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: Jonathan Dresner at Froginawell.et
May 21, 2008
The Needham Question is hot, hot, hot! Thanks to Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom
Source: Press Release
May 20, 2008
Cities, counties and states continue to debate who has ownership of the first Memorial Day, but a Purdue University historian says credit really belongs to thousands of Southern white women.
"If Confederate men would have organized memorials to honor their fallen soldiers in 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, it would have been considered treason against the United States," says Caroline Janney, an assistant professor of history. "Instead, women organized
Source: NYT
May 20, 2008
Beverly Rae Kimes, who, after failing to find work as a theater writer, parlayed a job as a secretary at a fledgling car magazine into a career as one of the nation’s pre-eminent historians of automobiles, died on May 12 at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 68.
Her husband, James H. Cox, announced the death but did not give a cause.
When Ms. Kimes became the first employee hired at Automobile Quarterly — which aimed to define elegance in cars, mainly antique one
Source: NYT
May 20, 2008
Regina Kellerman, an architectural historian whose research led to the literal unearthing of New York City’s first City Hall, died on May 13 in Mount Vernon, N.Y. She was 84 and lived in Greenwich Village, the neighborhood in Manhattan where much of her work was focused and about whose buildings she may have known more than anyone else.
The cause was pulmonary failure, said David Hennessey, a nephew.
It was in 1970, after five years of work on a doctoral dissertation bo
Source: http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com
May 19, 2008
Spencer Downing has a tale to tell, and he lands some big laughs along the way. Using very minimal costuming –- "layering" might be a better word -- an overhead projector and a series of hilarious hand-drawn transparencies, he tells the story of being one of the first college grads chosen for Teach for America, a Peace Corp-style program that asks participants to commit two years to teaching disadvantaged students across the U.S. Downing’s stint was in the early 1990s in a very rural,
Source: David Remnick in the New Yorker
May 19, 2008
Every weekday for the past twenty-seven years, a long-in-the-tooth history major named Phil Schaap has hosted a morning program on WKCR, Columbia University’s radio station, called “Bird Flight,” which places a degree of attention on the music of the bebop saxophonist Charlie Parker that is so obsessive, so ardent and detailed, that Schaap frequently sounds like a mad Talmudic scholar who has decided that the laws of humankind reside not in the ancient Babylonian tractates but in alternate takes
Source: Boston Globe
May 19, 2008
In a heartfelt ode to the power and joys of education, acclaimed historian David McCullough exhorted Boston College graduates this morning to "make the love of learning central to your life."
In his keynote address at the college's commencement on its Chestnut Hill campus, the award-winning historian extolled the "transforming miracle of education" and warned more than 3,300 graduates not to confuse plain facts with deeper truths.
"Information h
Source: Andrew Leonard in Salon
May 19, 2008
For reasons lost to history, my late uncle decided at some point in the early 1970s to purchase, one by one, volume after volume of Joseph Needham's magisterial work, "Science and Civilisation in China." My uncle was no China scholar, never visited Asia, and rarely discussed what he had learned from perusing Needham. I don't even know for sure that he did read the books, though perhaps, like me, the eventual inheritor of the volumes, he dipped in from time to time to dabble in the indu
Source: Times (UK)
May 18, 2008
SCOTLAND’S history is weaved from a “fraudulent” fabric of “myths and falsehoods”, according to an explosive new study by one of the world’s most eminent historians.
The Invention of Scotland: Myth and History, is the last book, and one of the most controversial, written by the late Hugh Trevor-Roper.
Now, five years after his death, the book is to be published at one of the most pivotal periods in Scottish political history.
It will provide an inflammatory
Source: Jon Wiener blog at the Nation
May 18, 2008
"Nixonland" – that's Rick Perlstein's term for the political world where candidates win power by mobilizing people's resentments, anxieties and anger, where politics destroys is victims. Perlstein's new book is Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.Do we still live in Nixonland?
Yes we do. I don't mean that the political anxieties and passions today are as great as they were in the late sixties. But the way Richard Nixon used the sixties
Source: Special to HNN
May 18, 2008
In his account of the 9/11 Commission’s work, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Investigation, Philip Shenon claims that the Commission’s Executive Director, Philip Zelikow, pushed the staff to find a link between al Qaeda and Iraq, ostensibly to provide a justification for the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq. This is simply not the case.
First, Shenon cites as evidence Zelikow’s nomination of Laurie Mylroie as an expert witness at the Commission’s Ju
Source: Paul Laity in the Guardian
May 17, 2008
Tony Judt has never fought shy of questioning long-cherished ideas. Postwar, his panoramic study of Europe after 1945, was loudly acclaimed in part because it dealt so bracingly with the lies and cover-ups on which the rebuilding of the continent depended - the number of Nazis and collaborators who retained positions of power, for instance, and the myths surrounding wartime resistance. Detail after striking detail documented how nations are never honest about their pasts, and how quickly inconve
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 16, 2008
"I just don't think Shakespeare would have married someone who wasn't smart and didn't have a good sense of humor," Germaine Greer speculates in her contentious biography of Ann Hathaway, who wed William Shakespeare in 1582, when he was 18 and she 26. That is one of Greer's many objections to the tradition among Shakespeare commentators of disparaging Hathaway, even though almost nothing is known about her.
Shakespeare's Wife was published last year in Britain (Bloomsbury)
Source: J. PATRICK COOLICAN at Politico.com
May 15, 2008
The liberal historian Rick Perlstein has just published his second book on the rise of the conservative movement, and if he isn’t exactly like the fox guarding the henhouse, he’s the fox who’s been invited in, shown a plush sofa and bathed in effusive praise.
The late William F. Buckley called Rick Perlstein’s first book “engrossing” and referred to Perlstein as a “skilled writer with an eye for detail.” Given the subject of “Before the Storm” — Barry Goldwater’s insurgent 1964 camp
Source: Bangkok Post
May 15, 2008
A well-known art historian, arrested in Los Angeles in connection with a federal investigation into illegal trafficking of pilfered Southeast Asian art, died early Wednesday of a heart attack at a Federal Detention Centre.
Roxanna Brown, 62, wheelchair-bound was suffering from flulike symptoms severe enough to postpone her initial court appearance.
She was indicted on a single count of wire fraud for allegedly allowing her electronic signature to be used on appraisal forms of items donated
Source: Scott Kleeb campaign website
May 15, 2008
A fourth generation Nebraskan, Scott Kleeb grew up listening to his grandfather’s homesteading stories –tales of community, patriotism and public service– and learned the values that would come to shape his life. Scott learned the value of hard work and self-reliance, but he also learned something just as important: Nebraskans depend on each other and, in good times and bad, they help each other. This simple idea –born on the hard plains of Nebraska in the nineteenth century and passed down thro
Source: Press Release
May 14, 2008
A number of members of SHAFR (Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations) are circulating the following petition expressing opposition to John Yoo's legal opinions on torture and executive power. The petition is prompted by SHAFR's invitation to John Yoo to serve as a plenary speaker at the upcoming SHAFR conference in Columbus, Ohio.
Source: Letter sent to the Editor of the Boston Globe
May 13, 2008
To the Editor,
Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan thinks Barack Obama should become"misty-eyed" about Henry Ford (Globe, 5/13). Does she know that Henry Ford's anti-Semitic publications, such as The International Jew, constituted one of the most most vicious, public hate campaigns in U.S. history? Does she know that Henry Ford refused to build aircraft engines for Britai
Source: Neve Gordon in the Nation
May 13, 2008
[Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Read about his new book and more at www.israelsoccupation.info]
The Jewish celebration of Passover and Israel’s 60th anniversary coincide this year, and seem to be a good time to reflect upon, and perhaps explain, my passionate commitment to Israel. No doubt having been born and raised in Israel makes me feel most at home there. My family and friends live in Israel. I like
Source: Frontpagemag.com
May 13, 2008
The UC Irvine Muslim Students' Union Association is currently staging a week long "Nakba" event (May 7-15) which, under the guise of commemorating the "catastrophe" of the founding of the Jewish state, will bring onto campus the genocidal philosophy being promoted by leaders and movements throughout the Middle East.
This preparation for genocide makes headlines every day in the world press. Rejecting the international community's call for negotiation and statecra
