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: http://www.turkishdailynews.com.tr
Oct 12, 2007
Turkey seems to be stuck on the issues of headscarf and secularity, while the world is discussing nano-technology, gene science, and the revolution in modes of communication. But exactly where do these discussions stem from? A leading historian in Turkey, Kemal Karpat believes Turkey cannot be run by Islamic canon law and that if the pressure on it is released, the headscarf will be void of political messages.
“There was no point in time that there was not a concern about secula
Source: Guardian
Oct 12, 2007
Saul Friedlander's feelings on being awarded the prestigious [25,000 Euros] Peace Prize of the German Book Trade are "complex" he admitted today in Frankfurt. Friedlander, the author of a magisterial two-volume work on Nazi Germany and the Jews, and a world authority on the Holocaust, said that while he accepted the honour with "the utmost pleasure", he had to acknowledge that he had been awarded it because of his work, which reflects the experience of his life and is linked
Source: Harvard Crimosn
Oct 12, 2007
"I stand honored by your trust, inspired by your charge," Drew G. Faust told thousands of spectators as she took the podium for her installation as Harvard’s 28th president on Friday afternoon.
In a rainy and blustery Tercentenary Theatre, Faust drew from the past to discuss the evolving role of universities and Harvard's responsibilities as a leader in higher education.
As expected, Faust explicitly avoided laying out a road map for her tenure in her 30-min
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at CampusWatch
Oct 12, 2007
UC Berkeley Near Eastern studies lecturer and adjunct professor at Boalt Hall School of Law Hatem Bazian is back in the headlines. Campus Watch readers will no doubt recall Bazian's infamous call for an"intifada in this country" at a 2004 anti-war protest in San Francisco, not to mention the numerous e
Source: Daniel Pipes Blog (Click here to see the sidebar)
Oct 12, 2007
The editor of Newsweek has added a remarkable erratum to the sidebar to a nasty article by Michael Hirsh about the Giuliani campaign, "Would You Buy a Used Hawk From This Man?...
The subsequent correction warrants a place in Guinness World Records.
Editor's Note: In our print edition, several captions for the photographs accompanying this report were inadvertantly transposed. Martin Kramer's photograph is identified as Norman Podhoretz; Daniel Pipes's photograph is
Source: CampusWatch
Oct 12, 2007
In 1989, former Conservative Party chairman and retired British officer, Lord Aldington, won a libel suit against Count Nikolai Tolstoy for allegations of complicity in war crimes which Tolstoy had made in his 1986 book, The Minister and the Massacres. Following up on his U.K. court victory, Aldington had his lawyers write to "… public libraries throughout Britain threatening further legal action if they continued to make [the book] available …. Even today, the book is virtually unavailable
Source: Laurel T. Ulrich in the Harvard Crimson
Oct 12, 2007
[Laurel T. Ulrich, author of ‘Well-behaved Women Seldom Make History,’ is the 300th Anniversary University Professor.]
In the fall of 2001, shortly after she arrived at Harvard as Dean of the newly created Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Drew Gilpin Faust gave a speech to the entering class. She told the story of a young woman named Sarah Pellet who in 1850 had the audacity to ask for admission to Harvard University. In his rejection letter, President Jared Sparks, Class of
Source: http://www.dailycardinal.com
Oct 12, 2007
A UW-Madison historian, who spoke Wednesday night about his recent book “Henry Kissinger and the American Century” at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, was named a young innovator in a special edition of Smithsonian magazine earlier this month.
Smithsonian magazine recognized Jeremi Suri as one of the top “37 Under 36” young American innovators in its October edition, along with other artists, scientists, scholars and humanitarians.
“We wanted to identify individuals who w
Source: Mason Gazette
Oct 12, 2007
Roy Rosenzweig, a historian and pioneer of digital technology and new media, died from cancer on Oct. 11. He joined the Mason faculty in 1981.
Rosenzweig was the Mark and Barbara Fried Chair and director of the Center for History and New Media (CHNM), which he founded in 1994. CHNM has been at the forefront of efforts to
Source: Guardian
Oct 12, 2007
The Oxford Union debating society came under fire last night after its president said he had approached Holocaust denier David Irving, British National party chairman Nick Griffin and the Belarussian dictator, Alexander Lukoshenko, to speak at forthcoming events.
Luke Tryl said he had asked Mr Irving and Mr Griffin to speak at the union's Free Speech Forum, due to take place at the end of November, adding that Mr Lukoshenko, the Belarussian president, accused of a string of human rights a
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Oct 12, 2007
When Andrew Ross was doing research for his latest book, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade; Lessons from Shanghai, he found himself spending a lot of time at the American Chamber of Commerce in China. The people he met there, he said Thursday at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association, generally assumed that he was some kind of investor, looking for a good move for his money.
That Ross — a New York University professor and leader
Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN
Oct 12, 2007
Proposed changes in the constitution of the American Historical Association would limit the ability of activists to push through resolutions at the annual Business Meeting. Under the rule resolutions proposed by members would have to receive the backing of a petition signed by one percent of the membership to be considered. (The AHA currently has more than 14,000 members. One percent would be 140, minimum.) Currently, resolutions can be considered by a vote of the majority in attendance at
Source: Press Release--DePaul Academic Freedom Committee
Oct 11, 2007
In light of the controversial tenure denials of eminent Middle East scholar Dr. Norman G. Finkelstein and Dr. Mehrene Larudee earlier this year at DePaul University, the most prominent scholars from across the world will come together this Friday, October 12, 2007, at a conference at the University of Chicago to speak lecturing about the threats to academic freedom at universities.
Professors Finkelstein and Larudee were both denied tenure at DePaul last June for political purposes
Source: Spiegel
Oct 11, 2007
SPIEGEL ONLINE talks to historian and Oxford professor Timothy Garton Ash about the European Union's weak image in the world, the limits to EU expansion and how Europe should tackle Russia and Iran.
Timothy Garton Ash is Professor of European Studies at St. Antony's College, Oxford, a senior fellow at the Stanford University-based think tank the Hoover Institution and a founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations (more...), a new European think tank. He has earned r
Source: Prensa Latina
Oct 11, 2007
The world needs to defend the legacy of indigenous peoples, since they were the creators of original civilizations, declared Mexican historian Miguel de Leon Portilla.
Speaking at the eighth meeting of the Association of Latin American and Caribbean Historians on Thursday, De Leon Portilla is considered the most important living historian of the Central American pre-Hispanic peoples and one of the greatest supporters of the Latin American indigenous peoples history.
ADH
Source: Adam Tooze, in the course of a review of The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany And The Jews 1939-1945 by Saul Friedlander, in the Telegraph (UK)
Oct 11, 2007
... The Germans are not absent from this history of the Holocaust. But by contrast with Friedländer's nuanced portrait of the victims, only his characterisation of Hitler carries any real weight. Friedländer portrays Hitler as what he calls a 'redemptive anti-Semite', who believed that only by the elimination of their racial enemies, above all the Jews, could the German people be saved from their own destruction.
For Friedländer, Hitler's anti-Semitism is an omnipresent motivating f
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Oct 11, 2007
There are strange developments at the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society. Its Board of Directors has approved the sale of its building at 122 E. 58th Street in Manhattan. The sale would also force its tenants -- the Holland Society of America, the Huguenot Society of America, the Society of Mayflower Descen
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Oct 11, 2007
The National Book Award nominations are out this morning. The nonfiction list:
Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I'm DyingChristopher Hitchens, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons EverythingWoody Holton, Unruly A
Source: HNN Staff summary of NYT article
Oct 11, 2007
John Swails, a tenured faculty member of Oral Roberts University and chairman of the history department claims in a lawsuit filed earlier this month that he and two others were dismissed after confronting officials of financial and other irregularities.
Joining Swails in the law suit are Paulita Brooker, another historian, and her husband, Tim, a professor in the government department, who accused the school of requiring students to work in a Republican candidate's campaign for may
Source: NYT
Oct 11, 2007
Walter Kempowski, a German writer and archivist who compiled thousands of pages of recollections from eyewitnesses of World War II into a monumental firsthand record of the German wartime experience, died at a hospital in northwestern Germany on Oct. 5. He was 78.
The cause was intestinal cancer, said his publisher, Albrecht Knaus Verlag.
Even in his final days, Mr. Kempowski kept a diary. His passion, for his own memories and those of others, led to the creation of the
