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: Editor's note in Historically Speaking (March/April 2008)
Apr 1, 2008
One year ago, we published Maureen Ogle’s winsome account of leaving academic history to “go popular.” Two issues later, the Historical Society’s president, Eric Arnesen, himself a frequent writer of reviews for the Chicago Tribune, wrote an essay expressing concern that so-called popular historians do not make sufficient effort to incorporate the fruits of academic historical scholarship in their books. Arnesen selected two books to illustrate his concern. One of them was Adam Hochschild’s Bury
Source: Stanley Katz in AHA Perspectives (April)
Apr 1, 2008
History matters. The incontestable truth encapsulated in this phrase was once again brought home to me quite forcefully by a brilliant and eloquent lecture delivered recently at a Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) meeting in New York by Fritz Stern, university professor emeritus at Columbia University, and a distinguished historian of Germany, whose most recent book is the best-selling autobiographical memoir, Five Germanys I Have Known.
The lecture—the second in a series on foreig
Source: Arnita Jones in the AHA Perspectives (APRIL)
Apr 1, 2008
... Earlier this spring National Coalition for History Executive Director Lee White and I spent a few minutes totaling up the amount of federal funding that has an impact upon history. We have the Department of Education's Teaching American History grants at $120 million for each of the last several years. The National Endowment for the Humanities received $144 million this year, much of which goes to historical projects. The National Archives, which relates to history in one way or another, cur
Source: NewsHour (PBS)
Apr 1, 2008
As part of a series on post-Katrina housing in New Orleans, NewsHour correspondent Betty Ann Bowser interviewed University of New Orleans history professor Arnold Hirsch about the history of public housing in New Orleans and the rest of the United States.
***
ARNOLD HIRSCH: I'm a professor of history at the University of New Orleans. My formal title is the Ethel and Hermann L. Midlow Endowed Chair for New Orleans Studies and University Research Professor of History.
Source: Boston Globe (Click to view a montage.)
Apr 1, 2008
Boston University professor emeritus Howard Zinn has turned to a new platform to give his version of US history -- the graphic novel, with "A People's History of American Empire."
Illustrations are by Mike Konopacki.
Source: Indiana Daily Student
Apr 1, 2008
Although the war in Iraq can be characterized as turbulent and controversial, the American publics interest in U.S. foreign policy is increasing.
Guest lecturer and military historian Andrew J. Bacevich spoke Wednesday night in
the Indiana Memorial Union about U.S. foreign policy and Iraq to a packed room of students, faculty, staff and Bloomington residents.
Bacevich said his underlying theme was not “what do we do about Iraq ... but how are we as a natio
Source: http://msutoday.msu.edu
Apr 1, 2008
In its day, the East German secret police, now known as the “Stasi,” was one of the most feared spy agencies in the world. But despite its reputation and seemingly unlimited access to James Bond-like technology, the best national security system couldn’t help an ailing communist regime, according to an MSU historian.
In her new book, “Seduced by Secrets,” MSU’s internationally recognized historian and Lyman Briggs associate professor Kristie Macrakis debunks the myths surrounding th
Source: Dani Rodrik's blog
Mar 31, 2008
[Rodrik is Rafiq Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. ]
Look at the figure below, and then look at it again, and again, and again. It is the most telling picture about the U.S. political economy I have ever seen.
Source: Jerusalem Post
Mar 31, 2008
Britain has become the epicenter for anti-Semitic trends in Europe as traditional, age-old anti-Semitism in a country whose literature and cultural tradition were "drenched" in anti-Semitism has developed into a contemporary mix of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, an Israeli historian said Monday.
The problem of anti-Semitism in Britain is exacerbated by a growing and increasingly radical Muslim population, the weak approach taken by a timid British Jewish leadership, and t
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Mar 31, 2008
Claire B. Potter has a level of academic success many young Ph.D.’s these days can only dream about. A professor of history and chair of American studies at Wesleyan University, she has tenure at an elite college. Tenure provides her not only with job security, but with part of her identity as the blogger Tenured Radical, where she shares views on a range of topics, writing with the freedom that tenure is supposed to protect.
So why would Potter recently have approached her provost
Source: Washington Times
Mar 31, 2008
Changes in teaching methods have been under way for a decade or more, says Kelly Schrum, director of educational projects at George Mason University's Center for History and New Media.
"It's similar to the emphasis on science education that came after the Cold War when doing experiments was important in a classroom. It's show, don't tell," she says.
It's also about what she calls "democratizing history" — using technology to give voice to people in h
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Mar 30, 2008
A range of school subjects could be swept away under new teaching proposals.
The attack on the National Curriculum, which has dictated school timetables for 20 years, could spell the end of separate classes in history, geography, literature, languages, art and music.
Instead, schools would be allowed to decide how they teach big themes such as global warming, conflict and healthy living.
The present list of subjects would be reduced to little more than English, m
Source: NYT
Mar 30, 2008
Paul Arthur, a film historian, scholar and critic well known for writing about American avant-garde cinema and documentaries, died on Tuesday at his home in White Plains. He was 60.
The cause was melanoma, for which he had just started treatment, said Karen Arthur, his former wife.
A professor of English and film studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey, where he had been named a distinguished scholar for 2007-8, Mr. Arthur had a decades-long passionate invol
Source: Haaretz
Mar 29, 2008
Alon Confino is a professor of modern German and European history at the University of Virginia and an expert in the culture of memory. In an article he published in the periodical Alpayim - A Multidisciplinary Publication for Contemporary Thought and Literature (in Hebrew), Confino calls for eliminating history from the discourse between Jews and Arabs in Israel, "to get rid of the arrogance of the past" and to overcome it. The debate as to what did and did not happen in the past only
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 28, 2008
Through the decades, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. has called me teacher, reminding me of the years when he earned a master's degree in theology and ministry at the University of Chicago — and friend. My wife and I and our guests have worshiped at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where he recently completed a 36-year ministry....
Now, for the hard business: the sermons, which have been mercilessly chipped into for wearying television clips. While Wright's sermons were p
Source: AP
Mar 27, 2008
A one-time director of the Theodore Roosevelt Association stole and tried to auction off one of its prized artifacts _ a 1918 letter the former president wrote about his son Quentin's death in World War I, prosecutors said.
Edward Renehan Jr., a historian who has written six books, was charged Wednesday with charged with grand larceny, criminal possession of stolen property and criminal possession of a forged instrument. The last charge referred to what authorities said was a phony
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Mar 27, 2008
To its credit, the Defense Intelligence Agency promptly withdrew an
official DIA history that mistakenly described the 1981 Israeli attack
on an Iraqi nuclear reactor in the 1980s as an attack on Iran (Secrecy
News, March 26). As soon as the error became public, DIA replaced the
entire document with an updated account.
In an email message yesterday to Israeli author Gideon Remez, who
discovered the error, DIA webmaster David Baird wrote:"You are correct
that the historical fact is w
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 27, 2008
In July 1933, six months after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, his government established the Hitler salute — right arm extended with palm open, together with the declaration "Heil Hitler!" — as the "properly German form of greeting." As Tilman Allert shows in his slim book, The Hitler Salute: On the Meaning of a Moral Gesture (Metropolitan Books), the greeting swiftly entrenched itself as a social convention and a gauge of loyalty to the regime. According to one N
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Mar 27, 2008
One of the key arguments made by David Horowitz and his supporters in recent years is that a left-wing orientation among faculty members results in a lack of curricular balance, which in turn leads to students being indoctrinated rather than educated. The argument is probably made most directly in a film much plugged by Horowitz: “Indoctrinate U.”
A study that will appear soon in the journal PS: Political Science & Politics accepts the first part of the critique of academe and s
Source: http://www.nj.com
Mar 26, 2008
Human rights activist Edwin Lewinson demanded to be sent to prison following his arrest last year during a protest against a controversial school that trains Latin American troops at Fort Benning, Ga.
But the blind 78-year-old retired professor is not happy to serve his three-month sentence at the Elkton Federal Correctional Institution, which is 413 miles from his home in Newark.
"It's going to make it difficult for my friends to come visit me," Lewinson said
