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: AP
Jan 4, 2008
The recently retired director of the National Museum of the American Indian spent $48,500 in museum funds to commission a portrait of himself and selected a non-Indian artist to create it, a newspaper reported Friday.
The portrait of W. Richard West Jr. by New York painter Burton Silverman hangs in a fourth-floor lounge of the museum, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution and is dedicated to the arts and culture of American Indians.
West, who has come under fire
Source: http://www.international.ucla.edu
Jan 2, 2008
Many of those who have worked with and studied under Miriam R. Silverberg came together to tell poignant and humorous anecdotes about their encounters with her at a two-day symposium on "Imperial Japan and Colonial Sensibility: Affect, Object, Embodiment." The event celebrated the work of its original organizer, Silverberg, including her recently published book Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. Silverberg was unable to attend the Dec. 7-8, 2007 sympo
Source: Washington Times
Jan 2, 2008
Black history authorities say getting more black-history sites on the National Register of Historic Places requires nominating more sites and including recent research on existing nominations.
Mary Harris, from Adamstown, Md., counts freed slaves among her ancestors. She joined with regional historians at a mid-November workshop in Buckeystown to accomplish these two strategies.
She detailed how after emancipation, former slaves quickly began living in the tobacco shack
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 2, 2008
For every James Meredith, who gained fame for becoming the first black student at the University of Mississippi, there were many other students who broke racial barriers without attracting much attention. Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement: White Supremacy, Black Southerners and College Campuses (University Press of Florida) tells the stories of some of those students and also portrays the broader story of the desegregation of higher education — which the essays in the book argue was
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jan 2, 2008
The overall numbers look good for historians on the job market this year, but the total figures hide the surpluses of would-be professors in some fields, shortages in others and a decrease in the percentage of new Ph.D.’s going to women.
Data released by the American Historical Association in advance of this week’s annual meeting in Washington project that 940 new history Ph.D.’s will have been awarded in 2007, a slight dip from the previous year. Meanwhile, the number of history jo
Source: http://www.solidarity-us.org
Jan 1, 2008
THE FOLLOWING INTERVIEW was conducted in November, 2007 by Charles Williams on behalf of the ATC editorial board. The paperback edition of Michael Honey’s Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King’s Last Campaign is released this January 2008.
The Memphis sanitation strike began on February 12, 1968 following the death on February 1 of two sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, who were crushed by a defective garbage compactor. Martin Luther King, Jr
Source: http://www.american.com (Jan-Feb issue)
Jan 1, 2008
In his nondescript office on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, nestled in a far-off corner of Harvard Square, Ben Olken ruminates on the economic consequences of tyrannicide, the damaging effects of television on social cohesion, and the byzantine system of bribery in Indonesia. Olken, a 32-year-old with an undergraduate degree from Yale (in mathe matics and “ethics, politics, and economics”) and an economics doctorate from Harvard, is a ris ing star in the field of developmental economics. Olk
Source: Peter H. Wood at Common-Place.org
Jan 1, 2008
[Peter H. Wood has written about colonial slavery, the demography in the early Southeast, the French explorations of LaSalle, the history of North Carolina, and the black images of American artist Winslow Homer. He has served on the boards of the Highlander Center, Harvard University, and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; his most recent book is Weathering the Storm: Inside Winslow Homer's Gulf Stream (2004).]
It was early December, the end of the fall s
Source: Paul Kennedy in the Atlantic in the course of a review of a book by Robert Irving: Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker, and Imperial Delhi
Jan 1, 2008
y first glimpse of the British Empire was an entirely favorable one. At some time during my seven years of purgatory at St. Cuthbert’s Grammar School, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, our history teacher gave us Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands. Here was a fond reminiscence of a young man who, immediately after his Cambridge education, had been dispatched as an administrative officer to some of Britain’s territories in the Southwest Pacific. His account included no Gandhian protesters, no disgruntled A
Source: Independent (UK)
Jan 1, 2008
Howard Montagu Colvin, historian: born Sidcup, Kent 15 October 1919; Assistant Lecturer in History, University College London 1946-48; Fellow, St John's College, Oxford 1948-87 (Emeritus), Tutor in History 1948-78, Librarian 1950-84; CBE 1964; Reader in Architectural History, Oxford University 1965-87; President, Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain 1979-81; CVO 1983; Kt 1995; married 1943 Christina Butler (died 2003; two sons); died Oxford 28 December 2007.
Howard C
Source: Editorial written by Ed Black et al. at the website of The Cutting Edge
Dec 31, 2007
[Mr. Black is the author of the award-winning IBM and the Holocaust and the recently published Internal Combustion: How Corporations and Governments Addicted the World to Oil and Derailed the Alternatives.]
As we close 2007 and embark on a new year of possibilities, one of Washington’s most overlooked areas of disappointment has been the leadership at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The complaints include: the shameful mishandling of the transfer of the Holocaust-era archive a
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Dec 31, 2007
The Modern Language Association frequently helps out its critics with provocative session titles and left-leaning political stands offered by its members. At this year’s annual meeting, in Chicago, some MLA members have worried that the association was poised to take stances that would have sent David Horowitz’s fund raising through the roof with resolutions that appeared to be anti-Israel and pro-Ward Churchill.
But in moves that infuriated the MLA’s Radical Caucus, the association
Source: NYT
Dec 31, 2007
Talk about prestigious and prominent bylines: the table of contents of one new publication includes Thucydides, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Osama bin Laden, Pope Urban II, Lenin ...and Lewis H. Lapham.
Mr. Lapham, who edited Harper’s Magazine for nearly 30 years, retired from that job in 2006 only to start a new publication, Lapham’s Quarterly, which reached newsstands last month. Unlike Harper’s, which tackles a blend of topics each month, the new journal takes on a single subject — in t
Source: Cathleen Shine in the NYT Mag.
Dec 30, 2007
Madeleine Stern was a renowned antiquarian book dealer, but her most important discovery was not a book at all. It was a series of lurid stories, all published in gaudy popular journals, all written under a pseudonym, all by New England’s fresh and hearty Louisa May Alcott.
During her lifetime, the last vestiges of Victorianism gave way to modernism, to pop, to postmodernism. Cars replaced horses. Television, computers, cellphones, the Internet all came to conquer the world she grew
Source: Neil Sheehan in the NYT Mag
Dec 30, 2007
ONE DAY IN EARLY JANUARY 1963, David Halberstam, portable typewriter in hand, appeared at the ground-floor apartment I was renting on a side street in Saigon. The front room served as an office. I slept in the second room at the back. I was the correspondent for United Press International, and David was in Vietnam for The New York Times. It was typical of the man that he did not ask, “May I join you?” Although wire-service reporters and daily-newspaper journalists often teamed up overseas, he si
Source: China Daily
Dec 29, 2007
Zheng Zu'an, a researcher at the history institute of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, has pointed out three major blunders during the city's urban construction over the past century.
The dismantling of Shanghai's city wall after the 1911 Revolution was disastrous, Zheng wrote in a recent edition of the Journal of Social Sciences.
The wall, built over a span of three centuries starting in 1553 in the Ming Dynasty, would otherwise be a top attraction in
Source: WaPo
Dec 28, 2007
The founding director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian spent more than $250,000 in institution funds over the past four years on first-class transportation and plush lodging in hotels around the world, including more than a dozen trips to Paris.
In that time, W. Richard West Jr. was away from Washington traveling for 576 days on trips that included speaking engagements, fundraising and work for other nonprofit groups, according to a review of travel vouche
Source: Cass R. Sunstein in the New Republic
Dec 27, 2007
[Cass R. Sunstein is a contributing editor at The New Republic and teaches at the University of Chicago. Over the years, he has offered informal advice to both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama; a long-term law school colleague of the latter, he has acted as an occasional, informal adviser to his campaign.]
The Compact Oxford Dictionary of Current English offers several definitions of the word "smear." One is "coat or mark with a greasy or sticky substance." Anot
Source: Robert Townsend at the AHA blog
Dec 27, 2007
The American Historical Association formally requested that oral history be excluded from the list of topics subject to "expedited review" last week, in response to a recent request for comments from the Office of Human Research Protections. The letter, approved by the Association’s executive committee, cites the profession’s "long and unhappy experience with the way these policies have been implemented," and concludes that IRB oversight is in "conflict with the essentia
Source: Dallek in the NYT in the course of a review of a new biography of Condoleezza Rice by NYT reporter Elisabeth Bumiller
Dec 27, 2007
... Ms. Bumiller says that if President Bush and Ms. Rice can produce a settlement in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, it would give them claims on success that would significantly improve their historical reputations.
But implicit in this assessment is the view that foreign policy failures have troubled the Bush presidency. And even if Ms. Rice and the president manage to achieve the sort of Israeli-Palestinian peace set
