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: Martin Kramer at his website, Sandstorm
Dec 10, 2007
[Martin Kramer is Adelson Institute senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, Wexler-Fromer fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and Olin Institute senior fellow at Harvard University.]
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt appear at Princeton University tonight, to promote their book The Israel Lobby. I've held back while other critics have had their say, and many of them have done a splendid job. But I don't think anyone has understood the neat sleight of ha
Source: AP
Dec 9, 2007
Would you like your Civil War history seasoned with baseball trivia? Spritzed up with a winery tour? Do you long to dissect the Battle of Antietam with a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian?
Hire a guide.
As the 150th anniversary of the war between the states approaches, starting with John Brown's 1859 prewar raid at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., customized tours for people fascinated by the conflict are multiplying.
As little as $50 buys a two-hour, private guided to
Source: Newark Star-Ledger
Dec 9, 2007
The search for the next superintendent of Newark's schools will be led by Clement Price, a Rutgers-Newark history professor and prominent city resident, Gov. John Corzine announced yesterday.
Price will chair a 17-member committee charged with drafting a short list of candidates for the job of taking charge of the state's largest school district, a post that will be vacated by Superintendent Marion Bolden in June.
Source: Benjamin M. Friedman in the NYT Book Review
Dec 9, 2007
[Benjamin M. Friedman is an economics professor at Harvard. His most recent book is “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.”]
...After decades of banishment to the realm of sociology and other such disciplines, the idea that a society’s “culture” matters has recently reappeared in economics. David Landes, an economic historian and a living national treasure if there ever was one, began this movement nearly 10 years ago when he looked in part to culture to explain “why some are s
Source: Patrick Allitt in the NYT BOok Review
Dec 9, 2007
[Patrick Allitt teaches history at Emory University and is the author of “Religion in America Since 1945: A History.”]
Garry Wills, one of America’s best journalists and historians of the last half-century, has always enjoyed taking familiar subjects and staring at them long and hard until they look strange and new. In “Head and Heart” he invites readers to reconsider American religious history, challenging the conventional wisdom on many issues while synthesizing much of the finest
Source: NYT
Dec 9, 2007
John Strugnell, a respected biblical scholar at Harvard whose tenure as the chief editor of the Dead Sea Scrolls ended in controversy over anti-Semitic remarks he made in an interview, died on Nov. 30 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 77 and lived in nearby Arlington.
He died while hospitalized for an infection associated with treatment of cancer, said his daughter Anne-Christine Strugnell.
At 23, while still a student of languages at the University of Oxford, Mr. Strugnell jo
Source: AP
Dec 8, 2007
After 19 books and thousands of articles and other writings over 70-plus years, the question is how many undiscovered nuggets of insight researchers may yet find in the private papers of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
Quite a few, according to the curator of manuscripts at the New York Public Library, which recently acquired from Schlesinger's estate a trove of materials belonging to the noted historian, who died this year at age 89.
"Though Schlesinger drew on his jo
Source: http://www.news-bulletin.com
Dec 8, 2007
Rio Communities Richard Melzer has spent a lot of time during the last decade in cemeteries throughout New Mexico, but he's not a morbid man.
He's discovered a marker that goads from the grave: "I told you I was sick."
He's stood at the final resting places of author D.H. Lawrence, historian Fray Angelico Chavez and race car driver Jerry Unser Jr.
A little more than a week ago, Melzer's new book depicting famous gravesites in New Mexico hit the bo
Source: Shelley Gare in the Australian
Dec 8, 2007
At four, she wrote her first mystery story. By 23, the Chinese-American journalism student had landed a contract to write her first book, about a Chinese missile scientist deported by the US government during the paranoia of the Cold War 1950s.
Six years later, her second book, a truly harrowing account of a massacre that has been called the Chinese Holocaust, was published. The event had been virtually overlooked by the world at large for 60 years.
In The Rape of Nanki
Source: WaPo
Dec 7, 2007
Silvio A. Bedini, 90, historian emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution and an expert on timekeeping and the history of early American scientific instruments, died of pneumonia Nov. 14 at Suburban Hospital. He lived in Washington.
Mr. Bedini was recruited to the Smithsonian in 1961 and became assistant, then deputy, director of what was then the National Museum of History and Technology.
He wrote more than 20 books, starting with "Early American Scientific Instrume
Source: Jewish Chronicle
Dec 7, 2007
HOLOCAUST-denier David Irving claims he is preparing to serve court papers on the American historian he unsuccessfully sued for libel in London’s High Court eight years ago.
This week, the JC learned that the discredited historian, who last year served part of a three-year sentence in an Austrian jail for breaching the country’s Holocaust-denial laws, emailed Deborah Lipstadt informing her he intended to institute unspecified court proceedings against her.
He told the J
Source: http://www.gainesville.com
Dec 7, 2007
A number of parallels have been drawn between Pearl Harbor and 9/11 - both were rare attacks on American soil, both launched the U.S. into war, each has its own set of conspiracy theories.
And retired University of Florida Professor Michael Gannon, a noted Pearl Harbor historian, said some of the shortcomings in the U.S. defense system that led to the Japanese bombing of the Hawaiian base 66 years ago today could teach current political and military leaders some lessons.
Source: Pueblo Chieftain
Dec 7, 2007
One of the most important writers to fuel the rise of radical Islam in Egypt and across the Middle East - Sayyid Qutb - based his scathing contempt for the corrupt, sinful West on the months he spent in Greeley in 1949.
"Personally, I'm not sure the devil would know how to tempt people in Greeley today, let alone in 1949," Colorado College professor Dennis Showalter joked to a surprised but laughing audience of about 60 people at a guest lecture Thursday night at Colorado
Source: http://www.coloradoan.com
Dec 7, 2007
Former Colorado State University professor James Hansen never set out to write the definitive history of CSU; but 30 years and two books later, he thinks he's finished.
"The fun of something like this is that you keep educating yourself," Hansen said. "The other thing is (discovering) how good your colleagues are. One of the real pleasures of doing this is ... coming to understand their greatness."
Hansen is a history professor emeritus at CSU, where
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
Dec 7, 2007
[The writer, one of the original editors and translators of the Gospel of Judas, is a professor of religious studies at Chapman University.]
To the Editor:
Re “Gospel Truth” (Op-Ed, Dec. 1), about the Gospel of Judas:
April D. DeConick speaks too confidently when she talks about our mistakes in translation. She knows better. The issues of translation she highlights are almost all discussed in the notes in the popular edition and critical edition of the Gosp
Source: Eric Foner's letter to the editor of the Harvard Crimson, which first published Alan Dershowitz's piece
Dec 6, 2007
To the editor,
I suppose I should be flattered that so distinguished a personage as Professor Alan M. Dershowitz devoted so much attention to me in a piece in the Crimson. According to him, I am an enemy of free speech because I criticized Columbia President Lee Bollinger's remarks in introducing the president of Iran when he spoke at our University. My real agenda, according to Dershowitz, is that I am "against Israel,&
Source: http://www.eagletribune.com
Dec 5, 2007
It is the issue that defined this year's election - development that is changing the face of several parts of the city and, according to some local historians, threatening preservation of Haverhill's past.
Now the issue is playing a role in Mayor James Fiorentini's decision to oust a member of the city's Historical Commission, that member said.
Thomas Spitalere said he believes his support for a local law that would force developers to wait up to a year before demolishi
Source: http://media.www.redandblack.com
Dec 5, 2007
Andrew Ladis, 58, a distinguished art historian and member of the University faculty, died Dec. 2 at St. Mary's Hospice in Athens after a long battle with cancer.
At the time of his death, Ladis was the Franklin Professor of Art History at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, a position he held for more than a decade.
A specialist in the painting of the early Italian Renaissance, he played a prominent role in international scholarship in the field, writing or serving as gene
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed summary of the December Issue of Academic Matters: The West's Self-Interest in Islamic Studies
Dec 5, 2007
As in the 19th and 20th centuries, the West's interest in Islamic studies continues to be "driven by self-interest," writes Tariq Ramadan, the controversial European Muslim scholar who since 2004 has been barred from residing or working in the United States.
In those past centuries, interest in Islamic studies came largely from colonial powers, such as France and Britain, that were "attempting to understand the religious references and practical motivations of their c
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Dec 5, 2007
Rob Townsend of the American Historical Association tracks the statistical parameters of my professional discipline, and I almost always learn something important from his pieces in our newsletter, Perspectives. In the just-received November issue there is a piece entitled “Left Behind? Historians Lag in the 2006-07 Salary Report.” It is based on numbers provided by the College and University Personnel Association-Human Resources, and it shows history salaries lagging significantly behind the av
