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: Cleveland Plain Dealer
Oct 3, 2007
A popular history professor at Case Western Reserve University who was stuck in Panama for months because her visa was in limbo will return to Cleveland in January.
Marixa Lasso learned Monday that her visa was renewed after months of unexplained and frustrating delays.
Case colleagues and students last week rallied behind Lasso, launching a letter-writing campaign to keep her from becoming one of a growing number of foreign scholars whose visas have been delayed or de
Source: Press Release--George Mason University
Oct 3, 2007
George Mason University has been awarded a five-year $7.5 million contract by the U.S. Department of Education to create a National History Education Clearinghouse. The online project, which will be housed in Mason's Center for History and New Media (CHNM), will focus on historical thinking and learning. It will also help K-12 history teachers become more effective educators and show their students why history is relevant to their daily lives.
The project will be led by Mason histo
Source: Columbia Spectator
Oct 2, 2007
There are Columbia professors, and there are Columbia institutions. Jacques Barzun is the latter. Undergraduate, provost, and everything in between, professor Barzun fundamentally redefined the Columbia experience through a half-century of dedicated service. Western, worldly, and undeniably brilliant, Barzun faithfully embodies the University’s greatness. As we approach his 100th birthday, a personal centennial, it is worth reflecting on his many accomplishments—for his is truly a Columbian life
Source: USA Today
Oct 2, 2007
A number of PBS affiliates across the USA, inspired by the release of Ken Burns' The War, are producing mini-documentaries about their own local war stories and encouraging high school and college students to collect oral histories.
The materials they gather are being sent to the Veterans History Project, which was launched in 2000 by the Library of Congress to collect oral histories and original wartime diaries, letters and photographs from U.S. veterans of all wars that are sent i
Source: National Post (Toronto)
Oct 2, 2007
A Toronto high school teacher who won a Governor-General’s award for excellence in teaching this week marked it by doing more of the same — challenging his Grade 11 students to change the stereotypes of black culture in Canada.
“If you’re one of these cats that’s just talking smack, saying, ‘I do this’ and ‘I do that,’ for the sake of a buck, you’re part of the problem,” David Watkins told his class at Weston Collegiate Institute during a lecture about rap/hip hop music on Monday.
Source: Edward Rothstein in the NYT
Oct 2, 2007
... “War happens,” [Eric Severeid] explained, “inside a man.”
And that is mostly where Ken Burns decides to look for it in his 15-hour documentary about the Second World War, “The War,” directed with Lynn Novick, now being broadcast on PBS (and to be released on DVD tomorrow). Invoking Mr. Sevareid, Mr. Burns says that his documentary — an “epic poem,” he has called it — is “created in that spirit.” Nearly 50 men and women talk about their wartime experiences, their testimonies pun
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Oct 2, 2007
On September 24, Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) objected to floor consideration of the “Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007? (H.R. 1255), at least temporarily holding up a vote on the bill. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) sought to have the bill brought up under the Senate’s unanimous consent rule that allows non-controversial bills to be considered on an expedited basis. When she did so, Senator Bunning objected to consideration of the bill.
Senator Bunning did not state the re
Source: Wilson Quarterly (autumn issue)
Oct 1, 2007
[Max Byrd, a professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Davis, is the author of the historical novels Shooting the Sun (2004), Grant (2000), Jackson (1997), and Jefferson (1993).]
Let me begin with a confession.
For many years, as I liked to tell my friends, I led a life of crime, though part- time only. By day, I taught 18th- century English literature at the University of California, Davis. By night, I wrote somewhat lurid paperback detective novel
Source: Barry Rubin & Judith Roumani at the website of Covenant: The Global Jewish Magazine
Oct 1, 2007
C: Your family has a very interesting background in Poland, would you mind telling us about it?
W: My parents were both born in Imperial Austria, my mother in Krakow and my father in southern Poland, and I myself spoke Polish until the age of 10. My mother came from a Modern Orthodox family, studied horticulture at university, and moved in artistic circles. My father was a doctor. In September 1939 they took a vacation and, because of a sense of foreboding that they had, they went e
Source: Perspectives, the newsmagazine of the AHA
Oct 1, 2007
[George J. Sanchez is professor of history at the University of Southern California.]
In 2005, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation issued a major report on diversity in doctoral education that concluded that despite decades-long national efforts, African Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans are still significantly underrepresented among recipients of PhDs in the United States. Despite comprising 32 percent of all U.S. citizens in the typical age range of PhD cand
Source: http://barzuncentennial (Click here to follow links to these articles.)
Oct 1, 2007
James Sloan Allen: Jacques Barzun and a Question of Friendship
Christian Bauer: Barzun on Woolrich
Warren Boroson: From Information to Aspiration
Fred Catapano: Jacques Barzun, Customer
Christopher Faille: Jacques Barzun: Words and Acts
Florence (Flo) Grant: My Favorite Memory of Mr. B
Allen J. Hubin: The Armchair Detective
Paul Kellogg: Overheard at Glimmerglass: Jacques Barzun by Percentages
Source: Janet Maslin in the NYT
Oct 1, 2007
In 1962 the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was able to comment with equal assurance on both of the Monroes within his orbit: Marilyn (as in “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”) and James (as in Monroe Doctrine). What’s more, he made these unrelated remarks closely enough in time for them to appear on the same page of the 894-page new volume of his journals.
This arch, irresistibly revealing book manages to be both showstopping and doorstopping, what with its vast range of subject m
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Oct 1, 2007
The typical slave ship began its life as a merchant vessel, and was refitted later for its grim purpose.
The primary remodeling, which often occurred on the outward leg of the voyage, was to build walls below decks to separate men and women, and then build horizontal platforms halfway between the first and second decks on which to stack the slaves.
The height between the first and second deck usually was only about 5 feet before the remodeling, said Marcus Rediker, Univ
Source: Alexandra M. Lord at the website of the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Oct 1, 2007
[Alexandra M. Lord is a public historian working in Washington and the cocreator of a Web site, Beyond Academe, designed to educate historians about nonacademic careers.]
... Like most academic historians, I was trained to do archival research. Although I love working in a cold, sterile archive, I have recently come to see that such a narrow approach to history, to almost any academic discipline, has serious limitations.
As a professor teaching at a land-grant universit
Source: Weekly Standard Scrapbook
Oct 1, 2007
Almost a year ago THE SCRAPBOOK took genuine pleasure in noting the award of the Library of Congress's first John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity ($1 million) to historian John Hope Franklin, author of the classic From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (1947). This award, as we noted, could be added to a "hundred-plus honorary degrees, organizational presidencies, visiting lectureships, and appointments to advisory boards, delegations, and commissions" for Dr. F
Source: Benjamin Schwarz in the Atlantic
Oct 1, 2007
The Cambridge historian Eamon Duffy has a genius for recovering worlds we have lost. In 1992 he published the revisionist The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400 –1580, a gigantic and subtle work of historical anthropology and a best seller in the U.K., in which he revealed the pull and vitality of pre-Reformation English Catholicism. His meticulous and beguiling reconstruction, along with his exploration of the psychological and spiritual devastation caused by the Tud
Source: Forbes
Sep 30, 2007
"The devastating nuclear exchange of August 2007 represented not only the failure of diplomacy, it marked the end of the oil age. Some even said it marked the twilight of the West."
It may read like bad science-fiction, but the above scenario came from the pen of from Harvard professor and historian Niall Ferguson, whose prediction of a chaotic, war-torn future, published in the London Telegraph in 2006, has struck a chord with, of all places, British hedge fund GLG Partn
Source: http://www.northjersey.com
Sep 30, 2007
To local historians -- who handle facts and lore of yesteryear with the same fervor as a racecar driver over Porsche parts -- history isn't dusty. It's downright current. Perhaps even sexy.
And definitely debatable.
"I'm going to be going head-to-head with some people from Fort Lee soon," said historian Mark Auerbach as he sat in his book-lined Passaic living room last month.
He said a July article in The Record wrongly asserted that the location
Source: Editorial in the Seattle Times
Sep 30, 2007
Is is too hard to imagine saying good-bye to writer and historian Walt Crowley, so let's not. Instead, it would be a far better and more fitting tribute to propagate the broad sweep of thinking with which he approached contemporary issues, and to embrace with renewed vigor his legacy, HistoryLink.org, the online archive of Washington state history.
A memorial service will be held Tuesday for Walt — "Mr. Crowley," as the rules of obituary writing would dictate, seems so ali
Source: Deborah Lipstadt at her blog
Sep 30, 2007
According to the Guardian, David Irving, whom it described in a headline as"Discredited" is planning a" comeback" speaking tour. [The paper also described him as a"Historian"... though I can't say why].What Irving has to say will not make deniers happy.First, of course, he engages in his traditional antisemitism, telling the paper that "the J
