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: AFP
Jan 23, 2008
Controversial Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan said Wednesday that with the backing of civil rights groups he was appealing a decision by the US administration to refuse him a visa.
Ramadan was forced to give up a teaching position at the University of Notre-Dame in Indiana in late 2004 when US authorities revoked his visa at the last minute on the recommendation of the Department of Homeland Security.
The noted scholar, who lives in Britain where he is a senior resea
Source: LAT
Jan 23, 2008
Sometimes, when a fine historian ventures outside his specialty, prodigies of fresh insight ensue. More often -- and particularly when the scholar carries into one era the baggage of another -- the results are worse than disappointing.
These days, we so urgently require a better understanding of Islam and its origins that it would be edifying to report that the distinguished historian David Levering Lewis' new book is an example of the former. Unfortunately, "God's Crucible: Is
Source: HNN Staff
Jan 23, 2008
This year's OAH annual meeting is in New York City. The OAH reserved rooms at the Hilton at a special convention rate of $202 a night (less than half the regular price).
But rooms sold out so quickly that on Tuesday the organization had to arrange to book more rooms.
As of Wednesday afternoon the Hilton still had rooms to rent, but they're going fast.
Hilton Tel: 1-212-586-7000
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
Jan 23, 2008
Dear Colleagues,
The Network for Education and Academic Rights (NEAR), London, and several press agencies reported that Mehrnoushe Solouki was released. A 38-year-old graduate student, she was arrested in February 2007 and prevented from leaving Iran for nearly a year after discovering a mass grave of regime opponents summarily executed during the 1988 Iraq-Iran war. Please see the summary below. Many thanks to all of you who campaigned on ms. Solouki’s behalf.
With bes
Source: NYT
Jan 22, 2008
Robert Frost wrote some of this country’s most quoted — and in the minds of some, most misunderstood — poetic lines.
Now a recently published compendium of his personal notebooks is coming under attack from two critics who say that the editor of the volume, Robert Faggen, mistranscribed hundreds, if not thousands, of Frost’s words.
Mr. Faggen, a professor and chairman of the department of English at Claremont McKenna College in California, published his book, “The Noteb
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 22, 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. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History.]
... I first became aware of the problem when one of my graduate school friends discovered that a more senior scholar had reproduced large sections of his dissertation. Later I
Source: http://www.fredericknewspost.com
Jan 22, 2008
The modern civil rights movement did not begin in 1955, according to Frederick County resident Bruce Thompson. It actually started in Maryland about 20 years earlier.
"Martin Luther King Jr. truly was a leader and should be celebrated, but he didn't create the movement. He stepped into it and broadened it."
Thompson earned his doctorate in history from the University of Maryland College Park in 1996.
Thompson teaches history and coordinates the honors p
Source: Daniel Beekman at the Seattle Times blog: Blogging Beijing
Jan 21, 2008
Few foreigners know Chinese sports and the Olympic Games like American anthropologist Dr. Susan Brownell.
Since her championship performance in track & field at China's second annual National College Games in 1986, Brownell has worked to build cultural bridges between Beijing and the 'West.'
Her first major work - "Training the Body for China" - was well received in 1995, and her second – "Beijing's Games: What the Olympics Mean to China" will
Source: NYT
Jan 21, 2008
It was not exactly a welcome mat that greeted the new museum director. When Kevin Gover left his quiet life teaching American Indian law among the cactuses of Arizona to lead the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian here, he arrived during a storm of publicity about spending by his predecessor, W. Richard West Jr.
But in his first in-depth interview since settling into his new office, Mr. Gover, 52, seemed unconcerned about the scrutiny he might now encounter about
Source: Guardian
Jan 21, 2008
The long-standing antagonism between Germany and the Church of Scientology escalated over the weekend when a high-profile historian compared Tom Cruise's performance in a Scientology video with the style of the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Guido Knopp, who has written a number of books on Hitler and his inner circle, said the video, which surfaced on YouTube last week, "inevitably" recalled Goebbels' speech in a Berlin sports stadium when he asked "Do you want
Source: Press Release--Oxford University Press
Jan 21, 2008
Henry Louis Gates, Jr's rescue and recovery project -- the African American National Biography is finally being published in February 2008
Oxford University Press and the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute are pleased to announce that after ten years of work, the AFRICAN AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY is complete and will be published on February 4, 2008.
“The AFRICAN AMERICAN NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY is a rescue and recovery project, retrieving the life stories of African Americans tha
Source: NYT Book Review
Jan 20, 2008
This fall, Elie Wiesel’s “Night” was removed from the New York Times best-seller list, where it had spent an impressive 80 weeks after Oprah Winfrey picked it for her book club. The Times’s news survey department, which compiles the list, decided the Holocaust memoir wasn’t a new best seller but a classic like “Animal Farm” or “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which sell hundreds of thousands of copies a year largely through course adoptions. Indeed, since it appeared in 1960, “Night” has sold an estimat
Source: NYT Book Review
Jan 20, 2008
In 2003, the German Remembrance Foundation awarded the historian Götz Aly the Marion Samuel Prize, which commemorates the one million Jewish children murdered by the Nazis. It was named for a young victim whose name was chosen at random from the lists of the dead, a gesture meant to underscore the tragic anonymity of the Holocaust’s casualties. In accepting the tribute, Aly set out on a mission to uncover the life of Marion Samuel, to rescue her at least from obscurity.
The idea was
Source: David Crist in the NYT
Jan 20, 2008
In the 1980s the Navy had to counter a broad effort by Revolutionary Guard forces, then at war with Iraq, to set mines and otherwise hamper and damage American-flagged oil carriers in the gulf. The conflict heated up in the summer of 1987, when an American-flagged tanker hit an Iranian mine. That fall, Army helicopters fired on and Seals boarded an Iranian ship laying mines in international waters. The Seals confirmed the presence of mines, detained the crew and scuttled the ship.
T
Source: Op ed in the WaPo signed by Jack Keane, Frederick W. Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon
Jan 20, 2008
Iraq's new de-Baathification bill, which awaits only expected approval by the presidency council before becoming law, is good news. During Saddam Hussein's day, if you wanted a professional job in Iraq, you basically had to join the Baath Party. For most of the 1 million-plus who did so, this hardly implied involvement or even complicity in crimes of the state. Hussein was so paranoid that only his very inner circles were entrusted with information or influence. The Shiite-led gove
Source: PBS
Jan 19, 2008
BILL MOYERS: Back in mid-January of 1980, another race for the Presidency was underway. As it is now, many Americans were worried about the economy and a failed policy in the Middle East. They hungered for change and hope.
Along came a former California governor named Ronald Reagan. He rallied his party at the Republican National Convention with these patriotic words: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."
Calling for a revolution, Reagan cho
Source: Daniel Larison at his blog
Jan 18, 2008
[Daniel Larison is a doctoral candidate in Byzantine history at the University of Chicago.]
This is rather amusing. Apparently I have become worthy of being denounced by
Jamie Kirchick at Commentary for my sympathy for the Confederacy. Kirchick’s “discovery” that I have belonged to the League of the South for many years will come, I expect, as no surprise to anyone who has been reading this blog for very
Source: WaPo
Jan 18, 2008
Polish prosecutors are considering taking the unusual step of filing criminal charges against an Ivy League professor for allegedly "slandering the Polish nation" in a book that describes how Poles victimized Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in the aftermath of World War II.
Jan T. Gross, a Princeton University historian and native Polish Jew, has raised hackles here with the publication of "Fear," an account of Poland's chaotic postwar years in which Jews who b
Source: Email from Stephanie Coontz to HNN
Jan 17, 2008
Family scholars from many disciplines --including historians, sociologists, psychogists, therapists, social workers, political scientists, and economists-- meet this spring for the 11th annual conference of the Council on Contemporary Families. The conference, held on April 25-26 at University of Illinois-Chicago, features what organizers have dubbed "Family Issues in Contention." Themes of sex, adoption, cohabitation, and divorce are at the center of the two-day dialogue. The program
Source: Jonathan Schanzer at the website of Campus Watch
Jan 16, 2008
[Jonathan Schanzer, an adjunct scholar at www.Campus-Watch.org, is director of policy for the Jewish Policy Center, and editor of inFocus Quarterly.]
When good news arrives from Iraq, most Americans celebrate. But not the Middle East studies professors who are often quoted in the mainstream press. For them, good news is bad news.
