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.
May 14, 2004
Omar Ford, in the Beaufort
Gazette (May 14, 2004):Beaufort High School is a decidedly different school than it was during the
1970s, recalls Glenda Gilmore a professor at Yale.
Gilmore was a budding history teacher at Beaufort High when the Supreme Court's
1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., decision was finally impacting
Beaufort in 1970. Li
May 14, 2004
Avi Shlaim, in the course of an
interview in the Palestine Chroncile (May 14, 2004):You were born in Baghdad. Do you have any memories of living in Iraq? I was born in 1945, and my family left Iraq in 1950. I was 5 years old, and
hadn’t started going to school so I never learned to read and write Arabic.
I have only disjointed memories of life in Iraq. My fath
May 14, 2004
Jonathan Calt Harris, in frontpagemag.com
(May 14, 2004):Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer at Berkeley in Islamic Studies, recently went
on television and was put on the defensive by Bill O’Reilly. The subject
was comments Bazian had made at a left-wing rally in San Francisco on April
10, 2004, calling for an “intifada” in the United States. As reported by LittleGre
May 13, 2004
Elizabeth Wasserman, in the Atlantic (April 29, 2004):In the foreword to an Arabic edition of one of Bernard Lewis's recent books, published by the Muslim Brotherhood, the translator included a few words of ambiguous praise for the author. Lewis was, he wrote,"one of two things: a candid friend or an honorable enemy," but certainly not one to dodge the truth.
In
May 11, 2004
Jon Wiener, in the LAT (May 2, 2004): Go ahead, try. Name the archivist of the United States.
It's a pretty fair bet you failed. The archivist, former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, oversees the nation's most important documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. The position has traditionally been one of the lower-profile jobs in the fed
May 8, 2004
From the Boston Globe (May 6, 2004):A QUOTATION from Douglas Brinkley in Alex
Beam's column "Historian's 'duty': PR for Kerry?" (April 29) leaves
the impression that Brinkley has been misleading about interviews he conducted
with John Kerry's crewmates. For the record, the introduction to the excerpts
from Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," published in The Atlantic and approved
by Brink
May 7, 2004
Paul Taylor in the London Independent (May 7, 2004):Alan Bennett's illustrious career as a stage dramatist began in 1968 with Forty
Years On, a comedy set in a minor public school symbolically named Albion House.
Now, close to 40 years on, his new play The History Boys returns to a school
location - this time a top grammar school in Yorkshire at the start of the 1980s....Alan Bennett was trained as a historian (his specialist subject was Richa
May 7, 2004
Dalia Shehori, in Haaretz.com (May 5, 2004):
Ilan Pappe lets his political opinions control facts, says Benny Morris. Pappe says Morris is captive to his own right-wing ideology. Two historians show post-Zionism is anything but dead. Third article in a series.
The relativist approach typified by post-Zionist research is subjected to a crushing attack in the review by Benny Morris, a professor of Middle Eas
May 5, 2004
Scott McLemee, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (May 7, 2004): W. Wesley McDonald, a professor of political science at Elizabethtown College, could not have planned for his new book, Russell Kirk and the Age of Ideology (University of Missouri Press), to appear in the middle of the recent debate over"intellectual diversity" in academe. But someone who wanted to argue that the deck has been stacked
Apr 30, 2004
Linton Weeks, in the Washington Post (April 28, 2004): What started out as a memorial service for Daniel J. Boorstin yesterday at the Library of Congress also turned into a lovefest for books, reading and the power of the written word.
More than 200 people gathered in the Thomas Jefferson Building to honor the bookish, bespectacled, super-brainy man who was given to wearing bow ties. Boorstin served as the 12th librarian of Congress, from 1
Apr 30, 2004
Alex Beam, in the Boston
Globe (April 29, 2004):These days Brinkley is acting a lot less like a historian and a lot more like
a PR flack for John Kerry, the subject of Brinkley's flattering bestseller "Tour
of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War." Brinkley proclaims his independence
from the Kerry campaign -- "This is my book, not his,&qu
Apr 29, 2004
Letter to the Wash Post (April 29, 2004): I appreciated that George Lardner Jr.'s April 20 news article"Bush Picks Weinstein as Archivist" brought attention to the stealth nomination of Allen Weinstein to replace John Carlin as archivist of the United States.
Notwithstanding the Dec. 19 letter Mr.
Carlin sent to the White House about his future, if Mr. Weinstein was contacted regarding the nomination in the fall of 2003, the timing suggests the W
Apr 29, 2004
Five of the people on the staff of the 9-11 commission are historians, including the executive director, Philip Zelikow. The following list appears on the website of the commission.
Philip Zelikow. Executive Director. Director of the Miller Center of Public Affairs and White Burkett Miller Professor of History at the University of Virginia. Was a member of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and served as executive director of the National Commission on Federal Ele
Apr 23, 2004
Chris Hedges, in the NYT (April 20, 2004):THE appointment of Rashid I. Khalidi as the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies
at Columbia University last fall brought to the campus not only a noted Middle
Eastern scholar, but also a man who, like Dr. Said, has been assailed by conservatives
and many supporters of Israel for being critical of United States policy on
the Middle East.
He is a scathing critic of Israel's treatment of Palestinians, although he
Apr 21, 2004
Jonathan Tepperman, in the NYT (April 17, 2004): Benny Morris is used to making enemies. When his first groundbreaking book appeared in 1988, marshaling evidence that Israel's founders had deliberately — and often violently — forced Arabs to flee during the war for independence, Mr. Morris was reviled and called an anti-Zionist. For years he was unable to find work as a professor in Israel; when he finally lan
Apr 16, 2004
Stephanie Salter, in the San Francisco Chronicle (April 11, 2004):Historian, biographer and poet Gerald Nicosia was juggling five separate interviews
by news media teams from Berlin to Brazil when his 8-year-old daughter provided
a reality check.
Alarmed and not a little irritated, she scolded him from her younger brother's
room: "Daddy, the lizard has no food!"
The family's pet lizard, Gecky, eats live worms, you see, and Nicosia is the
Apr 15, 2004
Teresa k. Weaver, in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution (April 11, 2004):Studs Terkel, oral historian emeritus of America, has a question before the
conversation begins. Pointing to my small silver tape recorder,
Apr 15, 2004
Gerald P. Merrell, in the Baltimore
Sun (April 15, 2004):Iris Chang was in another strange room, this time at the Fairmont in Kansas
City, just the fourth hotel she'll stop at in a dozen states in five weeks.
In a few minutes it would be 11 p.m., and, thankfully, her workday was completed.
Things are not always so fre
Apr 15, 2004
Jonathan Calt Harris, managing editor of Campus Watch, in frontpagemag.com
(April 15, 2004):A Catholic priest gave pronouncements “in the name of Allah.” [1]
Signs were sold proclaiming “Support Armed Resistence [sic.] in Iraq and
Everywhere,” next to tomes of Marx, Trotsky and Che Guevara. A smiling
student marched carried a sign saying “Long Live Fallujah,
Apr 13, 2004
Peter Roper, in the Miami
Herald (April 13, 2004):George McGovern was a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University in 1950,
looking for a thesis topic in American history, when one of his mentors, professor
Arthur Link, asked McGovern if he'd ever heard of the violent coalfield war
in Colorado that shook the steel industry and the nation in 1913-14. "Link
