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: Press Release: Duke
Dec 4, 2007
TePaske, 77, died December 1. A veteran of the U.S. Army TePaske, was a leading scholar of Spanish colonial America. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University in 1953 and 1959 and joined the Duke faculty in 1967.
His 1982 book The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America (co-written with Herbert Klein) was a an elaborate study of the economy and society of the region.
He is survived by his wife, Neomi; daughters, Susan TePaske-King and Marianna Daly
Source: Press Release: Duke
Dec 4, 2007
Lerner, 78, died Dec. 3. He taught at Duke for 45 and was a leading history of Russia and Eastern Europe, ethnic relations in the region and on the history of socialism and communism.
The Department of History issued the following statements Tuesday:
“Warren Lerner was a distinguished scholar, a superb teacher, and a dedicated leader of the Duke history department, which he served as chair from 1985-1990. Lerner’s scholarship on the communist revolution was widely reco
Source: Tom Engelhardt at his website, TomDispatch.com
Dec 4, 2007
Enter his small office at the Nation Institute only if you don't mind experiencing a slightly vertiginous feeling. Books are everywhere -- in boxes on the floor, on every surface, in, along, and perilously stacked above shelves. If you took a wrong step, you could at least imagine disappearing in a tsunami of tumbling books."That's my Hannah Arendt pile up there," he says, gesturing toward a shelf I'm examining. He's sitting at his desk, his legs up and an iMac perched on his knees. Even her
Source: HNN Staff
Dec 4, 2007
Last February historian Max Holland argued in the pages of HNN that the Zapruder film missed the first shot Lee Harvey Oswald fired at President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, meaning Oswald had more time to have gotten off his three shots than previously believed. In November the New York Times
Source: AP
Dec 4, 2007
A far-right Greek historian went on trial Tuesday for allegedly inciting racial hatred with a book that denies the Holocaust took place and allegedly contains offensive references to Jews.
Jewish community leaders testified at an Athens court that the book by Costas Plevris "The Jews: The whole truth" has led to a spike in attacks on Jewish monuments in the country.
"After the book was published, attacks against Jewish sites increased," said Moses Co
Source: http://www.budapesttimes.hu
Dec 4, 2007
Politicians, academics, former students, family and friends gathered at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA) on Tuesday to pay tribute to Historian Domokos Kosary, former president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, who died on November 15 at age 95.
President Laszlo Solyom, Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany and House Speaker Katalin Szili paid their respects at the funeral bier.
Kosary's funeral will be held at Budapest's Farkasreti Cemetery on Tuesday aft
Source: Independent Catholic News
Dec 4, 2007
A Swansea University historian is to shed light on a Catholic manuscript lost for nearly 200 years.
Professor Maurice Whitehead, an educational historian in the University's School of Humanities, was shown the document last July by Bart Op de Beeck, from the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. Professor Whitehead, whose research focuses on the educational experience of English and Welsh Catholics before emancipation, identified the manuscript as the long-lost catalogue of the libr
Source: Catholic News Service
Dec 4, 2007
Pope Benedict XVI has chosen an art historian and former Italian cultural minister to be the new director of the Vatican Museums.
The appointment of Antonio Paolucci, 68, was announced Dec. 4.
The same day, the Vatican announced that Pope Benedict appointed Francesco Buranelli, an archaeologist and the museums' director since 1996, to be the new secretary of the Pontifical Commission for the Cultural Heritage of the Church and an officer in the Pontifical Commission for
Source: Alan M. Dershowitz in the Harvard Crimson (Reprinted: Huffington Post/FrontpageMag.com)
Dec 4, 2007
Response by Eric Foner.
Do anti-Israel professors "tremble in fear" when they criticize Israel at Harvard and other American universities? Not likely, if you have any sense of what's going on on college campuses today where Israel-bashing is rampant among hard left faculty and students. But a Harvard professor named J. Lorand Matory who teaches anthropology and Afro-American studies, whined to the H
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Dec 4, 2007
At long last, the members of the American Academy of Religion have weighed in on how their annual meetings ought to be run. The results are good news for those who would like to see the academy resume its longstanding tradition of meeting in tandem with the Society of Biblical Literature.
In 2003 the academy's leadership announced that 2007 would be the last year of joint meetings—a decision it reached without consulting either its own membership or the society. The unilateral move
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
Dec 4, 2007
Dear Colleagues,
Today, Scholars at Risk (SAR) reports about Mehrnoushe Solouki, a filmmaker and journalism graduate student at Quebec University (UQAM), who, while making a documentary on burial rites of religious minorities in Iran, allegedly stumbled upon a site that was reportedly a mass grave of regime opponents summarily executed in 1988. On 17 November 2007, she was tried on charges of “intent to commit propaganda”. I hope that you can send the recommended urgent appeals imme
Source: http://www.newuniversity.org
Dec 3, 2007
Despite encountering protests during his last visit in January of this year, Daniel Pipes, a well-known American historian with outspoken views on the Israel/Palestine conflict and Islam, was again invited to speak at UC Irvine this past Wednesday, Nov. 28. His lecture, hosted by the College Republicans, the David Project and the Objectivist Club, was titled “Militant Islam and the Middle East.”
Pipes’ speech was intended “to defeat stereotypes,” according to Cameron Galbraith, fou
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 3, 2007
Australian war veterans demanded an apology from the historian Sir Max Hastings yesterday after claiming that his new book portrays their fellow soldiers as too cowardly to fight the Japanese towards the end of the Second World War.
Sir Max's account of the latter stages of the war in Nemesis: The Battle for Japan 1944-45 was labelled "offensive" by veterans in the wake of Australia's stand against Japan after the fall of Singapore and heroic attempts to stop the Japanese
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Dec 3, 2007
[Alice Kessler-Harris is a professor of history at Columbia University and also a professor in the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She is, most recently, the author of Gendering Labor History, published by the University of Illinois Press (2007), and is working on a biographical study of the playwright Lillian Hellman, to be published by Bloomsbury Press.]
From the perspective of the profession, the study of gender offers a different set of temptations. It immediately re
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Dec 3, 2007
With debate over the role of anthropologists in aiding the military machine a theme threading through their annual meeting, scholars voted Friday to demand that the American Anthropological Association reinstate strict language from its 1971 code of ethics prohibiting secret research. Members at the meeting – who, for the second time in about 30 years and the second year in a row constituted a quorum in excess of the required 250 — also voted overwhelmingly to oppose “any covert or overt U.S. mi
Source: Julia Keller in the Chicago Tribune
Dec 2, 2007
Nobody writes about America's early days better than Joseph J. Ellis, the Mt. Holyoke history professor whose latest book, "American Creation: Triumph and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic" (Knopf), is a vigorous and fascinating exploration of what he calls a "politically creative" era, filled with names such as Washington, Jefferson and Adams. They weren't perfect -- but they did pretty well, all told. Ellis has a wonderful knack for making his argument through stori
Source: http://www.sj-r.com
Dec 2, 2007
Much of the 1908 Springfield race riot story still remains untold, including how many of the city's black residents repelled white rioters by organizing armed fronts, according to a historian who spoke at a downtown history symposium Saturday.
"Generally, in a lot of race-riot stories, when resistance is present, oftentimes black resistance is viewed as black retaliation," said Anthony Landis, during a presentation he gave in the auditorium of the Howlett Building as part
Source: Michael Kenney in the Boston Globe
Dec 2, 2007
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., historian, political insider, and man about town, began his journal entry for March 13, 1968, with a bang: "Here we go again!"
It was the day on which Robert F. Kennedy decided he would enter the Democratic primaries for president, and Schlesinger had been involved in the high-tension huddles leading up to it. "Are you happy about this?" Kennedy asked him. Schlesinger said he was. Kennedy was not convinced. "You have some reservati
Source: http://www.northjersey.com
Dec 2, 2007
Rutgers University President Richard L. McCormick gets generally high marks -- and a half-million-dollar retention bonus -- as he completes five years at the helm of the state university this weekend.
McCormick appears to have fairly broad support on campus and even in the State House, where his vocal criticism of funding cuts was not always well-received. He has his critics -- most notably those upset that he has supported the school's escalating investment in big-time football.
Source: http://www.abc.net.au
Dec 2, 2007
A prominent English historian claims Australian troops were on the brink of mutiny in the final year of World War II and disobeyed orders to attack the Japanese, according to reports today.
The claims, reportedly made by Sir Max Hastings in his Nemesis - The Battle for Japan 1944-45, have sparked an angry response from veterans.
Today's The Age quotes Hastings as writing that the "the last year of the war proved the most inglorious of Australia's history as a fight
