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: Scotsman
Mar 7, 2008
A LEADING historian has criticised BBC Scotland over their choice of presenter for a new ten-part series on Scottish history.
Best-selling Scottish writer Professor Tom Devine has questioned why the BBC picked Neil Oliver to front the show which promises to "explode the myths" of Scotland's romantic past.
Prof Devine, who also said there were few myths left to explode, welcomed the new series, A History of Scotland, and its multi-media package but raised a red
Source: http://www.sabcnews.com
Mar 7, 2008
Another man convicted for the murder of historian David Rattray has testified against two other alleged accomplices on trial in the Pietermaritzburg High Court.
Simphiwe Ndlovu and Zibonele Mpanza are being tried for the murder of the world-renowned historian who was killed in January last year. The State says a gang of six armed men went to Rattray's Fugitive Drift Lodge home in northern KwaZulu-Natal to rob him. He was shot three times and died at the scene.
Thembin
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 7, 2008
Last fall, Samantha Power, a professor of public policy at Harvard University, told The Chronicle that advising Sen. Barack Obama on foreign policy was one of the greatest experiences of her professional life. But she added that she was deeply anxious that her blunt style would someday get the campaign into trouble:
[N]ew technologies make the candidate-adviser relationship more perilous than it once was. In theory a student in one of Ms. Power’s Harvard courses might post one
Source: NYT
Mar 7, 2008
George M. Fredrickson, a historian who cast new light on the study of race and who helped define the field of comparative history with a penetrating examination of racial relations in the United States and South Africa, died on Feb. 25 at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 73.
The cause was heart failure, his wife, Hélène, said.
Mr. Fredrickson is often credited with breaking ground in the use of comparative history to escape provincialism and suggest broader, more th
Source: NYT
Mar 7, 2008
Harriet Washington won the nonfiction prize for “Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present” (Doubleday).
Source: Independent (UK)
Mar 6, 2008
John Larner was one of a group of post-war British and American historians who changed our perceptions of Italy during the Renaissance. He then turned to the history of exploration and became an authority on Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus.
The adopted son of a schoolteacher mother and a father who worked as a park-keeper on Hampstead Heath, Larner was a grammar-school boy from suburban London who after National Service gained a place at New College, Oxford in 1951. His mother d
Source: Star Tribune, Minneapolis
Mar 6, 2008
On Tuesday evening, Stephen Feinstein was doing what he often did, giving a speech about the Holocaust. This one was at the Sabes Foundation Minneapolis Jewish Film Festival in Hopkins.
Suddenly he was at a loss for words. He was taken to Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis, where he later died. He was 64.
An international outpouring of grief has greeted the death of the world-renowned historian of genocide studies.
"Stephen Feinstein was invol
Source: LAT
Mar 6, 2008
George Marsh Fredrickson, an authority on the history of racism whose work comparing the histories of South Africa and America helped spawn a new field of study, died Feb. 25 at his home on the Stanford University campus, where he taught for nearly two decades. He was 73.
The cause was heart failure, said his daughter Caroline.
Fredrickson, who was Edgar E. Robinson professor of U.S. history at Stanford when he retired in 2002, wrote several highly regarded books,
Source: Stefan Collini in the Times Online (UK)
Mar 5, 2008
The career of E. H. Carr (1892–1982) provides a singular, and often baffling, illustration of the tensions and paradoxes involved in being one of twentieth-century Britain’s leading intellectuals. Through his little book What Is History?, he probably did as much as any other single figure to shape reflective assumptions in the second half of the century about the nature of historical knowledge, especially among sixth-formers and university students, yet he had not been educated as a historian, n
Source: Press Release--Middle East Forum
Mar 5, 2008
www.Islamist-Watch.org, the website of the Middle East Forum's Islamist Watch project, is open for business.Islamist Watch asserts that nonviolent radical Islam is more likely to alter the makeup of Western society over time than is terrorism. For while it is relatively easy to mobilize public opinion against terrorist groups, no institutions exist to counter the demands of non-violent extremists. Lawful Islamists lobby for legislation, influen
Source: P. David Hornik at frontpagemag.com
Mar 5, 2008
An appeals court in the Israeli town of Nazareth overturned an earlier lower-court ruling that had awarded a legal victory to Neve Gordon, a far-Left Israeli lecturer in political scientist at Ben-Gurion University in Beersheba. Gordon had filed a SLAPP suit in that court against Prof. Steven Plaut, a prominent columnist and academic economist, based on articles Plaut had published denouncing Gordon’s political opinions and public political activities. Plaut is a critic of Israel’
Source: Stanford
Mar 5, 2008
David Kennedy, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History, is retiring in July, and Stanford is honoring him with a March 7-8 conference titled "Reflections on the American Condition: A Celebration of the Career of David M. Kennedy."
Bruce Schulman of Boston University will deliver the keynote address, "David Kennedy and the Meaning of America." Kennedy's former doctoral students from around the United States will be speaking at the five conference panels.
Source: Hugo Schwyzer at Cliopatria (HNN Blog)
Mar 4, 2008
Blogger Brownfemipower has taken the lead on reporting the story of Andrea Smith's denial of tenure at the University of Michigan. Read here and here, and see the report in the Chronicle of Higher Ed here.
It's
Source: http://www.infozine.com
Mar 4, 2008
Bill Tuttle has taught KU students about recent American history, race relations and the social movements of the 1960s for more than four decades. The first Tuttle Lecture will be delivered by Leon Litwack, a retired professor from the University of California-Berkeley. The lecture, titled "Fight the Power," will take place at 7:30 p.m. Monday, March 10, at the Dole Institute.
"Bill Tuttle is an outstanding scholar and teacher, and one of the major reasons I came to K
Source: Guardian
Mar 4, 2008
[Dr Dejan Djokic is a lecturer in history at Goldsmiths, University of London; author of Elusive Compromise: A History of Interwar Yugoslavia; and editor of Yugoslavism: Histories of a Failed Idea 1918-1992]
agree with Noel Malcolm's rebuttal of Serb demonstrators' slogans stating that "Kosovo is Serbia" (Is Kosovo Serbia? We ask a historian, G2, February 26). However, I must also express reservations regarding some of his arguments. Malcolm does not explain that Kosovo ha
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 3, 2008
When Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. died, in February 2007, he left behind more than his legacy as an adviser to presidents and an award-winning historian.
He also left behind his vast collection of books. They filled the Manhattan apartment that he shared with his wife, and spilled over into a nearby apartment that he used as his study. More books were stacked in the building's basement.
Books also crowded Schlesinger's office at the Graduate Center at the City University o
Source: Gabriel Schoenfeld in the Weekly Standard
Mar 3, 2008
[Gabriel Schoenfeld, senior editor of Commentary, writes daily at connectingthedots.us.com.]
How do we explain the bizarre recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran, which stated in its opening sentence that the ayatollahs had halted their nuclear weapons program in 2003, even as, tucked away in a footnote, the same document noted that the most critical component of such a weapons program--uranium enrichment--was proceeding at full tilt?
Even Mike McConnell, t
Source: Middle East Forum
Mar 3, 2008
The Muslim Weekly, a London-based publication, issued an apology today to Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, concerning a defamatory article it published in February 2007.That article repeated a false allegation made by Tariq Ramadan that Daniel Pipes had lied to a conference hosted by London mayor Ken Livingstone in January 2007. (For details of what did occur, see the article by Mr. Pipes,"
Source: Conrad Black in the NY Sun
Mar 3, 2008
[NY Sun: Conrad Black, a founding director of The New York Sun, is scheduled to report today to federal prison in Florida, to begin serving a six-and-a-half-year sentence for mail fraud and obstruction of justice. At the trial in U.S. District Court in Chicago, he was acquitted of nine of the 13 charges against him; he is appealing the convictions. The following dispatch was sent yesterday.]
* * *
It is a terrible thing to be falsely accused, and wrongly convicted, even
Source: http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb
Mar 3, 2008
As the presidential campaign focuses attention on America’s future, Princeton’s Julian Zelizer is emerging as a prominent political scholar — known for bringing historical insights to today’s issues with a blend of social and cultural analysis.
Zelizer, who joined the University faculty in July as a professor of history and public affairs, utilizes a broad approach to studying political history, and coming to Princeton has provided him with an opportunity to further his interdiscipl
