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: http://www.columbia1968
Mar 12, 2008
This spring marks the 40th anniversary of the 1968 student protests at Columbia University. A group of alumni participants, working with faculty and students, has developed a program for a three-day conference to reexamine those events from a wide range of viewpoints and in the context of what was happening in 1968 in the country and the world. The conference will provide a chance for people who lived through that period to reconnect, reconcile, and reflect. And it will engage current students i
Source: Edwin Black at TheCuttingEdgeNews.com
Mar 12, 2008
One of America’s most knowledge experts on genocide suddenly passed away a few days ago.
Historian Stephen Feinstein, 65, died on the job last week during a presentation at the Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival. Feinstein lapsed mid-sentence during his remarks. His wife reportedly rushed to his side and summoned paramedics. But at the hospital nothing could be done to repair what was close to an aortic aneurism. The loss to his family, to his friends, to the community and to scholars
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
Mar 12, 2008
Dear Colleagues,
Scholars at Risk (SAR), based at New York University, is a worldwide network promoting academic freedom and defending the human rights of scholars, in part by arranging temporary placements for scholars who suffer grave threats to their work or their person. SAR is sending us a summary profile of an Iranian historian working in the field of Iranian and Turkish history, who was dismissed in January 2008 because he had published a Farsi translation of a biography of A
Source: AP
Mar 11, 2008
The Knights of Malta have elected a British art historian as the new grand master of the lay Roman Catholic order.
Fra Matthew Festing replaces the late Fra Andrew Bertie as head of the 900-year-old charitable order.
The Knights of Malta chose the 59-year-old Festing as their 79th grand master during a meeting Tuesday in Rome.
Festing joined the Order of Malta in 1977. He has led humanitarian missions in Lebanon and Kosovo as the Grand Prior of England, a s
Source: http://capitalnews9.com
Mar 11, 2008
“This is very significant in the history of New York State,” said Historian Dominick C. Lizzi.
Meet historian Dominick Lizzi. He's been watching the Spitzer news unfold like most of us.
“The parallels are absolutely amazing,” said Lizzi.
He literally wrote the book that's the result of one of New York's darkest political days. Martin Glynn Forgotten Hero details New York's governor who came to power after William Sulzer was impeached for misusing campaign
Source: John Crace in the Guardian
Mar 11, 2008
Just over five years ago, Michael Burleigh did the unthinkable. He walked away from academia. No jumping, no pushing - just walking. With his career on a high after winning the Samuel Johnson prize for The Third Reich: A New History, and after more than two decades teaching at Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cardiff - not forgetting visiting posts at Rutgers and Stanford in the US - he decided to jack it all in.
"The crap had begun to take over," he laughs bleakly. &q
Source: Press Release
Mar 11, 2008
New York, NY—Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, announced today that Daniel Walker Howe will receive the third annual New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize for What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press). The award will be presented at a ceremony during the annual Chairman’s Council Weekend With History on April 4, where Howe will also be named American Historian Laureate.
Source: NYT
Mar 11, 2008
[Orlando Patterson is a professor of sociology at Harvard and the author of “The Ordeal of Integration: Progress and Resentment in America’s ‘Racial’ Crisis.”]
... I have spent my life studying the pictures and symbols of racism and slavery, and when I saw the Clinton ad’s central image — innocent sleeping children and a mother in the middle of the night at risk of mortal danger — it brought to my mind scenes from the past. I couldn’t help but think of D. W. Griffith’s “Birth of a N
Source: http://www.news-gazette.com
Mar 10, 2008
You won't find James McPherson's name on a biography of Abraham Lincoln per se, but when the University of Illinois History Department was thinking of speakers to kick off a bicentennial celebration of the 16th president's birth, McPherson was at the top of the list.
The Civil War scholar and author – UI history Professor Bruce Levine calls him "the most sophisticated interpreter of Lincoln's presidency around" – will give the Lincoln Bicentennial Lecture, the first of a s
Source: Eric Rauchway at The Edge of the American West (Blog)
Mar 10, 2008
Over the weekend, I attended a conference in honor of David M. Kennedy, who was the first reader on my dissertation and has remained a role model and mentor. (You can find a pdf of the conference program by clicking on the image.) It was in the nature of the conference that a lot of the anecdotes wouldn’t travel well. But here’s one. The gentleman telling this story joined the Stanford History department as a graduate student in the days of Thomas A. Bailey:
About fifteen minutes be
Source: Press Release--National Coalition for History
Mar 10, 2008
The Co-Chairs of the Congressional Humanities Caucus, Rep. David Price (D-NC) and Rep. Phil English (R-PA), have prepared a Dear Colleague letter in support of $177 million in funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities in FY 2009, which is currently circulating in the House of Representatives. The deadline for Members of Congress to sign the letter is soon- Monday, March 17, 2008.
ACTION NEEDED
Please call, email, or fax your Representative and ask him/her t
Source: Press Release--Cathy Gorn, executive director of National History Day
Mar 10, 2008
It is once more the time of year to voice your support for NHD, and to press your representatives in Congress to appropriate federal funds to one of the longest-running education programs in the country. Phone calls from constituents like you and your friends compelled 31 Representatives and 21 Senators to support NHD in a Dear Colleague letter last year!
For grassroots activism, that is a tremendous result, and I am certain that your energy and concern can bring us even closer to f
Source: Stan Katz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 10, 2008
[Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. ]
I have been working for the past several years with a group of historians who are trying to create a National History Center in the nation’s capital. This is an idea proposed many years ago by J. Franklin Jameson when he was the Librarian of Congress, and resurrected by my former Princeton colleague James Banner severa
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at the website of Campus Watch
Mar 10, 2008
[Cinnamon Stillwell is the Northern California Representative for Campus Watch. She can be reached atstillwell@meforum.org]
A Santa Clara University course optimistically titled,"The Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes," was the setting for a February 26 academic debate on one of the world's most intractable disputes: T
Source: http://www.sas.upenn.edu
Mar 10, 2008
While Tom Sugrue, Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of History and Sociology, was researching his award-winning book The Origins of the Urban Crisis, he found the inspiration for yet another untold American story. In Origins, Sugrue offers an important new perspective on the economic decline in Detroit and other industrial cities since World War II. One of the major issues he explores is how residential segregation, economic transformation and discrimination in the workplace constrained opp
Source: Max Boot at his Commentary blog
Mar 9, 2008
The lip-smacking glee with which the resignation of Obama adviser Samantha
Power is being greeted on the right is perhaps an understandable reaction
to the sanctimony (and success) of the Obama campaign. But some of the
comments are simply over the top. For instance, Scott Johnson at Powerline
(a blog which I regularly read and greatly respect) [1] calls Power"self-righteous, high-minded, and utterly unserious — in short, a pompous
phony."
I can only imagine that Johnson has not rea
Source: Washington Times
Mar 9, 2008
... In "The Purpose of the Past: Reflections on the Uses of History," Mr. Wood critiques and analyzes many of the important books of the past 25 years, with a special emphasis on works about the Revolutionary era. It is a collection of his review essays from publications such as the New Republic and the New York Review of Books.
His thoughts on the views expressed in the books he is reviewing are insightful and rigorously argued. Fortunately, his writings lack the stridenc
Source: Hindustan Times
Mar 9, 2008
Pioneer Indian-American historian Tejinder Singh Sibia, who documented the arrival of early Indian migrants to Canada and the US and their struggles, died in Sacramento at the weekend following a brief illness. He was 70.
Popularly known as Ted, he was the first Indian-American to document the history of the Gadar movement in California, the Komagata Maru and early Indian pioneers in America.
After his retirement as a librarian from the University of California at Davis
Source: http://www.rte.ie
Mar 8, 2008
An appearance by the controversial historian, David Irving, at a debate in University College Cork next week has been cancelled.
Two years ago, Mr Irving was convicted in Austria of saying that the Holocaust did not happen, which is a criminal offence in that country.
UCC said it had cancelled Mr Irving's appearance over security concerns, but said that Monday's debate would go ahead.
Source: Email to friends
Mar 8, 2008
[Mark Naison is Professor of African American Studies and History, Fordham University.]
Friends,
While I am all for pointing out the many contexts in which being "white" confers enormous advantages, not only historically, but in American society today, I am extremely wary of the concept of "white privilege,"especially the way it is used on college campuses in racial sensitivity sensitivity sessions and diversity training
First of all, the pe
