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: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Nov 5, 2008
George Mason University announced last week that the future of Zotero, a web browser application, will “remain unchanged” despite a lawsuit filed by Thomson Reuters Corporation in September. The lawsuit alleges that developers at the university’s Center For History and New Media improperly used Thomson Reuters’ EndNote to create Zotero, a free program.
The university also decided not to renew its site license for EndNote, the citation software that Thompson Reuters argues was improp
Source: http://www.theherald.co.uk
Nov 5, 2008
Julian Zelizer, a political historian at Princeton University, said Mr Obama and Mr Bush stood for very different things, but added that the Democrat "runs his campaign with the same sort of methodical efficiency and closed nature of the Bush White House".
"He's not going to have a freewheeling White House where people are free to go out on their own and do what they want and be allowed to talk to the press," Mr Zelizer said.
Senator Dick Durbin, a l
Source: http://money.uk.msn.com
Nov 3, 2008
One of Britain's best known historians believes the global financial crisis is the "end of an era" for capitalism and a long overdue return to government intervention.
Eric Hobsbawm, the 91-year-old Marxist historian, author and academic, told MSN Money the past two decades of unfettered capitalism had been as damaging as Soviet economic totalitarianism.
In his responses to MSN Money's questions, Hobsbawm predicted that far from being a hiccup or correction of
Source: Independent (UK)
Nov 3, 2008
The historian answers your questions, such as 'Do we face recession or depression?' and 'Where should I invest my cash?'
Who would you like to see win the US election? Ian Barker, Brighton
I was one of John McCain's foreign policy advisers when he was campaigning for the Republican nomination, but haven't been involved since the presidential campaign became a two-horse race. I think McCain was by a wide margin the best of the Republican candidates, but I can't see him b
Source: Columbia University Press Blog
Nov 3, 2008
The following is an interview with Mark Hulsether, author of Religion, Culture, and Politics in the Twentieth-Century United States.
Q: Your book came out at a good time to throw light on the religious politics of the 2008 election. Did you plan it that way?
Mark Hulsether: I wish! This book was a long time coming; it was supposed to be finished for the 2004 election. But it worked out all right; elections with interesting religious-political dynamics come along all the
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog Sandbox (Updated several times)
Nov 3, 2008
This post has several important updates. The first brings a passage from a 1978 New York Times report from Beirut, noting that Rashid Khalidi "works for the P.L.O." The third uncovers a passage from a 1976 Los Angeles Times report, also from Beirut, describing Khalidi as "a PLO spokesman." The fourth update, the most compelling, unearths a 1979 radio docum
Source: Edward Rothstein in the NYT
Nov 2, 2008
The voice is unforgettable, as if each phrase scraped the ear with a scoopful of gravel. What remains in the memory too is the earnestness that could turn both fervent and sentimental. And there was the music, jazz and blues that often provided a respite from the trademark persona.
But after hearing that Studs Terkel had died on Friday, I thought about his WFMT radio shows, which I had heard during my years in graduate school in Chicago. He seemed to be without pretense and compassi
Source: Austin-Statesman
Nov 1, 2008
H. W. "Bill" Brands and Douglas Brinkley are, perhaps, Austin's two best-known historians. Though both teach at prestigious universities — Brands at the University of Texas, Brinkley at Rice — they spend much of their time writing engaging, best-selling American history books for a general audience. Brands, 55, who has lived in Austin for 20 years, has written about figures as disparate as Benjamin Franklin, Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt. Brinkley, 47, who moved to Austin last
Source: OAH Newsletter
Nov 1, 2008
The Obama Phenomenon in Historical PerspectiveLawrence J. FriedmanObama in Global PerspectiveJoseph GersonObama through the Eyes of Middle Easterners
and North AfricansMiray ZakiThe Obama Phenomenon in Great BritainRic
Source: NYT
Nov 1, 2008
Albert Boime, a noted scholar of art history who took the history every bit as seriously as the art, if not more so, died on Oct. 18 in Los Angeles. He was 75 and a longtime Los Angeles resident.
The cause was myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disorder, his wife, Myra, said. At his death, he was a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he had taught for three decades.
In nearly 20 books and scores of articles, Professor Boime explored th
Source: Shaul Ben Joseph at the website of israelcampus.org
Nov 1, 2008
He barricaded himself with Arafat during the siege of Ramallah, he has his articles posted on Holocaust denial websites, he thinks Israel is a pariah state, he distorted historical facts, he turned the classroom into a propaganda battlefield, he advocated a one-state solution, and yet, he was recently appointed as the head of Ben Gurion University's department of Politics and Government. Will you send your child to study there?
Consider this madness: One of the most anti-Israeli aca
Source: Chicago Tribune
Oct 31, 2008
The author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol has died. "My epitaph? My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat,'" he once said.
Louis Terkel arrived here as a child from New York City and in Chicago found not only a new name but a place that perfectly matched--in its energy, its swagger, its charms, its heart--his own personality. They made a perfect and enduring pair.
Author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol Louis "Studs&qu
Source: Jewish Chronicle
Oct 30, 2008
TV production company Endemol, which makes the reality show Celebrity Big Brother, was condemned this week for inviting Holocaust-denier David Irving to take part in the next series.
Mr Irving states on his website that he received a "top secret provisional invitation" in September asking him to take part in series planned to start on January 2. He was told last Friday that he had not made the final selection.
He met producers for 90 minutes at a Kensington ho
Source: Juan Cole at his blog Informed Comment
Oct 30, 2008
The increasingly sleazy John McCain, who once promised to run a clean campaign, has now attacked my friend Rashid Khalidi and attempted to use him against Barack Obama. Khalidi is an American scholar of Palestinian heritage, born in New York and educated at Yale and Oxford, who now teaches at Columbia University. He directed the Middle East Center at the University of Chicago for some time, and he and his family came to know t
Source: Tim Rutten in the LAT
Oct 29, 2008
James M. McPherson is the most important historian of the most important event to occur in these United States since the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution -- the Civil War.
Any new book of his is -- by definition, therefore -- an event, but "Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief" is one that speaks directly to a nation on the cusp of a momentous decision regarding its next president. Given the author's vocal disapproval of the war in Iraq, it's p
Source: MSNBC
Oct 29, 2008
Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin accused the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday of protecting Barack Obama by withholding a videotape of the Democrat attending a 2003 party for a Palestinian-American professor and critic of Israel.
The paper said it had written about the event in April and would not release the tape because of a promise made to the source who provided it.
McCain and Palin called Rashid Khalidi a former spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, a char
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Oct 28, 2008
Enid Hart Douglass, who was largely responsible for developing the oral history program at Claremont Graduate University and led it for more than three decades, has died. She was 81.
Ms. Douglass, a former mayor of Claremont (Los Angeles County died Oct. 17 at a care facility in Sunnyvale from complications of Alzheimer's disease, her family said.
As a graduate student at the school in the 1950s, she became interested in how history is preserved as she studied the lette
Source: Independent (UK)
Oct 28, 2008
Frank Walbank, Emeritus Rathbone Professor of Ancient History at Liverpool University, was one of the great ancient historians of the 20th century. For around half a century he defined and dominated the field of Hellenistic history. Above all he was the unchallenged expert on the Greek politician and historian Polybius, who composed his history of Rome around the middle of the second century BC. Walbank's magnum opus is the monumental three-volume Historical Commentary on Polybius – a project la
Source: Max Boot at his blog in Commentary
Oct 27, 2008
It’s bad enough that various finger-to-the-wind Republicans–like Colin
Powell, Bill Weld, Chris Buckley, Ken Adelman, and Scott McCellan–are
rushing to get on the Obama bandwagon now that it has gale-force momentum.
(Where were they, one wonders, back in early September, when Obama was
behind in the polls and could really have used their help?) To add insult
to injury, the Republican president most admired by John McCain is more or
less endorsing his opponent, too. At least he is if you be
Source: WTVD
Oct 27, 2008
The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom made history in the Triangle Monday when he made a stop at the polls.
Doctor John Hope Franklin, 93, joined more than 1 million early voters in N.C. The civil rights activist said he's taking advantage of a right he once fought to have.
Franklin, a historian, an author, a prestigious professor and a civil rights activist, arrived at a Durham polling site to place his vote.
Franklin, said he was honored to v
