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: Simon Schama in the Times (UK)
Oct 19, 2008
Why should the blues make you feel so happy? This is what I remember asking myself as the student ship MS Aurelia sailed under the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, on its way from New York back to Britain. Maybe it was an American thing, this peculiar mix of loss and desire; the need to get away and the certainty you’d be back. Maybe I, a first-time summer visitor to the United States, was already an American thing?
A few weeks earlier, on a sultry August night, I’d sat in a piano bar in o
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 19, 2008
Dan Snow, the TV historian, belongs to one of Britain's most distinguished broadcasting families. When he began looking into the past of a little-known ancestor, however, he was shocked to uncover a deeply uncomfortable family secret. Sir Thomas D'Oyly Snow, the grandfather of TV journalists Peter and Jon Snow, was a general at the Battle of the Somme who sent thousands of men to their deaths.
Dan came close to tears as he stood in the graveyards of northern France, contemplating hi
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Oct 18, 2008
In August, Steven L. Hoch, a Russian historian, left the University of Kentucky to take a tenured position at $300 K as Provost at Washington State University. Six weeks later, he had a fight with the Vice President for Business and Finance. Fired as Provost, he's taken a leave of absence, but will return as a tenured professor
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 18, 2008
Imagine a Sunday morning a year or so ago, a book-lined study in an old university, where an elderly academic long past retirement age sits at his desk. Around him are about a dozen students, or rather seekers of knowledge - men and women of different backgrounds and nationalities, some on chairs and others on the floor. The knowledge they seek is an understanding of the lyrics of Hafiz (1325-90), whom many regard as the finest poet in the Persian language. The teacher is Peter Avery, his room i
Source: http://www.jsonline.com
Oct 17, 2008
More than a decade after University of Wisconsin-Madison alum Stephen Ambrose set up a fund to hire a military history professor, the school may finally fulfill the late historian’s vision by filling the position next fall.
Ambrose, the famed author of “Band of Brothers,” who grew up in Whitewater, established an endowment for the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair in U.S. Military History in 1998. He named it in part after his mentor, former UW-Madison professor William Hesseltine.
Source: Conrad Black at the Dailybeast.com (blog)
Oct 17, 2008
When he interrupted his campaign to return to DC to manage the economic crisis, McCain was onto a winning streak. But he blew it.
President Bush did his best to manage the financial crisis in a way that would have enabled John McCain to turn it to his advantage, but the candidate missed his great chance.
His hare-brained week, starting with the Herbert Hoover quote that the economy is "fundamentally sound," ranks among America's greatest attempts at political
Source: John Dean at Findlaw.com
Oct 17, 2008
... QUESTION: What prompted you to undertake this devastating examination of the historical truth of McCain's war record? ANSWER: I was interested as soon as I read his Faith of My Fathers and found it to be a chronological mess. As a historian who believes that it's important to know whether one thing happened before another, I established a time line that,
Source: Rocky Mountain News
Oct 16, 2008
Sarah Vowell writes history without being a historian and makes you laugh without being a humorist. She is, by her own description, "just a writer" - a statement that shortchanges her notable contributions to public radio's This American Life and her distinctive voice, which sounds like a teenage slacker trapped inside the body of a 38-year-old.
In her five books, she has taken on her share of bleak subjects, such as the history of presidential assassinations, and infuses
Source: Ron Radosh at his new blog at pajamasmedia.com
Oct 15, 2008
Hello PJM readers,
Welcome to my new blog, which I hope will prove stimulating, provocative, entertaining and hopefully, will at times get many of you angry at me. I will be writing about current political events, history, ideas, books, articles, bluegrass and folk music, and whatever else interests me and will hopefully be interesting to readers.
Many of you may already know my work from the various books I have written, or the articles and reviews I have recently had
Source: Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com
Oct 13, 2008
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kevin Mattson, Connor Study Professor of Contemporary History at Ohio University and the author of many books including, Upton Sinclair and the Other American Century and When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism. His new book is Rebels All!: A Short History of the Conservative Mind in Postwar America.
FP: Dr. Kevin Mattson, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Mattson: Thanks for having me.
FP: What in
Source: Vancouver Sun
Oct 13, 2008
Author, who didn't know until late in life that his father grew up in an orphanage, had a racy private life.
###
Pierre Berton seemed to know everything there was to know about Canadian history, but only three months before his death did the famous author learn a "shocking" secret about his own family's past.
He was 84 when he learned that in 1878 his father, Francis George Berton, then six years old, had been placed in an orphanage in Saint John,
Source: HNN Staff
Oct 13, 2008
HNN Editor: Last July Sheldon M. Stern in an email to HNN observed that Joseph Persico's new book about FDR was marred by errors. One can read his email below. One error attracted his notice especially. It was Persico's claim that TR learned of William McKinley's death as he sailed home from Europe (TR was actually camping in the woods when he heard the news that McKinley had died). Stern now tells us he has solved the mystery of Persico's blunder:
Geoffrey Ward in
Source: Campus Watch
Oct 12, 2008
One of the greatest myths in Middle East studies departments across North America and Europe is that the presence of an Israeli faculty member makes a "balanced" department. In fact, many Israeli academics have built their reputation on scholarship that is critical of Israel and its existence. These academics are frequently given center stage by the Association for Israel Studies, the Middle East Studies Association and Middle East studies centers, which host them and provide visiting
Source: Raymond Seitz in the Telegraph (UK)
Oct 12, 2008
There's nothing like a television camera to make a historian go all giddy and coy, but in this case we have Schama Unbound. His latest book is intended to accompany his new BBC series about America on the eve of its presidential election. What is an American and what makes the country tick? Like any good historian - and Simon Schama is very good - he looks backward in order to see forward. But that damn camera turns this project into performance history with Schama the Star - a couple of jokes,
Source: Francis X. Clines in the NYT
Oct 11, 2008
The true tale of America involves far more than teeming masses yearning to be free — a story well told at the Ellis Island Immigration Museum in New York Harbor. The first immigrant recorded to land there in 1892, a “rosy cheeked Irish girl” named Annie Moore, is charming to contemplate. But more and more modern visitors from Latin America and Asia don’t spot any of their kind there.
And what about the ignored immigrant sagas of slaves brought in chains from Africa? Native Americans
Source: David Kaiser at the website of H-Diplo
Oct 10, 2008
[David Kaiser is a historian at the Naval War College.]
The debate on the decision to drop atomic bombs has been carried on
repeatedly and in very lively fashion here, most notably at the time of the
50th anniversary (when the moderators actually had to call a halt) and
again about two and a half years ago. For at least 45 years, I would
suggest, the debate has done more to illuminate the current state of the
historical profession than to uncover significant new facts. Thus, the
Al
Source: Gerald Early in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Oct 10, 2008
[Gerald L. Early is a professor of African and African-American studies and American-culture studies at Washington University in St. Louis, as well as director of its Center for the Humanities. He is the series editor of Best African American Essays and Best African American Fiction, whose inaugural volumes will be published in January 2009 by Bantam Books.]
... Many of us black professionals, members of the black elite, keep the embers of our victimization burning for opportunistic
Source: NYT Letters to the Editor
Oct 9, 2008
To the Editor:
I write as an American historian, born in the presidency of Warren G. Harding, who has over many decades observed Republican leadership.
One of the most luminous moments — the “Declaration of Conscience” — came during the McCarthy era, when Margaret Chase Smith joined with six of her Republican colleagues in the United States Senate to denounce fellow Republicans for resorting to “the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intoler
Source: Guardian (UK)
Oct 9, 2008
John Lennon controversially declared they were bigger than Jesus, and the levels of fan hysteria and devotion they engendered made them synonymous with the youth culture of the swinging 60s. But a Cambridge University historian today argues that the Beatles were not heroes of the counter-culture but capitalists who cynically exploited youth culture for commercial gain. David Fowler claims: "They did about as much to represent the interests of the nation's young people as the Spice Girls did
Source: BBC
Oct 9, 2008
The distinguished historian Simon Schama argues that Barack Obama's emergence as presidential candidate represents a profound change in the American psyche.
"Whether or not he wins the presidency, this represents an historic shift in America's self-perception," he argues in his new series for the BBC, The American Future.
It would have been inconceivable in the 1960s that white Americans in the midst of a major economic collapse would have turned to a black man to lead them out
