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
Sep 23, 2007
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., writing on April 27, 1967, described the mutability of attitudes toward presidential power. The excerpt is from “Journals: 1952-2000,” a collection of the late historian’s diary to be published next month.
We are reaching some sort of crisis on Vietnam. L. B. J. has evidently decided on a quick and brutal escalation of the war. It was clear in February that he did not wish negotiation until the existing military balance could be turned considerably in
Source: Times (UK)
Sep 22, 2007
A REMARKABLE NEW BOOK attempts to summarise the history of the world in one volume, with maps, pictures, timelines and boxed information on most of every page. Led by the popular television historian Adam Hart-Davis, a team of seven consultants and 40 contributors ensures that every continent, every nation receives expert attention.
The result is as imposing in its size and glossiness as it is in the extent of its coverage. Like a Bible in a parish church, it is made to be kept stat
Source: Seattle Times
Sep 22, 2007
A voice, pen and institutional memory of the city has gone silent. Walt Crowley, chronicler of Seattle's people, places and things, died Friday night after a stroke. He was 60.
In four decades spanning student revolution and the information revolution, Mr. Crowley went from campus radical to the city's most prominent citizen historian, co-founding and running HistoryLink.org, an online encyclopedia of Washington state history.
"It's only Walt and his efforts that h
Source: http://news.rgj.com (Reno, Nevada)
Sep 21, 2007
Most people associate Guy Rocha with his job as state archivist -- one who manages records and archives.
Not as many know him as a truth-seeker, a champion of justice and reform, and a self-described activist.
Rocha, who will be 56 in two days, has been assistant administrator for archives and records at the State Library and Archives for more than 26 years.
In his quest for truth, Rocha has been a useful and valuable resource for the media and, as I can attest t
Source: [Mark Edmundson in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Sep 21, 2007
[Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is author of The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days, published this month by Bloomsbury.]
Why publish a book about Sigmund Freud in 2007, a time when many people — perhaps most — think that Freud is passé? Even a reasonably sympathetic observer is likely to believe that what's best in Freud's work has already been absorbed into the culture. Everyone, this line of thinking runs, now knows wha
Source: Interview at American Heritage
Sep 20, 2007
Geoffrey C. Ward is the writer of The War, the 15-hour Ken Burns documentary about World War II that airs on PBS beginning this Sunday evening, September 23. He also wrote the extremely good companion volume, The War: An Intimate History, which was reviewed on this site last week. He has won five Emmys and two Writers Guild of America awards for his work for public television, having collaborated with Ken Burns on his earlier films about the West, Mark Twain, jazz, baseball, the fighter Jack Joh
Source: Baltimore Sun
Sep 19, 2007
[Ms. Spiegel is chair of the history department at Johns Hopkins.]
... A specialist in the history of medieval France, [Gabrielle ] Spiegel received her undergraduate degree in 1964 from Bryn Mawr College and her Hopkins doctorate a decade later. Her appreciation of American history comes in part, she says, from her own experience, having been born into a Belgian family who were refugees from World War II in Europe.
"Although I was born in the United States, I firs
Source: Frederick Kagan in the Weekly Standard
Sep 19, 2007
... The current strategy has failed?
Tell it to the tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have not been killed, wounded, or driven from their homes because the new strategy has reversed the slide toward civil war.
Tell it to the tens of thousands of former insurgents and local people who have volunteered to join the Iraqi Security Forces this year to stop the violence in their country.
Tell it to the shop owners in Baghdad, Ramadi, Fallujah, and Baqub
Source: Brendan Miniter in the WSJ
Sep 19, 2007
"It's one of the greatest stories of World War II never told." After making critically acclaimed documentaries for more than two decades, Ken Burns at age 54 understands how to draw the attention even of those who think they know all they need to know about a topic. On a recent visit to The Wall Street Journal's editorial page, he was in top form.
"The story of Joseph Medicine Crow," Mr. Burns said, "is something I've wanted to tell for 20 years." The g
Source: Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Ed
Sep 19, 2007
[Ralph Hexter, the president of Hampshire College, married his longtime partner September 1. They announced the news this week, which was reported at the website, InsiderHigherEd.com.]
... For Hexter, the marriage also marks a personal milestone that relates to an important part of his scholarly career. While he was at Yale, he was a close friend and colleague of John Boswell, a historian whose two books on gay history in medieval Europe are considered to have been path-breaking
Source: http://allafrica.com
Sep 18, 2007
Professor Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian historian specializing in Rwanda who had announced in 2005 his intention not to collaborate furthermore with the prosecution of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) as long as it would not have indicted elements of the of the RPF, began Tuesday to testify in favour of an ICTR defendant.
This defence testimony for Joseph Kanyabashi, the former mayor of Ngoma, should last two weeks. Kanyabashi is on trial with five other persons in
Source: New Zealand Herald
Sep 18, 2007
The Prime Minister's literary awards today honoured three writers - a historian, a poet and a novelist.
The three writers - historian Dick Scott, poet Bill Manhire and novelist Fiona Farrell - have all been recognised in the Prime Minister's Awards for Literary Achievement, in a ceremony at Premier House in Wellington tonight.
Each received $60,000 [NZ $] in recognition of their significant contribution to New Zealand literature.
Prime Minister Helen Clark
Source: http://www.democratandchronicle.com
Sep 18, 2007
David Oliver's two lives evolved from one unusual childhood habit.
"I didn't read about Dr. Seuss," he said. "I read about World War II."
Oliver, director of the Tinker Homestead and Farm Museum in Henrietta, will leave his historian's life for a military one when his National Guard unit mobilizes this month in preparation for deployment to Afghanistan.
After two months of training at Fort Bragg, N.C., members of Alpha Company, 1st Battalion,
Source: AP
Sep 18, 2007
Cartoonist Hector Cantu decided if Ken Burns didn't tell the stories of Latinos in his World War II documentary, he'd have Baldo do it.
This week, Cantu and co-creator Carlos Castellanos unveiled Benito "Benny" Ramirez in their syndicated comic strip "Baldo," which appears in 200 newspapers.
Ramirez is a composite of the actual stories of several Hispanic World War II veterans featured in a book by University of Texas journalism professor Maggie Rivas-Rodr
Source: http://nn.byu.edu
Sep 18, 2007
U.S. citizens live with the Founding Fathers in a distinct and unique way, a
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian told a BYU audience Monday."To live with the Founding Fathers, in a historical sense, is to try to live
with ambiguity, because a documentary record is always incomplete," said
Jack Rakove, a professor of political science at Stanford and 1997 winner of
the Pulitzer Prize for history."History is a dynamic process."
Rakove spoke in the JSB auditorium on"Living With the Fo
Source: Columbia Spectator
Sep 18, 2007
Last night, Barnard religion professor Alan Segal lectured on the lack of academic accuracy in the work of assistant professor Nadia Abu El-Haj, whose tenure process has sparked controversy due to her book in which she denies the existence of the ancient Jewish state of Israel.
In his lecture, titled “What Biblical Archaeology Tells Us About the First Temple Period,” Segal focused on the role of archaeology in proving certain aspects of the Bible to be true, including the existence
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) (audio interview)
Sep 18, 2007
Waskar T. Ari Chachaki, a Bolivian historian and an Aymara Indian, was one of the first indigenous people from Latin America to earn a Ph.D. at an American institution. Yet for two years the U.S. government would not allow him into the country to teach, relenting only when his hiring institution, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, sued. Mr. Ari talks about his long road back to American academe.
Source: Steven Plaut at frontpagemag.com
Sep 17, 2007
[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press.]
The Norman Finkelstein affair at DePaul University was not yet buried when an entire revisionist "narrative" of the affair was being churned out by the Far Left. A bit of revisionism was to be expected, one supposes, regarding the favorite "academic" of those promoting Holocaust Revisionism and "New History&q
Source: [Winfield Myers at the website of CampusWatch
Sep 17, 2007
[Winfield Myers is director of Campus Watch.]
In an uninformed entry at the blog Huffington Post, Marjorie Cohn, a professor of law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego and president of the National Lawyers Guild, misrepresents Campus Wat
Source: Boston Globe
Sep 16, 2007
Notice something different about your current Bank of America statement? "Bank of America is a proud sponsor of THE WAR, a Ken Burns film," it says, in even bigger print than your balances.
Or reach for an orange. It might be one of the 25 million that bear a message urging citrus lovers to watch "The War," Burns's seven-part, 16-hour documentary about World War II, which begins airing on PBS next Sunday. WGBH will broadcast it locally.
"If you
