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: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Sep 10, 2008
The State Department Historian last week released a new electronic volume
of Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), the official documentary
record of U.S. foreign policy, devoted to events in Eastern Europe from
1973-1976.
While every FRUS publication is of interest, the latest E-volume
reinforced concerns about diminishing quality control in the venerable
series.
"I was taken aback by how skimpy it is," said Mark Kramer, director of the
Harvard Project on ColdWa
Source: Campus Watch
Sep 10, 2008
"The American empire is going down."So declared history professor and former president of the Middle East Studies Association, Joel Beinin, on the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center (PPJC) cable television program,"Other Voices" (watch
Source: Australian
Sep 10, 2008
THE latest chapter in the history wars returns one of its chief protagonists, Stuart Macintyre, to the front line, with his appointment by the National Curriculum Board to draft the course for schools from the first year of school through to Year 12.
Professor Macintyre, the Ernest Scott professor of history at Melbourne University and chairman of Australian Studies at Harvard, was sidelined by the Howard government in its pursuit of a national curriculum for Australian history.
Source: Yale Daily News
Sep 9, 2008
Memories of Yale in the 1960s echoed through the Branford master’s house Monday afternoon as historian Thurston Clarke ’68 told students about a “time of great turmoil” in recent American history.
Using his new book about Robert F. Kennedy’s 1968 bid for the presidency, “The Last Campaign,” as a starting point, Clarke crafted a narrative of a decade whose upheaval and turbulence mirror that of the present.
“When I do these micro-histories,” said Clarke, the author of 10
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Sep 9, 2008
On June 25, 2008, the House Appropriations Committee cleared the Financial Services and General Government fiscal year 2009 appropriations bill that includes funding for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC). NARA received $423.8 million, a significant $23.6 million increase over the FY ’08 enacted amount. And the NHPRC not only staved off elimination, but also received its fully authorized amount of $10 mi
Source: National Security Archive
Sep 9, 2008
More than 50 years after the historic but controversial execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were convicted of atomic espionage, the U.S. government this Thursday, September 11, is expected to make public long shrouded grand jury testimony from its prosecution of the Rosenbergs, which will be the subject of a press briefing on September 11, 2008.
Several noted Cold War scholars will provide expert analysis of the newly public documents at the briefing, organized by the National Security
Source: Atlanta-Journal Constitution
Sep 9, 2008
Philip Lee Secrist loved the Civil War and everything about it.
He displayed a collection of relics and artifacts at his Marietta home. He wrote two books on the war and taught history 48 years at the high school and college level.
“His passion for his life and career was all about the Civil War,” said his daughter Barbera Secrist Schmedes of Marietta. “I can remember very well as a child that every summer vacation entailed a visit to some Civil War battlefield here in
Source: ThinkProgress
Sep 8, 2008
Thirty-two of the nation’s leading historians have sent letters to congressional leaders calling on them to strengthen the Presidential Records Act (PRA). [Text & signers posted below. Click READ MORE.] The effort, led by the Center for American Progress Action Fund and joined by the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the National Coalition for History, notes that while the PRA requires the administration to preserve presidential records, “it fails to
Source: Sunday Herald (Australia)
Sep 7, 2008
THE SCOTTISH historian Niall Ferguson has warned that the strategic alliance between China and Russia is more of a threat to the West than the credit crunch.
Ferguson, a best-selling author, broadcaster and professor of history at Harvard University, said that the development of the new Russia-China powerblock was set to put the two economic heavyweights on a path to confrontation with much of the rest of the world.
Speaking at Making Sense Of The Future, a conference o
Source: Jess Row in the NYT Book Review
Sep 7, 2008
Nineteen sixty-eight began as a promising year for William Styron. After six years of intense work, he had published, the previous fall, the novel he thought would cement his reputation: “The Confessions of Nat Turner,” an account of an 1831 slave revolt in Southampton County, Va., narrated in Turner’s voice. It was a risky, even provocative book — he’d always known it would be — but the gamble appeared to have paid off. “The Confessions” got excellent reviews, appeared on the best-seller list,
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Sep 4, 2008
Long before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an American Civil War general exposed the horrible power of "total war" as he rampaged across the South. Or did he?
The ever-quotable Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman certainly promised to "make Georgia howl!" and he was hardly gentle during his famous march to the sea in 1864. But an exhaustive new history tells a story of military prowess and remarkable survival, not lawless and rampant destruction.
Union soldiers d
Source: http://www.theithacajournal.com
Sep 4, 2008
Speaking in Cornell's Sage Chapel to a crowd of about 40 people as part of the Sage Wednesday Series, Bennett said people have made a hero of a man who doesn't deserve it — Abraham Lincoln.
"To tell the truth, history was not reinvented by Lincoln, but against Lincoln," Bennett said, "not by his acts but by acts he opposed."
Bennett worked for Ebony magazine as an editor for five decades and is the author of 10 books on U.S. racial history. He was bo
Source: http://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com
Sep 2, 2008
It is with profound sadness, and a deep and abiding sense of obligation, that the community of indigenous historians of Sierra Leone, and allied enthusiasts, has received news of the passing of the much-revered Dean of the history of Sierra Leone, Christopher Fyfe.
Christopher devoted enormous energies, time, and resources to his research and writing on Freetown and its Krio community, and the ties between that group and the other ethnic societies of Sierra Leone. With great insight, prof
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Sep 2, 2008
A dispute between Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and the Ulysses S. Grant Association has deepened with the filing of a lawsuit over the association’s collection of papers of the U.S. president and Civil War general — which are held at the university’s library — and a welter of contending accounts of the split in the news media.
According to reports in The Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Carbondale, the association has sued the university to seek the release of
Source: AHA's Perspectives on History
Sep 1, 2008
Women and minorities remain only a small part of the history profession, despite decades of efforts to increase their relatively modest numbers. Whether one looks at recent snapshots or longer trends, by most measures, it appears the discipline's glass ceiling remains largely intact.
According to the most recent federal survey of faculty, 30.4 percent of the history faculty in American colleges and universities are women and 14.7 percent are minorities.1 In contrast, if one looks at faculty
Source: Social Science Research Council
Sep 1, 2008
October 3-5, 2008, Columbia University, New York
Charles Tilly was one of the giants of social science and remains through his teaching, writing, and leadership a formative influence on the study of politics, social movements, inequality, states, French and British history, and historical social science in general. In recognition of his extraordinary achievements, Tilly was selected the winner of the 2008 Albert O. Hirschman Prize, awarded by the Social Science Research Coun
Source: NYT
Aug 31, 2008
The White House has long touted the “surge” of forces in Iraq as one of President Bush’s proudest achievements. But that decision, one of Mr. Bush’s most consequential as commander in chief, was made only after months of tumultuous debate within the administration, according to still-secret memorandums and interviews with a broad range of current and former officials.
In January 2007, at a time when the situation in Iraq appeared the bleakest, Mr. Bush chose a bold option that was
Source: Andrew Leonard at Salon.com
Aug 30, 2008
All in all, [the barbecue] made for a kick-ass party. But after reading Andrew Warnes' "Savage Barbecue: Race, Culture, and the Invention of America's First Food," I suspect more was going on, beneath the smoke cookery, than I cared to acknowledge.
To this day, writes Warnes, a lecturer in American literature and culture at Leeds University, barbecue "has yet to escape the fraught implications of savagery and cannibalism inbuilt and original to its name." Barbecu
Source: NYT
Aug 30, 2008
Michael Baxandall, whose analysis of the social forces shaping works of art and the way they were seen helped pave the way for the influential movement known as the new art history, died on Aug. 12 in London. He was 74.
The cause was pneumonia associated with Parkinson’s disease, said his wife, Kathrin Baxandall.
Mr. Baxandall’s second book, “Painting and Experience in 15th-Century Italy,” published in 1972, announced a program in its first sentence. “A 15th-century pai
Source: Guardian
Aug 29, 2008
An American book prize has blacklisted Random House following its "cowardly self-censorship" of Sherry Jones's novel The Jewel of Medina. The Langum Charitable Trust, which awards two yearly $1,000 (£550) prizes, has said that until the novel is published, it "will not consider submissions of any books, for any of our prizes, from Random House or any of its affiliates".
Random House dropped Jones's novel, about the child bride of Muhammad, after it was warned tha
