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: Boston Globe
Dec 16, 2005
The Pilgrims, persecuted religious dissidents who founded a colony on a shoestring in what they expected to be Virginia, are a well-studied subject. Though there has been no reexamination of the colony's history by a major historian in recent years, that is about to change.
Prize-winning author Nathaniel Philbrick, who struck bestseller gold with his account of a 19th-century whaling expedition, is working on an account of the early phase of the Plymouth Colony, from the voyage of t
Source: Deutscher Prize website
Dec 16, 2005
The 2005 Deutscher Prize has been awarded to:
Revolution and Counterrevolution, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory by Kevin Murphy (published by Berghahn Books).
Every year, this prize is awarded for a book which exemplifies the best and most innovative new writing in or about the Marxist tradition. The closing date for nominations is May 1st.
There is a modest prize of £250, the winning title is announced in the press, and the author is invited to de
Source: Raw Story website
Dec 15, 2005
Raw Story's John Byrne: Speaking to elementary school children Tuesday, Lynne Cheney compared this week's parliamentary elections in Iraq to America's own early struggle for democracy. "Two hundred and seventeen years ago, we held our first vote under our Constitution," she said. "We started then on the path the Iraqis are walking now." What do you make of that?
Boston University Professor Emeritus of Political Science Howard Zinn: [Laughs] It's sort of ridiculou
Source: Seattle Times
Dec 15, 2005
At 90, Dr. John Hope Franklin has seen a lot of history, been part of some of it and chronicled more of it than almost anyone else. He's a hard worker who even in retirement is still turning out books.
His latest book, "Mirror to America," came out just last month. Part autobiography and part history, it tells the story of his remarkable family and of the 20th-century civil-rights movement. The book is full of victories and momentous change for the better, but it is also a
Source: Peter Ryan in the Australian
Dec 15, 2005
AGHAST at their television screens as they watched Sydney's race riots, how many Australians cast their minds back 20 years to remember Geoffrey Blainey's thoughtful warning that such horrors might happen? Happen, that is, unless we reconsidered our program of almost indiscriminate immigration and the accompanying madness of multiculturalism.
I suppose very few viewers -- or newspaper readers, or radio listeners -- made the connection: if a week is a long time in politics, two decad
Source: Slate
Dec 14, 2005
I was delighted to read the review of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln by Fred Siegel, a historian I greatly admire. Yet I'm afraid that he has misapprehended my book as a brief on behalf of the modern Democratic Party. He bases his misreading not on the book itself but on an article I wrote for the New York Times Magazine, which pointed out some of the similarities between the forgotten Whig Party and today
Source: Guardian
Dec 14, 2005
The sociologist and sociological historian Professor Joe Banks, who has died age 85, was the leading authority of his generation on the Victorian family and its rapid reduction in size. He transformed our understanding of a problem that had fascinated and mystified social scientists for decades.
The Banks thesis focused to great effect on the fall in fertility among the Victorian middle classes, who were among the leaders of this domestic revolution in Britain between broadly 1870 a
Source: Providence Journal
Dec 13, 2005
Childhood lead poisoning was a problem of slum dwellings that could not be solved until there was a way to "get rid of our slums and educate the relatively ineducable parent," according to a document written by an official of the Lead Industries Association.
The document, a letter written in the 1950s by the director of the association's health and safety department, was one of a half-dozen documents presented by the state against NL Industries, Atlantic Richfield and Mill
Source: Haaretz
Dec 13, 2005
An Austrian court will begin the trial of British historian David Irving in February on charges of denying the Holocaust, a court spokesman said on Tuesday.
Irving was arrested in the southern province of Styria last month under a warrant issued in 1989 and has since been remanded in custody and charged with denying the Holocaust, a crime in Austria which carries a sentence of one to 10 years in prison."Irving's trial will take place on Feb. 20 and 21
Source: Fred Siegel in Slate
Dec 12, 2005
The Democratic Party and the endeavor of writing American history have a problem in common. Until the 1960s, both enjoyed the coherence of a shared narrative in which American politics and history could be described as a struggle by the great mass of virtuous Americans—"the people"—against privileged monopolists and plutocrats. Just before the 1948 presidential election, Harry "Give 'em Hell" Truman unloaded with a standard piece of populist rhetoric. "The Wall Street re
Source: Newsweek
Dec 12, 2005
Shortly after the start of President George W. Bush's second term, a high-level "deputies" meeting was called at the White House. Issue one on the agenda was how to improve the administration's message in the face of allegations that the U.S. government condoned torture. Philip Zelikow, the powerful counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, spoke up first. He argued firmly that the problem was not how the policy of interrogation and detention was presented to the world; it was
Source: Sun-Sentinel
Dec 11, 2005
For the casual tourist or college student, the Great Hall in Manhattan's Cooper Union might seem little more than an ornate auditorium, with its oil paintings, white columns and bright wooden stage.
But for Doris Kearns Goodwin, among others, the Great Hall is a landmark graced by history: Abraham Lincoln was here. He stood on that stage and spoke in early 1860, an address that established him as a national candidate, not just an Illinois lawyer and orator, and helped get him electe
Source: Neil Cameron in the Gazette (Montreal)
Dec 10, 2005
[Neil Cameron is a Montreal historian.]
Winston Churchill's pro-digious life found a prodigious biographer in Sir Martin Gilbert. Gilbert has published 75 books, and while many have been on other topics, he has made Churchill his lifelong preoccupation. His huge six-volume life was not only the largest work on any single political figure of the 20th century, but effectively a history of British and world politics centred on the life of the century's most remarkable man.
Source: Boston Globe
Dec 9, 2005
Several boldface names showed up the other night to fete Bill Fowler , who's leaving the Massachusetts Historical Society after eight years as director. Among those gathering at Doyle's in JP were Henry Lee of the Friends of the Boston Public Garden, longtime Republican operative John Sears , former state Senator Bill Saltonstall , and former senate president Billy Bulger , who cracked wise for 15 funny minutes. Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough and his wife, Rosalee , hosted. (M
Source: Australian
Dec 8, 2005
HISTORIAN Keith Windschuttle was wearing his publisher's hat this week, launching Michael Connor's book, The Invention of Terra Nullius, in Sydney. The event was attended by like-minded conservatives, including retired Court of Appeal judge Roddy Meagher, Leonie Kramer, David Flint, the NSW Liberal Party's David Clarke, Janet Albrechtsen and Christopher Pearson. Windschuttle will now settle down to write the second volume of his opus, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. But finding a market f
Source: Reuters
Dec 8, 2005
Twenty-five years after John Lennon was murdered, a court battle to release the last 10 pages of secret FBI files on the former Beatle still rages on, with no end in sight.
The FBI assembled about 300 pages of files on the singer-turned-activist in 1971 and 1972 as part of President Richard Nixon's effort to deport and silence Lennon as a critic of the Vietnam War, according to historian Jon Wiener, who has led the court battle to release the files.
"After years of
Source: Seth Sandronsky Interview with David Roediger at politicalaffairs.net
Dec 7, 2005
David Roediger, professor of history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a scholar of critical whiteness studies, delivered a talk titled "The Dilemmas of Popular Front Antiracism: Looking at The House I Live In" on November 17 at the Marxist School of Sacramento. After screening this WW II film that stars Frank Sinatra, Roediger discussed what it tells us about the limits of anti-racisms that imagine we can subordinate justice to unity. He connected the film to the
Source: Australian
Dec 7, 2005
TASMANIAN academic Michael Connor has called on the High Court to correct what he says are mistakes in its Mabo native title decision that tainted the foundations of Australia.
Dr Connor yesterday accused the court of wrongly accepting that Britain settled Australia in the belief that it was an empty land -- or terra nullius.
While the historian accepted that Aborigines had gradually been dispossessed, he said the foundation of Australia had not been based on the concept that Aborigines"we
Source: ft.com
Dec 7, 2005
MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, which for most of its 96 years was not acknowledged as existing, is to be the subject of an official history. Professor Keith Jeffrey, of Queen's University Belfast, will write the history, to be published to mark MI6's centenary in 2009.
Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, said it was "another progressive move by SIS", which came in from the cold in only 1994 when the government acknowledged its existence.
But any expectat
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Dec 7, 2005
Normalcy: It's a wallflower during the ball, but it almost always gets the last waltz.
Recent proof of this universal truth is reflected in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to British playwright Harold Pinter. The master of menacing drama is revealed to be a fan of normalcy, of a most charming kind.
And therein lies a profound contradiction.
First, the work. Domination and submission are Mr. Pinter's themes. As The New York Times puts it, by d
