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: Tulsa World
Jan 11, 2008
One of the three former Oral Roberts University professors who sued the university for wrongful termination last fall has been reinstated in a settlement reached late Thursday.
Jo Anne Deaton, who with John Tucker represents all the defendants except former ORU President Richard Roberts, told the Tulsa World that the defendants had reached a settlement with former professor John Swails. The details of the settlement, which came after a full day of negotiations, were not released.
Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog
Jan 11, 2008
[Ms. Lipstadt is Dorot professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies and director of the Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University.]
As readers of this blog know, I do not label people or writings as antisemitic unless they are blatnatly so. Well Gandhi's grandson has written a column for the Washington Post which is clearly so.
Arun Gandhi is the fifth grandson of “Mahatma” Gandhi and is president and co-founder of the M. K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 11, 2008
In 2002, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, a Mark Twain scholar at Stanford University, discovered a forgotten play written by Twain in 1898 that had never been performed. Fishkin published Is He Dead? in 2003 and produced the play, which opened on Broadway last month at the Lyceum Theatre. Directed by Michael Blakemore and adapted by David Ives, the production has earned positive reviews, including one from The Village Voice's Michael Feingold, who praised its "good humor, good energy, and a sweet u
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 11, 2008
Any interview with the author of a new scholarly book inevitably includes the question what's next? Drew Gilpin Faust, whose This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is just out, has pondered the question quite a bit. Always direct (after all, she grew up the only daughter among three sons, often at odds with her mother about the dictates of femininity), she says: "I don't expect to be writing a lot more Civil War history."
That may not be surprising co
Source: Edward L. Ayers in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 11, 2008
Long before she became the first female president of Harvard University in July 2007, Drew Gilpin Faust showed herself to be an inventive, energetic, and restless historian. Her first book, in 1977, focused on a subject many people had doubted was a subject, "the intellectual in the Old South." Five years later, she produced what is still the fullest — and most disturbing — portrayal of a white Southern planter, a man who sought complete mastery over the white women in his charge as we
Source: Washington Times
Jan 10, 2008
Photos of makeshift memorials. E-mails letting family members know the sender was safe. The New York Fire Department's daily action plan at Ground Zero. These images and items from September 11, 2001, and the aftermath of the terrorist attacks are bits of history that may have been relegated to the bottom of a shoe box, slipped into the pages of a scrapbook or discarded forever. However, with innovations in technology, historians are making large collections of recent history accessible and avai
Source: Press Release--Stephen Ambrose Tours
Jan 10, 2008
In response to
growing requests, Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours
(SAHT) added a World War II in Poland and Germany tour
to its 2008 guided tours. Veteran and historian
General David Zabecki, who was commander of U.S.
forces in Europe, and has a Ph.D. in Military History
from the Royal Military College of Science, Cranfield
University in the United Kingdom, will lead the 14-day
tour to visit historic World War II sites in Gdansk,
Krakow, Warsaw and Berlin from May 16-30, 2008.
Unique
Source: Yanek Mieczkowski, writing for HNN
Jan 10, 2008
[Dr. Mieczkowski is chair of the History Department at Dowling College and author of Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s (2005) and The Routledge Historical Atlas of Presidential Elections (2001). ]
The historical profession lost a giant with the passing of John A. Garraty, the Gouverneur Morris Professor of History emeritus at Columbia University. The author and editor of numerous American history books, Garraty was one of the most prolific historians of his generation.
Source: Paul Buhle at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Jan 10, 2008
[Paul Buhle is a senior lecturer in history at Brown University. He is editor of the forthcoming A People's History of American Empire (Metropolitan Books, 2008), an adaptation in comics form of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980).]
History comics seem to have been a long time in coming, but readers of graphic novels have probably been expecting them for years. Art Spiegelman's Maus, drawn from the oral history of his father, a Holocaust su
Source: Zachary Krogman
Jan 10, 2008
[Mr. Krogman is an HNN intern.]
An illustrious group of American historians have filed an amicus curiae brief at the US Supreme Court in support of an employee who is suing Cracker Barrel under Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Signers of the brief include: David Levering Lewis, Stanley N. Katz, Leon Litwack, James McPherson, and Mary Frances Berry. The case, Hendrick G. Humphries v CBOCS West, Inc. , will be heard by the Supreme Court on February 20, 2008.He
Source: Harvard Crimosn
Jan 9, 2008
Only days before she was installed as Harvard’s 28th president, Drew G. Faust received a message from the past.
It came in the form of a letter written in 1951 by then-President James B. Conant ‘14, who sealed it with instructions that it should be opened by the first Harvard president of the 21st century. The letter was lost in the Harvard Archives during the tenure of Lawrence H. Summers—or maybe it was just waiting.
The letter resurfaced just in time for Faust, a h
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jan 9, 2008
In the early hours of April 25, 1974, Europe's oldest remaining dictatorship was overthrown by a small cadre of left-wing officers in the Portuguese military. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see how that event sparked an unprecedented wave of democratization that would ultimately spread well beyond the streets of Lisbon. Consider that in the mid-1980s, about two in every five states worldwide were democratic. A decade later, it was three in every five states. Though that democratic boom pe
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jan 8, 2008
Historians have typically characterized Palestinians collectively as Hitler-supporters during the Nazi regime. But a German researcher has said that they were more concerned with relations with an other European country.
Any historical conversation in Germany over Palestine and National Socialism usually turns to one name: Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al Husseini. The Muslim leader was an anti-Semite, a passionate follower of the Nazis and moved to Germany in 1941 to collaborate with Hitler's re
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Jan 8, 2008
At the 5th Annual Banquet of the Cliopatricians at the American Historical Association convention in Washington, DC, the winners of The Cliopatria Awards for 2007 were announced. Many thanks to Jeremy Boggs of ClioWeb and George Mason University who designed the logo for The Cliopatria Awards. Thanks also to the judges who made the difficult decisions in selectin
Source: AP
Jan 7, 2008
BEIRUT, Lebanon: A vocal American critic of Israel met Monday with a senior official from the militant Hezbollah group and visited villages in southern Lebanon that witnessed heavy fighting in the 2006 war between the guerrillas and the Jewish state.
Norman Finkelstein, who resigned last year as a political science professor at DePaul University in Chicago, met Hezbollah's commander in south Lebanon, Nabil Kaouk, in his office in the coastal city of Tyre.
He visited the
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Jan 7, 2008
At the beginning of a discussion on “closing the ‘passion gap’ in graduate education,” audience members at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association were asked whether they were graduate students or professors. The audience was lopsided grad students.
But judging from the discussion, professors in a number of programs are aware and concerned about the “passion gap” — enough to be rethinking some policies. One consensus on the panel was that even though undergraduates
Source: http://www.missoulian.com
Jan 6, 2008
An American professor who teaches Islamic law and the Quran is at the center of a brewing tempest at the University of Montana, which is considering hiring him for an unexpected, unadvertised, unplanned-for job.
Several issues are at play, but they all spring from a single, thorny topic for universities called “spousal accommodation.”
The awkward phrase essentially means this: To get the best person for a job, a university will often help find suitable campus employment
Source: Thai Jones in the NYT
Jan 6, 2008
[Thai Jones is author of “A Radical Line: From the Labor Movement to the Weather Underground, One Family’s Century of Conscience.” He is pursuing a Ph.D. in U.S. History at Columbia.]
ON a bitter night in November, I watched two protests face off on Columbia University’s central quad. At the sundial, about 100 supporters of a five-student hunger strike, then in its ninth day, gathered close, screening their votives from the cold wind. They were demanding more money for ethnic studie
Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN.
Jan 4, 2008
Your portfolio doing badly? So's the AHA's.
At the Business Meeting Sunday executive director Arnita Jones announced that the association's stock portfolio has declined some twenty-five percent in value. "Instead of almost four million a year ago," she said, "we have about three million."
Jones said the current budget is slightly in surplus, though advertising revenues are down "somewhat." The AHA benefits from ads for jobs. In a down ma
Source: Renehan Blog
Jan 4, 2008
During February of 2007, I called for the disbanding of the Theodore Roosevelt Association, a venerable organization which has, since 1919, kindled the flame of memory for our nation's twenty-sixth President. Now I've changed my mind. Simply put, my doubts about the long-range importance of the TRA were unfounded. In line with its long and distinguished record of preserving and making available to the public the numerous historic places and the multitudinous historical records pertaining to the
