This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: National Security Archive
Jan 19, 2006
Washington D.C., January 19, 2006 - A federal district judge's opinion last year ordering more secrecy for two almost 40-year-old CIA memos to President Johnson contradicted Supreme Court precedent and the plain language of the Freedom of Information Act, as well as time limits on presidential privilege set in the Presidential Records Act, according to the appeal filed yesterday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit by University of California, Davis professor Larry Berman.
Source: Newsletter of the American Revolution Round Table
Jan 19, 2006
Tom Fleming got everyone's attention -- and then some -- when he revealed that the opening chapter of his latest book, Washington's Secret War The Hidden History of Valley Forge, was titled: "General George Washington: Loser." Today, Valley Forge is a national shrine. In December 1777, Tom said it looked more like a black hole into which the Revolution was about to disappear. As many as fifty men deserted in a single day, while dozens of officers submitted resignations at the same ruin
Source: Providence Journal
Jan 19, 2006
It was the second day of cross-examination of David Rosner, a key witness in the state's effort to prove that paint companies created a public nuisance by making and marketing lead-based paints two generations ago.A paint company lawyer barraged Columbia University historian David Rosner yesterday with documents showing that the federal government specified the use of lead-based paints on schools and other public buildings for much of the last century.
Law
Source: The Australian
Jan 19, 2006
IF "history is an argument", an aphorism plausibly attributed to Bob Carr, the former premier of NSW, then Keith Windschuttle can be relied on to drum up more of it in 2006.
Windschuttle ignited Australia's immensely entertaining history wars with his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History: Volume One, Van Diemen's Land. This was a research-based critique of the work of academic historians. It effectively demolished their consensus that 19th-century European settl
Source: NYT
Jan 18, 2006
What was George Washington's accent like? "The War That Made America," a four-part edutainment series that begins tonight on PBS, makes some guesses about that and hundreds of other lost historical details, as it chronicles the French and Indian War in high-gloss and ultimately successful re-creations. Possibly Washington sounded very American, with hard R's; possibly he sounded Irish-like; maybe he sounded British or southern or vaguely mid-Atlantic. The actor can't seem to decide. An
Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Jan 18, 2006
In the late 1980s, a history professor from Marquette University named John William Rooney walked into the French National Archives in Paris and walked out with a copy of the 1814 Treaty of Fontainebleau, a woven paper with red wax seals and a green silk cord through which Napoleon Bonaparte agreed to give up the French empire and accept exile.
The opportunity to steal a major piece of history, Rooney said, was too tempting to pass up.
"If you were to stand in fron
Source: LAT
Jan 18, 2006
The year-old Bruin Alumni Assn. says its
"Exposing UCLA's Radical Professors" initiative takes aim at faculty "actively proselytizing their extreme views in the classroom, whether or not the commentary is relevant to the class topic."
The group's recent campaign has upset a number of targeted professors and triggered the resignation last weekend of Harvard historian Stephan Thernstrom, a prominent affirmative action opponent and former UCLA professor, fr
Source: Der Spiegal
Jan 18, 2006
British historian and Holocaust denier David Irving, arrested last month in Austria where his views are illegal, is busy preparing his trial in a Vienna prison. Could this be the eccentric Hitler admirer's final act of provocation?At night, when the pale winter sun has slipped behind the rooftops of Vienna's Josefstadt district, a jungle comes to life in the prison yard at the city's old Imperial-era prison. "That's when they start yelling from the windows and t
Source: Press Release -- Rutgers University
Jan 18, 2006
NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. – Dr. Richard P. McCormick, one of the most accomplished and beloved scholars, educators, administrators and social activists in the 240-year history of Rutgers University, has died after an extended illness. He was 89.
Professor Emeritus McCormick, who first came to Rutgers as an undergraduate in 1934, served the university community and the state of New Jersey with distinction for more than 60 years as a professor of history, university historian, d
Source: Press of Atlantic City
Jan 17, 2006
A noted New Jersey historian and former longtime Rutgers professor whose son now leads the university has died. Richard P. McCormick was 89.
McCormick died Monday after an extended illness, the university said in a statement Tuesday.
He first arrived at the public university in 1934 as an undergraduate, and, with the exception of a stay at the University of Pennsylvania to earn his doctoral degree in the 1940s, McCormick spent most of his career at Rutgers.
During h
Source: The Guardian (London)
Jan 17, 2006
John Bierman, who has died aged 76, was one of the last of a generation of buccaneering reporters and writers who pursued successful careers across the media. Newspaper reporter, editor, radio correspondent, television "fireman", documentary maker and, finally, acclaimed historian, Bierman excelled at each, in a working life that reached back to the days of plate cameras and reporters in trilbies.
He was fast, fluent, accurate and - beneath a forbidding carapace - a widely
Source: The Guardian (London)
Jan 17, 2006
No one could accuse Lisa Jardine of being slow to get to the point. Barely has she parked herself on the sofa of her Bloomsbury apartment than she announces, "You know I had breast cancer and was out for most of last year." No calls for sympathy, no easing gently into the subject; just cards on the table from the off.
Even so, you should be careful about taking Jardine at face value. After surgery, followed by gruelling courses of radio and chemotherapy, out for most peopl
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jan 16, 2006
Last week the literary world got a double dose of scandal with revelations of two high-profile fabrications: Memoirist James Frey's past, it turns out, is considerably duller than his books suggest; and novelist JT Leroy, it appears, does not exist at all.
Now the academic world has yielded up its own fabrication, this one involving neo-Nazis, a white supremacist radio show, a professor's firing, and a flap over academic freedom. But this time the unmasking was self-inflicted.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 16, 2006
The strange story of Jacques Pluss just got stranger.
In March, Pluss was fired from his position as an adjunct professor of history at Fairleigh Dickinson University shortly after it became known that he had become a leader of the National Socialist Movement of the United States, which is also known as the American Nazi Party. Students and colleagues at the New Jersey institution were stunned, but Pluss could be heard on Nazi radio broadcasts and made racist and anti-Semitic commen
Source: NYT
Jan 15, 2006
Milton Himmelfarb, a leading essayist for Commentary and other publications who was known for his well wrought and witty observations on Jewish affairs, died on Jan. 4 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. He was 87 and lived in White Plains.
The cause was complications of skin cancer, his nephew William Kristol said.
Mr. Himmelfarb was a member of an astonishingly accomplished intellectual clan with working-class and liberal roots that evolved into ne
Source: HNN
Jan 15, 2006
In an exclusive story published by the History News Network, historian Jacques Pluss claimed that last year he orchestrated a damning leak that he was a Neo-Nazi in order to infiltrate the group for a research project. After the leak he was fired by Fairleigh Dickinson University. The case attracted national headlines.
Click here to read the story--"Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi":http://hnn.us/arti
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Jan 14, 2006
Cliff Kuhn first encountered the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot when he wrote a column for an alternative newspaper called "The History You Weren't Supposed to Know."
Thirty years later, the Georgia State University historian is still trying to shed light on the city's worst outbreak of racial violence. "Most Atlantans have never heard of it," he says.
This year marks the centennial of the riot, in which thousands of whites rampaged through downtown At
Jan 13, 2006
Allegations of conservative political bias at the National Endowment of the Humanities have been made over the last several years, but few scholars have come forward to tell their stories. On Saturday 7 January, at a panel sponsored by the American Historical Association Professional Division, the Coordinating Council for Women in History, and the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, historian of sexuality Marc Stein, an associate professor at York University in Toronto, went public.
Una
Source: Cliopatria, HNN Blog
Jan 12, 2006
Chris Bray, a member of HNN blog, Cliopatria, is a graduate student in history at UCLA, now on duty in Kuwait with the US Army.
Beginning this week he plans on blogging about the Iraq War.
He writes:
"First, these observations come secondhand; I'm nominally an infantry sergeant, but am currently parked at a not-very-interesting desk job in Kuwait. What I write here comes from what I've read, what I've observed at the periphery of the war, what I've e
Source: Knight Ridder
Jan 12, 2006
This week, in a nod to the 120th meeting of the American Historical Association, the National Constitution Center hosted three celebratory Ben Franklin biographers: Gordon Wood, Walter Isaacson and Stacy Schiff.
Philadelphia's David Waldstreicher, Temple history professor and fellow Franklin biographer, wasn't among the honored guests. That's despite his well-reviewed "Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004
