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.gainesville.com
Feb 9, 2008
Armenians during World War I died of starvation and disease, not genocide, an Ottoman Empire historian said Friday in a speech sponsored by the University of Florida's Turkish Student Association.
Justin McCarthy, a history professor a the University of Louisville, was greeted by applause in a half-full University Auditorium and spoke about his research on what others say was genocide against the Armenian people during World War I.
Armenians cannot claim that the Otto
Source: http://www.rockbridgeweekly.com
Feb 9, 2008
Mark P. Carey, assistant professor of history at Washington and Lee University, has received the Leopold-Hidy Prize for 2007. The prize is awarded by the Editorial Board of the peer-reviewed Environmental History to the author of the best article published in the journals during that year.
Carey, an environmental historian, is the author of "The History of Ice: How Glaciers Became an Endangered Species," published in Environmental History (July 2007). Currently, he is wor
Source: Newsweek
Feb 9, 2008
February of every year is Black History Month, and it's easy to tell when it's here because we're inundated with images of Martin Luther King Jr. and other celebrated African-Americans. All of it can seem mostly pro forma political correctness with little context and even less thought. But a new eight-volume set of books released this month, the African American National Biography (AANB), blows the dust off Black History Month by telling the stories of 4,080 black lives in America—past and prese
Source: NYT
Feb 8, 2008
... The American military’s difficulty in securing Iraq has led to much soul-searching within the armed forces on how to prepare for future conflicts. Col. H. R. McMaster of the Army, who commanded the successful effort in 2005 to secure the northern Iraqi town of Tal Afar, asserts in a new article that an exaggerated faith in military technology and a corresponding undervaluation of political and military measures to secure the peace undermined American efforts in Iraq.
“Self-delus
Source: Mercury News
Feb 8, 2008
As Black History Month began, a gaggle of schoolchildren traipsing through the fifth floor of San Jose's main library surrounded Iris Jerke and her history exhibit on Santa Clara Valley's African-Americans. None of the kids was black, and neither is Jerke.
The kids looked at early, black-and-white photos of "Negroes" and "colored" folk wearing courtly, wrist-to-neck shirts or blouses and illustrious hats. The children wondered if they were slaves, servants or fre
Source: NYT
Feb 8, 2008
To posterity the balding man in the courtroom was the greatest writer in the English language. To the maidservant formerly employed at his lodgings, he was “one Mr Shakespeare that laye in the house.” To the Court of Requests, taking depositions in a lawsuit in 1612, he was simply a witness who gave his statement, signed a hurried “Wm Shakspe” and then took his leave.
This fleeting glimpse of Shakespeare as he appeared to others, grounded in a specific London setting, seized the ima
Source: AFP
Feb 8, 2008
Historian Zeev Sternhell, an expert on
extreme right-wing ideologies in France, has been awarded the 2008 Israel Prize in political science, public television said.
Born in Poland in 1935, Sternhell fled the Holocaust and lived briefly in France before going to Israel in 1951.
He teaches at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in the emergence of fascism.
Sternhell is also a frequent contributor to the liberal Haaretz newspap
Source: Interview at Inside Higher Ed
Feb 8, 2008
In campus health centers, Heather Munro Prescott sees much more than places to promote student health. Their history reflects important societal values on the evolution of higher education in the United States, about the education of women, and about some of the most controversial social issues of the day. Prescott’s new book, Student Bodies: The Influence of Health Services in American Society and Medicine, is just out from the University of Michigan Press. Prescott, professor of history at Cen
Source: Stan Katz in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 8, 2008
How did you spend Thursday, Stan?
Well, it is a complicated story. I took Amtrak from Princeton Junction at 6:16 a.m. in order to make a 10 a.m. hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Aha, you say, the chairman, Senator Leahy, a Vermont Democrat, wanted your views on waterboarding, or perhaps on whether or not to confirm the latest bunch of President Bush’s judicial nominees?
Nope. Senator Leahy wanted my opinion, and that of several others, on “The Founding Fathers
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
Feb 8, 2008
Amnesty International reports once again about death threats against members of a Guatemalan forensic anthropology team. These teams can be perceived as "protohistorians": they excavate mass graves to find evidence for the genocide and other crimes against humanity committed during the civil war (1960–96) and they are therefore of great concern to the historical profession. The new threats are apparently connected with, inter alia, an article in the newspaper Siglo XXI that reported th
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
Feb 8, 2008
The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN protests the four-year prison sentence handed down to writer and human rights activist Lü Gengsong on 5 February 2008 for ‘inciting subversion of state power’ for his critical writings published online. Lü has been detained since 24 August 2007. International PEN considers Lü Gengsong to be detained in violation of Article 19 of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights, to which China is a signatory, and calls for his immedia
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 8, 2008
"The present is a void," the literary critic and historian Van Wyck Brooks wrote in 1918, "and the American writer floats in that void because the past that survives in the common mind of the present is a past without living value." Coining the phrase he is best remembered for, Brooks called on his fellow citizens to join in the search for "a usable past." If they could not discover one, he argued, they could invent one.
Brooks's pitch was not aimed at
Source: Sen. Judiciary Committee
Feb 7, 2008
Mr. Chairman, I wish to thank you for the chance to speak before this committee in support of the Founding Fathers Project. What has been achieved thus far with the publication of the papers of the Founders is all of an exceedingly high order. I want to attest to that emphatically, as one of the many -- the countless number of historians, biographers, scholars, and students -- who have drawn again and again on the great wealth of material to be found in these incomparable volumes. Their value is
Source: NYT
Feb 7, 2008
The Air Force Academy was criticized by Muslim and religious freedom organizations for playing host on Wednesday to three speakers who critics say are evangelical Christians falsely claiming to be former Muslim terrorists....
Prof. Douglas Howard, who teaches the history of the modern Middle East at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., heard Mr. Saleem speak last November at the college and said he thought the three were connected to several major Christian evangelical organizatio
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 7, 2008
Tariq Ramadan, a prominent European Muslim scholar, is calling on “all people of conscience” to boycott the forthcoming Turin Book Fair in Italy. Ramadan's outrage stems from the fact that the Turin festival organizers have decided to honor Israeli literature because it is the Jewish state's 60th anniversary. Luminaries from the world of Israeli letters like David Grossman, Amos Oz, A.B. Yehoshua, and Etgar Keret are scheduled to attend.
According to a post by Rachel Donadio on The
Source: WaPo
Feb 7, 2008
There are a number of things that make Drew Gilpin Faust different from those who've come before her as head honcho of America's flagship university.
Faust is, for example, the only president of Harvard known to have produced an academic paper titled "Equine Relics of the Civil War," the research for which included attending a solemn burial ceremony for the cremated bones of Stonewall Jackson's horse.
She is, it seems almost certain, the only one among the ano
Source: Press Release--Historians Against the War (Click here for details.)
Feb 7, 2008
Historians Against the War and the Peace History Society invite you to our upcoming national conference at Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia, 11-13 April 2008.
We want to attract historically minded scholars, activists from a variety of social movements, graduate students, educators, artists, and independent researchers and writers.
The conference will begin on Friday evening, April 11 with two keynote addresses. The speakers are Bill Fletcher, Jr., a longtime
Source: http://media-newswire.com
Feb 5, 2008
A native New Yorker and nationally recognized historian, who has held various leadership positions on the state and national level for the past 28 years, has been appointed the new chief historian. Robert Weible, the current director of public history at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, a unit of the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC), will take on his new role as New York State's chief curator of history in late March.
Source: http://www.afriquenligne.fr
Feb 5, 2008
Senegalese historian Prof. Mamadou Diouf on Tuesday denounced the "autocratic trend" that is increasingly characterising governments formed after democratic elections in Africa.
"Democratic elections are giving birth to autocratic regimes in some African countries," Prof. Diouf, Director of the Institute of African Studies (IAS) of the University of Colombia, said in Dakar at the four-day African Forum of the Open Society Initiative (OSI) Foundation of the US bil
Source: http://www.hattiesburgamerican.com
Feb 5, 2008
The University of Southern Mississippi will recognize the contributions of African-Americans to the state, region and nation with a series of programs in celebration of Black History Month, beginning Feb. 7.
The theme for this year’s programming is “Carter G. Woodson and the Origins of Multiculturalism,” which is also the national theme for Black History Month. Woodson was a historian and founder of Black History Month who worked to promote the value of the contributions of African-
