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: Press Release--Emory University
Apr 30, 2008
Release date: April 30, 2008
Contact: Elaine Justice at 404-727-0643 or elaine.justice@emory.edu
Funding will support HDOT.org translation into Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Russian
Emory University Professor Deborah Lipstadt has received a grant of $120,000 from the New York-based Claims Conference (The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany) on behalf of her Web site, Holocaust Denial on Trial (HDOT.org).
Source: Elisabeth Grant at the AHA Blog
Apr 30, 2008
This past Monday the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announced its Class of Fellows for 2008. The Academy, founded by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and other forefathers, has been in existence since 1780. Past members have included Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Albert Einstein.
This year’s addition of new fellows (190 in all), include a number of scholars drawn from the field of history. See below for a list of these individuals, and visit the academy’
Source: NYT
Apr 30, 2008
Tony Horwitz’s new book, “A Voyage Long and Strange,” is about the American history most Americans never learned, including the story of the short-lived, early-17th-century colony established on this windswept island eight miles west of Martha’s Vineyard.
The book starts with the Viking discovery of North America, dispels a number of myths about Columbus (a much lousier navigator than we were taught) and then traces the various Spanish and French explorations of America before turni
Source: http://www.mediabistro.com
Apr 30, 2008
One of our favorite movie moments of all time is when Good Will Hunting's Will (Matt Damon) pulls out a historiographical can of whoop-ass on a snide young scholar looking for a scuffle. ("You're a first year grad student. You just got finished reading some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison probably....next year, you're gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about ya know, the Pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.") Although the
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Apr 30, 2008
Morris J. Vogel, professor of history at Temple University, has been named president of the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side in New York City, taking over from founding president Ruth J. Abram.
Vogel, 62, was born on the steppes of Kazakhstan to Polish-Jewish parents who fled eastward during World War II. After the war, the family lived in displaced-persons camps before coming to the United States in 1949. Vogel knows his immigrants.
"I became an American his
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 30, 2008
The Turkish parliament voted today, by a tally of 250 to 65, to alter a controversial law that has been used repeatedly against academics, journalists, and writers.
The law, Article 301 of the Turkish penal code, had criminalized the act of “insulting Turkishness.” It will now be amended to instead criminalize “insulting the Turkish nation.” The justice minister will be required to approve any Article 301 prosecutions, under the amended law, and the maximum jail term for offenders w
Source: NYT
Apr 30, 2008
William W. Warner, a former administrator at the Smithsonian Institution and the author of “Beautiful Swimmers,” a study of crabs and watermen in the Chesapeake Bay, which won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1977, died on April 18 at his home in Washington. He was 88.
The cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, said his daughter Alexandra Nash.
A weekend sailor and lifelong nature enthusiast, Mr. Warner spent endless hours on what he called the “benign and
Source: http://www.nzherald.co.nz
Apr 30, 2008
An art history lecturer made redundant from the University of Auckland has won his job back in a legal decision that describes his feeling of humiliation after being dismissed.
Maori and Pacific art specialist Dr Rangihiroa Panoho - the first Maori to get a PhD in art history - was also awarded $25,000 in compensation under an Employment Relations Authority determination.
The ruling came a month after a high-profile ruling ordering the university to pay senior political
Source: Guardian
Apr 29, 2008
It is hard to research history's bit-players - by their peripheral nature they leave little behind. But for her biography of Louis XIV's mistress author Veronica Buckley hit upon a startling, apparently unmined source: the secret diaries of the Sun King himself.
The journals, writes Buckley in her book Madame de Maintenon: The Secret Wife of Louis XIV, were only found in 1997, some 282 years after they were written, "a packet of yellowed papers, wrapped in string and sealed wit
Source: Press Release--UW, Madison
Apr 28, 2008
The Wisconsin Alumni Association has selected University of Wisconsin-Madison history professor Jeremi Suri as the 2008 recipient of the Ken and Linda Ciriacks Faculty Outreach Excellence Award.
The award recognizes UW-Madison faculty members who go above and beyond their job roles to support the Wisconsin Idea and WAA by delivering a variety of enrichment or outreach programs to a primarily alumni audience.
Suri is the author of three books on contemporary politics and
Source: NYT story about the broken dreams of the Khalil Gibran International Academy in NYC
Apr 28, 2008
... “It’s a battle that’s really just begun,” said Daniel Pipes, who directs a conservative research group, the Middle East Forum, and helped lead the charge against Ms. Almontaser and the school.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, critics of radical Islam focused largely on terrorism, scrutinizing Muslim-American charities or asserting links between Muslim organizations and violent groups like Hamas. But as the authorities have stepped up the war on terror, those critics have shifted th
Source: Statement The Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) concerning the status of Iraqi archival documents
Apr 28, 2008
The Society of American Archivists (SAA) and the Association of Canadian Archivists (ACA) are
deeply concerned about the whereabouts, current custody, and ultimate fate of records captured or
otherwise obtained by the United States of America, and those removed by private parties, during the
first and second Gulf Wars. SAA is the world’s largest organization of archivists, comprising more than
5,100 members from around the globe. ACA represents 600 archivists from Canada and internationally.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 28, 2008
Islamic extremism was the dominant topic this past weekend at the first conference of a new organization for scholars of the Middle East and Africa. The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa, or Asmea, was formed last fall by two conservative academics as a scholarly counterweight to a much-larger group of Middle East scholars.
One of the new group's founders, Bernard Lewis, serves as its chairman. A p
Source: Matt Korade in the Congressional Quarterly
Apr 27, 2008
One of the world’s foremost Islamic scholars warned Friday that Middle Eastern studies programs have been distorted by “a degree of thought control and limitations of freedom of expression without parallel in the Western world since the 18th century, and in some areas longer than that.”
Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, made the remarks in the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association for the Study of the Middle East an
Source: Harvard Crimson
Apr 25, 2008
Like many venerable American universities, Harvard’s past is tied to slavery: for decades, if not centuries, the University inculcated pro-slavery sentiment and benefitted from funds that were the fruits of the slave trade or slave labor. But unlike many of its peers—such as Brown and Yale—Harvard has never conducted a formal examination of its past.
And though the University has no plans to launch such an investigation, many feel the time is right for Harvard to do so, given that
Source: Turkish Daily News
Apr 25, 2008
Thousands of social facilities, churches and schools that once belonged to Armenians cannot be seen in Anatolia today, providing more convincing evidence than written documents that the World War I-era killings of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire constitute "genocide," an American historian said yesterday.
“Although there were around two million Armenian people living in Anatolia during the Ottoman Empire before 1915, today it is not possible to find any histo
Source: Bill Moyers Journal
Apr 25, 2008
... BILL MOYERS: In 1972, Jeremiah Wright became pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He inherited a struggling congregation of just 87 members....
BILL MOYERS: So, when you looked out on that handful of worshippers that first Sunday morning, 87 members, I'm sure all of them weren't there--
REVEREND WRIGHT: Oh, yeah. They all knew they heard this new kid was there with a big natural. So, they came to see--
BILL MOYERS: They were there.
Source: Jay Parini at the website of the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 25, 2008
... "Sixties sexual rebels seldom made love," Gerard J. DeGroot notes in The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade, released by Harvard University Press this spring. "They fucked. The word — vulgar, aggressive, rebellious, unfeeling — was the preferred term of the soldiers in the sexual revolution." If you winced at the use of the F-word, as I did, DeGroot's point is confirmed: There was something warlike about making love, 60s-style.
Source: YIGAL BRONNER and NEVE GORDON at the website of the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Apr 25, 2008
"Archaeology has become a weapon of dispossession," Yonathan Mizrachi, an Israeli archaeologist, said in a recent telephone interview with us. He was referring to the way archaeology is being used in Silwan, a Palestinian neighborhood in the oldest part of Jerusalem, where, we believe, archaeological digs are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel Palestinians from their ancestral home.
That effort is orchestrated by an Israeli settler organization call
Source: English professor Mark Bauerlein in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, commenting on a survey of the historical knowledge possessed by students conducted by Sam Wineburg and Chauncey Monte-Sano
Apr 24, 2008
... Wineburg and Monte-Sano asked 11th- and 12th-graders to rank the ten “most famous Americans in history,” and the five most famous women, excluding presidents and presidents’ wives. They reported the findings in the latest issue of Journal of American History.
Here is the first list:
1. Martin Luther King, Jr.
2. Rosa Parks
3. Harriet Tubman
4. Susan B. Anthony
5. Benjamin Franklin
6. Amelia Earhart
7. Oprah Winfrey
