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: NYT
Oct 22, 2007
... There may be something to be said for avoiding face-to-face encounters with shaggy leftists — the cigarette smoke, for starters, and the jargon, and the complacent moral superiority. But in largely repealing the law on ideological exclusion in 1990, Congress seemed to suggest that Americans could be trusted to make those decisions for themselves.
The spirit of the old law, the McCarran-Walter Act, was revived after the Sept. 11 attacks. The USA Patriot Act of 2001, for instance,
Source: International Herald Tribune
Oct 22, 2007
Last week, after this year's Frankfurt Book Fair closed up shop, a reporter called Rowohlt Verlag in Hamburg to find out if a book in its catalogue called "Ich Nicht" had found an English-language publisher.
The answer was no. The woman from the foreign rights department said it was a shame.
Agreed. Published in Germany 13 months ago, "Ich Nicht" is a memoir by the late Joachim Fest, author of the best-known German study of Hitler and a co-publisher
Source: Daily Mail
Oct 22, 2007
She seems harmless enough now, the elderly figure in a dressing gown peering round the door to her flat.
Erna Wallisch, an 85-year-old grandmother, rarely ventures out, spending her days drinking coffee and being cared for by her family.
But the image she presents belies a dark past which has put her seventh on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list of most-wanted Nazi war criminals still at large.
As a young woman during the Second World War, Mrs Wallisch insp
Source: http://defend.university.googlepages.com
Oct 22, 2007
Many concerned individuals, on campuses and beyond, have been monitoring and
condemning the recent attacks on academic freedom, including the ever more aggressive
incursion of partisan politics into universities' hiring and tenure practices.
Today a diverse group of academics and others are joining together to collectively mark
our resistance to the current abrogation of academic freedoms. To begin we are asking
people to sign up so that their name may be added to the petition on our
Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog
Oct 22, 2007
David Irving has told the Jewish Chronicle in London that he will NOT accept the Oxford Union invitation to appear in a debate alongside of the leader of the far right British National Party, Nick Griffin.
Even Irving, who seems to me to be someone who thrives on the maxim, "I don't care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right," apparently understands that keeping company with a man like Griffin was not a good career move.
Actually given tha
Source: Duke Press Release
Oct 22, 2007
Internationally renowned scholars John Hope Franklin and Romila Thapar will reflect on social change and the role of the historian in an Oct. 27 public conversation at Duke University.
“The Historian in the World: A Conversation with John Hope Franklin and Romila Thapar” will take place at 3 p.m. in the Divinity School’s Goodson Chapel on Duke’s West Campus. It is free and open to the public. Srinivas Aravamudan, director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, will moderat
Source: Abstract of article published by the New Yorker (article is not available online)
Oct 22, 2007
Writer tells about Barzun’s daily routine at his home in San Antonio, Texas, where he retired after spending more than seventy years in New York, most of them on the faculty of Columbia University. Next month, Barzun will turn one hundred. Among his areas of expertise are French and German literature, music, education, ghost stories, detective fiction, language, and etymology. Barzun chooses to think of himself as an “amateur,” someone who takes genuine pleasure in what he learns about. More tha
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Oct 22, 2007
“He gets very emotional. He gets very excited … a lot of spittle around the mouth and so on," says Ian Buruma of Paul Berman, kicking off the latest round of polemical bloodletting between the two liberal intellectuals.
The history of this spat is a bit tedious and more than a bit convoluted, but here it is in a nutshell: In February Buruma, a professor at Bard College, wrote a profile of the Swiss-born Egyptian scholar Tariq Ramadan for The New York Times Magazine. Buruma conc
Source: AHA Blog
Oct 21, 2007
Republican Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota filed an amendment (3364) last Thursday, October 18th, which would provide federal funding for National History Day, an important event we’ve recognized before on AHA Today. National History Day is an annual contest for students in grades 6-12 to create original papers, exhibits, documentaries, and dramatic performances around a changing theme. Coleman’s amendment, joined Friday by Democrat Daniel Akaka of Hawaii, sets aside $2 million for the progra
Source: Boston Globe
Oct 21, 2007
Sarah Goldhagen taught architectural history and theory for 10 years at Harvard. She and her husband are now raising two kids in Newton. She writes at home. She's done a classic book on the great architect Louis Kahn, and she's working on another that will try to define, once and for all, the nature of modernism.
At the moment, though, she's obsessed with a less exciting kind of architecture.
Her interest is infrastructure.
Yes, the very word puts people to
Source: Boston Herald
Oct 21, 2007
History is being made at Harvard as the Ivy League university officially installs its first female president. Drew Gilpin Faust has actually been on the job for several months after being elected earlier this year by the Harvard Corporation, the school’s governing body.Faust will be formally inaugurated as Harvard’s 28th president Friday during an outdoor ceremony at the Tercentenary Theatre. Scholars and academic leaders from around the world are expected to attend.
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Oct 20, 2007
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition has just announced that Columbia University's Christopher Leslie Brown is the winner of this year's Frederick Douglass Prize for his book, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. The book has also won the AHA's James A. Rawley Prize.
Joshua Foer,"Remember This
Source: JC.com
Oct 19, 2007
It was in an English courtroom eight years ago that David Irving’s reputation was comprehensively shredded. His attempt to sue American academic Professor Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a Holocaust denier ended in spectacular failure with a damning verdict on his character and professional credibility from the judge.
Even then, Irving had come to court claiming that he was no denier but simply a dissident historian who quibbled over minutiae. But under forensic cross-examination f
Source: NYT
Oct 19, 2007
For decades historians accepted the portrait of Stalin painted by his rivals. He was, in the words of one political adversary, Nikolai Sukhanov, “a gray blur,” a mediocre party hack who managed, through stealth and intrigue, to wrest the levers of power from the brilliant revolutionaries surrounding him. History, in this case, was written by the losers, notably Leon Trotsky, who never could accept that he had been bested by a pockmarked thug from Georgia with shaky intellectual credentials.
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood, is published by the Federation of American Scientists
Oct 19, 2007
The late Chuck Hansen, a relentless and resourceful researcher, worked
for decades to document the history, technology, design and development
of nuclear weapons. His findings helped nurture a continuing wave of
scholarship and historical reflection on nuclear policy and technology.
An extensive new collection of his most valuable and important
acquisitions has recently been published on compact disk under the
title Swords of Armageddon, Version 2. It is a veritable encyclopedia
of
Source: AP
Oct 19, 2007
Arvarh Strickland came to the University of Missouri nearly four decades ago to teach history.
On Friday, the school's first black professor made some history of his own when a prominent campus building was renamed in his honor.
More than 100 former students, colleagues, friends and well-wishers turned out for the unveiling of Arvarh E. Strickland Hall, formerly known as the General Classroom Building. The building is in the heart of campus next to the Brady Commons student c
Source: Monsters & Critics
Oct 19, 2007
Warsaw - He is a historian with a passion for football and come Sunday he hopes to make history by scoring a victory for his opposition liberal Civic Platform (PO) party in Poland's seventh parliamentary election since the demise of communism in 1989.
Just days ahead of Sunday voting, surveys show Donald Tusk's PO is running neck-and-neck with the governing conservative-nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party of Prime Minister Jaroslaw Kaczynski.
Following a slow start
Source: Boston Globe
Oct 19, 2007
AMHERST - Students shuffle into the morning history class to a dreamlike drone, a fog of fuzzy guitars, and sleepy harmonies. It's a wistful, faraway sound, a lingering echo from a distant time.
In this University of Massachusetts-Amherst course, the '60s never died, burned out, or faded away, and the Grateful Dead is alive and trucking. The students were born two decades after the legendary band sprung from the San Francisco rock scene, but many know every riff and every word to th
Source: http://www.commercialappeal.com (Memphis)
Oct 18, 2007
When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the nation's separate-but-equal schools in 1954, Dr. John Hope Franklin briefly thought it was a new day for black America.
"I was very optimistic for about 15 minutes. Southern senators met the next day and said they would oppose it with all their mights," says Franklin, the historian who had prepared the legal history used as background for the Brown vs. Board of Education lawsuit in Topeka, Kan.
Fifty-three years late
Source: http://www.redrocknews.com
Oct 18, 2007
To recognize Arizonans dedicated to preserving state history, the Arizona Historical Foundation, the state historian and Westin Kierland Resort & Spa in Scottsdale created the annual Arizona Culturekeeper award.
Sedona’s own Janeen Trevillyan, a historian with the Sedona Historical Society, was among nine individuals and one organization selected to receive the award this year and she will be one of less than 100 Arizonans overall to receive the award before it’s laid to rest at
