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: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 1, 2008
Thomas Edward Lawrence arrived in the Arabian port city of Jeddah early on the morning of October 16, 1916. Four months earlier, the Arab ruler of Mecca had started a rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. Lawrence, an Oxford-trained archaeologist who joined the ranks of British intelligence at the outset of World War I, was on a fact-finding mission to determine how Britain should respond to what the papers in London were grandiosely dubbing the Great Arab Revolt.
As is well known,
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Feb 1, 2008
Jay Leno may be annoying, but is he a threat to American democracy? That is the eyebrow-raising charge that Russell L. Peterson levels at the host of The Tonight Show and his mainstream comedy peers in Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke (Rutgers University Press).
Peterson, a visiting assistant professor of American studies at the University of Iowa, has clearly spent a great deal of time with a remote control clutched in his hand, clicking his way
Source: HNN Staff
Feb 1, 2008
In his long-awaited history of the 9-11 Commission due out February 5, New York Times reporter Philip Shenon calls into question the independence of the executive director who ran the investigation,
Source: http://www.michiganlawyer.com/
Feb 1, 2008
So much of a traditional legal education is geared toward passing the bar.
But sometimes issues of social justice can become lost amid the study of torts,
contracts and civil procedure.
Frank H. Wu, the outgoing dean of Wayne State University Law School, has made it
his mission to change that....
To prepare his students for this future, Wu and his wife, Carol"Debbie" Izumi,
pledged $125,000 over a five-year period to create the Izumi Family Fund.
Named in honor of Izum
Source: New Criterion: Notes & Comments
Feb 1, 2008
Some projects are born fatuous, some achieve fatuousness, some have fatuousness thrust upon them. Which melancholy comedy best fits the news that A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn’s anti-American fantasy masquerading as history, is—finally, at last, after so many failed attempts—going to be turned into a television show? Somehow the crowning glory of the farce was the news that the actor Matt Damon (who grew up next to Zinn) would perform in the four-hour miniseries titled “Th
Source: David Bosco in the American Scholar (winter issue)
Feb 1, 2008
During the hot and desperate summer of 1862, a senior American commander found himself consumed with the question of insurgents. Major General Henry Halleck had become general-in-chief of the Union armies in July of that year, and he soon discovered that the army had no laws or regulations to govern its contacts with the bands of irregular Southern forces in the field. A lawyer by training, Halleck found the absence of guidance maddening. Union troops were encountering an array of rebel forces,
Source: http://www.ynetnews.com
Jan 31, 2008
Nizar Hassan, [an Arab] lecturer at Sapir College who refused to teach a reservist who showed up to his class in an IDF uniform, was asked by the college's administration to apologize to the student in order to avoid the termination of employment at the institution, according to a summary of the council hearing on the case on Thursday....
[History] Professor Zeev Zachor, President of Sapir College, sent a letter to Hassan saying: "As a condition of your continued employment, yo
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 31, 2008
Welcome to CiteULike, a social bookmarking tool that allows users to post, share and comment on each other’s links — in this case, citations to journal articles with titles like “Trend detection through temporal link analysis” and “The Social Psychology of Inter- and Intragroup Conflict in Governmental Politics.” It’s a sort of “del.icio.us for academics,” said Kevin Emamy, a representative for the site’s London-based holding company, Oversity Ltd. It started out as a personal Web project in 200
Source: National Security Archive
Jan 31, 2008
The National Security Archive, along with several leading U.S. historical associations, today is filing a petition in federal court in New York City for the release of grand jury records from the 1951 indictment of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of running an espionage ring that passed American atomic secrets to the Soviet Union, convicted of spying, and executed in 1953.
Supported by extensive declarations from experts, the petition describes the trial of the Rosenber
Source: Hartford Courant
Jan 30, 2008
Jim Zwick, 51, an American Studies scholar whose specialties included Mark Twain, political history, and the educational usages of the internet died Thursday (January 24, 2008) at his home outside of Syracuse, New York. Zwick was the author of numerous noted books and articles on Twain, anti-imperialism and other topics. Major publications included the books Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire, Inuit Entertainers in the United States, and Confronting Imperialism: Essays on Mark Twain and the Anti-Imp
Source: http://www.infozine.com
Jan 30, 2008
Americans have a more negative attitude toward Islam now than they did immediately after Sept. 11, a history professor who studies the Middle East and religion told an audience here last week.
***
Juan R.I. Cole, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, said that immediately after Sept. 11, 30 percent of Americans had a negative view of Islam. But reports published in the Washington Post and USA Today in December 2006 found that 45 percent of Americans held
Source: http://media.www.thetraveleronline.com
Jan 30, 2008
The troop surge in Iraq is not nearly as successful as the media portrays it to be, a Middle East historian said in a lecture Monday in Giffels Auditorium.
In "The Iraq Surge One Year On," Chris Toensing, editor of the Middle East Report, disputed assertions by neoconservatives in the media concerning the "apparent success of the surge." He said the war in Iraq is far from over.
The claims of success are correctly based on two figures - the decrease
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jan 30, 2008
Seventy-five years ago, Hitler came to power, ending the Weimar Republic. Did Germany's experiment with democracy between 1919 and 1933 ever stand a real chance? Eric Weitz, a US historian and author, has the answers.
On Jan. 30, 1933, Hitler was named German chancellor, spelling the end to the Weimar Republic -- Germany's convulsive experiment with democracy between 1919 and 1933. The period was dubbed the "Weimar Republic" by historians in honor of the city of Weimar, where a
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jan 29, 2008
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia—This country can't rest its bones.
Skeletons are buried in meadows and beneath parking lots, and just beyond the rumble of trucks and cars near a major highway.
More than 570 hidden grave sites from World War II have been unearthed by a university professor intent on a fair accounting of the past in this former Yugoslav republic now riding high as current holder of the European Union presidency.
A slaughter was conducted in Slovenia in t
Source: Doug Lederman at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Jan 29, 2008
Historians for Obama, Economists for Edwards, Academics for Ron Paul (president of the University of Florida for McCain) — scholars are coming out of the woodwork to support the presidential candidate of their choice, seemingly earlier in the campaign and arguably more aggressively than ever before. But lest anyone think that the current activity is a phenomenon purely of today’s punditocracy, our good friends at The Green Bag law journal have (as is their wont) dug into the archives to show us
Source: HNN Staff
Jan 29, 2008
A sampling of opinion:Stan Katz (Chronicle of Higher Ed.) I was intrigued and disappointed to read John Gravois’s article on the agreement signed by the Hoover Institution at Stanford with the Iraq Memory Foundation for the deposit at Hoover of “two shipping containers” of records created by Ir
Source: Mary Beard at Times Online (UK)
Jan 28, 2008
In this month’s (that is February’s) Vogue, that wonderful polymath Simon Schama shares his views on, and recipes for, stews. In the course of this article, “Simmer of love”, he has some harsh words for the culinary knowledge of Virginia Woolf.
His particular target is the meal cooked by Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse, a tremendous pot of boeuf en daube. Just one ladleful of the stuff is enough to turn awkward company into human beings, joined in “tender communion’. Mrs Ramsay is d
Source: NYT
Jan 28, 2008
In attempt to broaden its online audience, The Washington Post Company on Monday is to introduce an online magazine primarily for a black audience, with news and commentary on politics and culture, and tools for readers to research their family histories.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a writer and a professor of African and African-American studies at Harvard, is the editor in chief of the magazine, called The Root, which he conceived with Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the company.
Source: Jacob Weisberg in Newsweek excerpt of his new book, The Bush Tragedy
Jan 28, 2008
... Wolfowitz and his protégé Scooter Libby, the other most influential neoconservative inside the administration, were driven by a particular notion about how to transform the sick political culture of the Middle East. The big thinker behind their theory was the Arab scholar Bernard Lewis, a professor emeritus at Princeton. The originator of the phrase "the clash of civilizations," Lewis believed Muslims had been engaged in a "cosmic struggle for world domination" since the
Source: Boston Globe
Jan 27, 2008
In his vivid and illuminating new book, "God's Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215" (Norton, $29.95), historian David Levering Lewis re-examines the 400-year era of Muslim rule in Europe, a period during which a sophisticated and tolerant Islamic empire conquered - and profoundly influenced - parts of a West that had fallen into barbaric tribalism following the collapse of the Roman empire.
Lewis, a professor at New York University, received the Pulitzer Pri
