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: Cinnamon Stillwell at CampusWatch
Nov 16, 2007
In the latest issue of City on a Hill Press, the student newspaper for the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), reporter Marc Abizeid spins a bone-chilling tale of silenced professors and a Middle East studies field threatened by a shadowy network of"radical pro-Israel interest groups." At the helm of this nefarious conspiracy is of course Campus Watch, which Abizeid paints as a
Source: Winfield Myers at the website of CampusWatch
Nov 16, 2007
In a surprising act of corporate courage, the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) has dismissed an attempt by Philadelphia-based Campus Watch to place an ad in the program for MESA's upcoming annual conference in Montreal.
The text of the rejected ad read:
Campus Watch: Working to Improve Middle East Studies since 2002.The bad news arrived in the form of a terse email from Amy W. Newhall, Ph.D., the executive director of MESA. She wrote from her
Source: Harvard Gazette
Nov 15, 2007
While Edward Gibbon was publishing his six-volume opus, “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” a large portion of Britain’s empire was declaring its independence and fighting to break free of the mother country.
The first volume of Gibbon’s history was published in 1776, just months before representatives from the 13 American Colonies met in Philadelphia to sign the radical and audacious document that declared, “All men are created equal.” While not quite “the shot heard round the
Source: Tom Engelhardt in the Nation
Nov 15, 2007
Before I met Jonathan Schell, I already knew him in the best way possible: on the page. Even in his days as a neophyte journalist in Vietnam, he committed a writer's greatest act of generosity. First in the pages of The New Yorker, and then in his books, he took readers to places most of us never could have gone on our own -- to The Village of Ben Suc, for instance, as American troops cleared it of its 3,500 peasant inhabitants and destroyed it in what was, in 1967, the largest military operatio
Source: AP
Nov 15, 2007
A history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point pleaded guilty to a single count of possession of child pornography Wednesday and had a second charge dismissed.
Michael Foret, 53, was arrested April 17 for uploading sexually explicit photographs of young children onto an image sharing Web site.
Foret, a specialist in the history of southeastern American Indians, told detectives he liked boys and girls of ages 11 to 17 but said he had not "acted on
Source: NYT
Nov 15, 2007
In the nonfiction category, Tim Weiner, a reporter at The New York Times, took the [National Book Award] prize for “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the C.I.A.” (Doubleday).
Mr. Weiner, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on national security programs, examined more than 50,000 documents and interviewed hundreds of C.I.A. veterans for his book, a critical history of C.I.A. failures.
Accepting the award, Mr. Weiner said his work was “a testament to the power of the
Source: Press Release--National Endowment for the Humanities
Nov 15, 2007
Today, President George W. Bush awarded the prestigious National Humanities Medals for 2007 to Victor Davis Hanson, military historian and author, and Richard Pipes, author and historian, during a ceremony held in the White House East Room. In total, nine distinguished Americans and one cultural foundation were honored for their exemplary contributions to the humanities and were recognized for their scholarship, preservation efforts, philanthropy, and literary works. Other winners include Steph
Source: NYT
Nov 15, 2007
Gerald D. Feldman, an eminent historian of 20th-century German history who concentrated on the intersection of economics and politics to explore subjects like the hyperinflation of the 1920s and the cozy relationships between financial companies and the Nazis, died on Oct. 31 at his home in Berkeley, Calif. He was 70.
The cause was cancer, said Beverly Crawford, associate director of the Institute of European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where Dr. Feldman taugh
Source: Scott McLemee at the website of InsideHigherEd.com
Nov 14, 2007
Studs Terkel, whose new book Touch and Go: A Memoir (The New Press) appears just a few months after his 95th birthday, has often been called an oral historian for his collections of interviews with “ordinary people,” to use a term he despises for its implicit condescension. I take it from a look through JSTOR that some of the oral historians in academe dispute that label. They have their methods, while Terkel has his.
Terkel works the transcripts of his conversations over so that th
Source: Network of Concerned Historians (NCH)
Nov 14, 2007
Dear Colleagues,
Scholars at Risk (SAR), based at New York University, works to promote academic freedom and to defend the human rights of scholars, in part by arranging temporary placements for scholars who suffer grave threats to their work or their person. SAR is sending us a summary profile of an Iraqi historian working in the field of Modern History/Turkish and Ottoman History whose life may be in danger and who is currently seeking assistance. Perhaps your university could acc
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Nov 14, 2007
A month after the release of a study hailed by many as a definitive examination of faculty members’ political views, a slew of new research on the topic — some of it updated versions of previous research — will be released today finding (not surprisingly) that professors lean to the left.
Today’s research will be released as part of a day-long conference, “Reforming the Politically Correct University,” being held at the American Enterprise Institute. Two of the papers were released
Source: Times (UK)
Nov 13, 2007
Starting out just after the war Frank Cass acquired a reputation as one of Britain's leading scholarly publishers. Even after he sold the bulk of his interests to Taylor and Francis, he started to build anew. “Why should I retire,” he would ask, “when I love what I am doing?” and he was still working right up to his death.
Born in 1930 into a Russian-Polish family, Cass spent his formative years in London where he developed an early love of public libraries. He went to Hackney Downs
Source: Tulsa World
Nov 13, 2007
Britain's former prime minister was very accomplished but also very human, he tells Tulsans.
It's a odd experience to meet an iconic figure such as former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.
"It's kind of a shock," explained Chris Collins, Monday's speaker at the Tulsa Press Club, "to see a famous person in the room, real live, actually and really there."
A British historian who edited Thatcher's memoirs, Collins has made i
Source: http://fredericksburg.com
Nov 13, 2007
THE VOICE OF the slave is rarely heard. During the more than two centuries of slavery in America, millions of Africans and African-Americans were held in bondage. Of those, only about 200 left behind narratives that have found their way into print. The silence of the slave reverberates like none other, robbing history of a vital voice--specially in Fredericksburg. The voice of Fredericksburg's slaves has been virtually silent.
But with the publication of Yale professor David Blight'
Source: HNN Staff
Nov 13, 2007
In an article in the spring edition of the Minnesota Review, John H. Summers exposes a series of misrepresentations of
Irving Louis Horowitz, an academic who claimed to be C. Wright Mills's acolyte.
Summers is the of editor of"The Politics of Truth: Selected Writings of C. Wright Mills," to be published in 2008 by Oxford University Press. He lives in Andover, Massachusetts.
Exce
Source: British Library Press Office
Nov 12, 2007
Dr Saad Eskander, Director of the Iraq National Library and Archive (INLA), has been given
the prestigious Archivist of the Year Award by New York's Scone Foundation at a ceremony
at Columbia University in New York on 12 November. The honour was conferred on Dr Eskander
in recognition of his leadership of the reconstruction of the INLA following its burning
and looting in 2003.
The Award is presented annually by the Scone Foundation to recognise an archivist or
archival researc
Source: Center for History and New Media
Nov 12, 2007
Roy Rosenzweig co-founded the Center for History and New Media in 1994 and directed the Center until he passed away last month. In the early years, the Center was just Roy and a few others, but in the last seven years the number of projects, size of the staff, and overall ambition of the Center has grown exponentially. Presently there are over forty people working full or part time at CHNM on over two dozen active projects, from landmark history education projects like History Matters and the ne
Source: AP
Nov 12, 2007
David McCullough, whose next book will be a history of Americans in Paris, remembers when he first laid eyes on the French capital. He was a freshman at Yale University — young, in love, "impressionable."
And at the movies.
"I went to see 'An American in Paris,'" McCullough, speaking by telephone Monday with The Associated Press, said of the 1951 classic that won six Academy Awards. "I aspired at that point to be an artist, and there was Gene Ke
Source: http://newsinfo.colostate.edu
Nov 12, 2007
In celebration of Native American Awareness month, Colorado State University's Department of History and Native American Student Services is hosting renowned scholar and cultural historian, Philip Deloria, as he presents "Crossing the (Indian) Color Line: A Family History." Deloria's presentation is at 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 15, in Room 104 in Yates Hall on the Colorado State campus. The presentation is free and open to the public.
In June 1931, Deloria's grandmother - whi
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Nov 12, 2007
Juan Cole is in a gloomy mood this Veterans Day.
“On Veterans Day, he writes, “think about the thousands of U.S. dead and wounded in Iraq (for what purpose, exactly?), and think about Iraqi Veterans against the War . . .
“Typically this group and others like it are being denied a voice in public commemorations of the veterans (who apparently should be honored but should not actually be allowed to speak for themselves.)”
Citing newspaper accounts, Cole write
