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: HNN Staff
Sep 26, 2007
In his new biography, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Richard Lyman Bushman, a Mormon historian who taught at Columbia until his retirement, faces the hard questions asked by critics. He addresses questions about the provenance of the Book of Mormon, the Golden Plates and the stories about the angel Moroni. In an article in the current issue of the Journal of American History he acknowledges the tension he experienced as both a believer in Mormonism and a practioner of professional history,
Source: Timothy Noah in Slate
Sep 26, 2007
[HNN Editor: See Ken Hughes's HNN article, Nixon vs. the Imaginary “Jewish Cabal” from this week's edition.]
It was the last recorded act of official anti-Semitism by the United States government. Boy, was it ever recorded! On Sept. 24, the presidential recordings program at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs released transcripts of Nixon White House tapes concerning the unauthorized publication in the New York Time
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Sep 26, 2007
On Monday, Juan Cole went after Israel's foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, for "grandstanding at the UN." His beef is not only with Ms. Livni but also with her father, Eitan Livni, who in pre-state Palestine was a leader of the Irgun. The organization was infamous for orchestrating the attack on the King David Hotel, in Jerusalem, in 1946 in an effort to drive the British out of Palestine."
Source: Scott McLemee at the website of InsideHigherEd.com
Sep 26, 2007
Zotero is a tool for storing, retrieving, organizing, and annotating digital documents. It has been available for not quite a year. I started using it about six weeks ago, and am still learning some of the fine points, but feel sufficient enthusiasm about Zotero to recommend it to anyone doing research online. If very much of your work involves material from JSTOR, for example – or if you find it necessary to collect bibliographical references, or to locate Web-based publications that you expect
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Sep 25, 2007
... Randall Balmer, a professor of American religious history at Barnard College, is an ordained Episcopal minister and a self-described evangelical. He is also a liberal. He published an article in The Chronicle Review last year titled "Jesus Is Not a Republican."
He has certainly heard people say that Christian professors are discriminated against. But he has never, in his 22 years of teaching at several universities, seen evidence of that. "The picture that has bee
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Sep 25, 2007
[Marixa Lasso is an assistant professor of Latin American history at Case Western Reserve University.]
... Lasso’s course for the fall — on Latin American history — has been called off. She’s the only Latin Americanist in her department and she’s stuck in Panama. Lasso is a Panamanian citizen, but she has had no trouble winning visas in the past or academic recognition in the United States. She won a Fulbright to study in the United States, earned her master’s degree and Ph.D. at Am
Source: Press Release--Fordham
Sep 24, 2007
For an art historian, there may be no better city in the United States in which to live than New York. The breadth and depth of museum and gallery choices is staggering. For Nina Rowe, Ph.D., assistant professor art history, the fact that Manhattan is her hometown, and that her mother previously taught in Fordham’s English department, where her husband is now a faculty member, is simply icing on the cake.
“It’s so good to be back,” says Rowe, who lives near the Cloisters, a branch
Source: Press Release--University College of London
Sep 24, 2007
John Doyle Klier, a much-loved and admired scholar of East European Jewish history, died on 23 September 2007. As Sidney and Elizabeth Corob Professor of Modern Jewish History in UCL Hebrew & Jewish Studies, John was a tireless advocate of Jewish scholarship in Eastern Europe, and passionately worked to develop East European Jewish history in the United States, continental Europe and the UK.
He was the world’s leading authority on Russia’s perceptions and treatment of the Jews f
Source: Stephen Sestanovich in Slate
Sep 24, 2007
It will be the rare reader of David Halberstam's history of the Korean War who picks it up not knowing that long ago, the author wrote about another war in Asia that went badly for the United States. His new book gently reminds us that we're in such a war again, and the inevitable question—why do these things keep happening?—hovers over the entire story. Back in 1972, in The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam had a clear answer: The military and moral disaster of Vietnam was no accident, but the
Source: http://www.cleveland.com
Sep 24, 2007
A highly detailed art-historical presentation isn't normally the kind of fare that would attract listeners to a darkened lecture hall on the brilliant first afternoon of fall in Cleveland.
But more than 200 people showed up Sunday at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History to hear art historian Ellen Landau of Case Western Reserve University. She was speaking for the first time locally on her fresh research into the artistic relationship between photographer and graphic designer Her
Source: http://www.usmedicine.com
Sep 24, 2007
If Abraham Lincoln survived his head wound through modern trauma care, he would have retained his mental awareness, but likely been left inarticulate among other disabilities-which might have exacerbated his already existent depression.
"It would be more of a problem because he already suffered from depression," advised Steven Lee Carson, a Presidential historian from the Woodrow Wilson House in Washington, D.C., who spoke at the 13th annual Clinicopathological Conference
Source: http://www.dailyevergreen.com
Sep 24, 2007
One of the first students with a public history doctorate from WSU took his degree farther than anyone expected.
Robert Sutton will take over one of the most esteemed historian positions in the federal government on Oct. 1. As the chief historian of the National Park Service, Sutton said he will oversee the 390 national parks in the United States and administer park service programs.
In January, approximately 60 candidates applied for the position, Sutton said. While he
Source: Chronicle of Philanthropy
Sep 24, 2007
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has named the 24 recipients of its 2007 MacArthur Fellowships.
The fellowships, commonly referred to as the ‘‘genius awards,” recognize individuals from wide-ranging disciplines who show creativity, originality, and a commitment to continued innovative work.
Thirteen men and 11 women won this year’s awards; they range in age from 33 to 67. Each fellow receives $500,000 over five years, with no strings attached, so that t
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Sep 24, 2007
Writing at his New Yorker blog, Interesting Times, George Packer takes note of an apparent shift in Fouad Ajami's thinking about the war in Iraq.
An early champion of the case for intervention, the Shiite Lebanese-born professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University has come a long way from the memorably self-critical op-ed he wrote for The New York Times in May 2004. "Let's face it," he wrote at the time, "Iraq is not going to be America's showcase in
Source: Salon
Sep 24, 2007
An alternate title for "The Stillborn God," Mark Lilla's new history of the separation of church and state in the West, could be "How Soon They Forget." Take an example from our own lifetime, something titanic like Sept. 11. Remember how it seemed so inconceivable, so unprecedented, that terrorists would blow up the World Trade Center? Yet it had already happened -- in 1993, when a group affiliated with al-Qaida tried to do just that, with a car bomb, killing six people. Some
Source: Nancy Franklin in the New Yorker
Sep 24, 2007
You have to work very hard, and take yourself very seriously as the keeper of the keys to America, to make a tedious documentary about the Second World War. But that is what Ken Burns and Lynn Novick have done with their fifteen-hour series “The War,” which will begin on Septembe 23rd, on PBS. They’ve taken a subject that is inexhaustible and made it merely exhausting. Scene by scene, interview by interview, the series doesn’t bore, if you are of the school that believes that everyone’s
Source: Newsweek
Sep 24, 2007
[HNN: This is a very long feature, running across 6 web pages.]"The thing that really got me mad," Ken Burns says in explaining why he felt called to begin"The War," his forthcoming documentary series,"was finding out that a huge number of our high-school graduates think that we fought with the Germans against the Russians in the second world war. It's so unbelievable." Now you or I might have set about trying to fix America's broken educational system, but Burns is a practical man—
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Sep 23, 2007
Historians rarely get the mega-headline at Drudge. Columbia University's Latin American historian and acting dean of the University's School of International and Public Affairs, John Coatsworth, holds it today. It features his explanation to Fox News that Adolph Hitler would have been invited to speak at Columbia, if he were willing to engage in a public interrogation of his
Source: Reuters
Sep 23, 2007
A Malian historian married to the head of the African Union has challenged fellow academics to produce a continental history book as a riposte to French President Nicolas Sarkozy's view that Africans lack history.
The French leader enraged many Africans when he laid out his Africa policy in July at one of French-speaking Africa's most prestigious educational institutions in a speech many denounced as patronising and out-dated.
"The tragedy of Africa is that the African
Source: From the first chapter of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy in the NYT
Sep 23, 2007
America is about to enter a presidential election year. Although the outcome is of course impossible to predict at this stage, certain features of the campaign are easy to foresee. The candidates will inevitably differ on various domestic issues-health care, abortion, gay marriage, taxes, education, immigration-and spirited debates are certain to erupt on a host of foreign policy questions as well. What course of action should the United States pursue in Iraq? What is the best response to the cr
