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: Cinnamon Stillwell at the website of CampusWatch
Aug 29, 2007
It has become popular for those with competing political agendas to allege threats to free speech, whether real or imagined. Yet, there is a very real threat to free speech that has received little attention in the public sphere. It's called libel tourism and it has become a major component in the ideological arm of the war on terrorism.At question is the publication of books and other writings that seek to shed light on the financing of Islamic terrorism. Increasingly, American author
Source: HNN Staff
Aug 29, 2007
This has been a busy summer for Robert Collins, emeritus professor of history at UC Santa Barbara, who's supposedly retired. In July Cambridge University Press decided to pulp his book on terrorism financing after a Saudi billionaire named in the book threatened to sue for libel, putting Collins in the middle of an international storm involving important questions of censorship . Now he is preparing to head to Washington DC next week to br
Source: http://www.canadaeast.com
Aug 28, 2007
A high-society Montreal matron and her son are found dead in the bedroom of the woman's mansion. Two gunshots were heard. Three bullets are recovered. The year is 1901.
Outdoorsman and iconic Canadian painter Tom Thomson goes out for a paddle in Ontario's fabled Algonquin Park and disappears. His body is found floating in Canoe Lake days later. Murder or misadventure? The year is 1917.
A Canadian diplomat, removed from a post in Japan and made ambassador to Egypt, jumps
Source: NYT
Aug 28, 2007
The command post is a set of Manhattan publishing offices, and the foot soldiers include Joan Didion, Seymour Hersh, Bob Woodward, Anna Quindlen, Alex Kotlowitz, Paul Hendrickson, Samantha Power and Bill Walton. They are going on David Halberstam’s book tour for him.
Five months after Mr. Halberstam’s death in a car accident on April 23, some of this celebrated journalist’s closest friends and colleagues will be banding together to cover different legs of a nationwide publicity tour
Source: Dan Michman in Haaretz
Aug 28, 2007
Raul Hilberg, a professor of political science at the University of Vermont, died on Saturday, August 4. He was certainly one of the most influential scholars in Holocaust research in the world, despite the fact that his list of publications was relatively short. But his relationship with Israeli Holocaust research was ambivalent.
Hilberg fled as a child with his parents from Vienna to the U.S. after the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938). He was recruite
Source: http://www.joplinindependent.com
Aug 28, 2007
Missouri Southern State University graduate Dr. Jarod Roll, pictured, originally from Mt. Vernon, MO, has won the 2006 Best Ph.D. Dissertation Prize from the International Association of Labor History Institutions. In recognition of his award, Roll will receive a cash award of 750 GBP, or a little more than $1500 (USD) by today's rate of exchange.
Now teaching at the University of Sussex in England, Roll's dissertation is entitled, "The Road to the Promised Land: Rural Re
Source: Independent (UK)
Aug 28, 2007
A 12th-century copper casket that once contained the relics of Thomas Becket, the "troublesome priest" who was murdered on the steps of Canterbury Cathedral in 1170, is just one of hundreds of priceless treasures – some never seen before by the public – unearthed by a team led by TV historian Dr David Starkey for a ground-breaking exhibition which opens next month.
The treasures, including an early Turner painting, a jousting score sheet and a rare celebratory banner from
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) (Click here for embedded links.)
Aug 28, 2007
It’s not due out until next week, but Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case is already generating online buzz — and big preorders (as of today, Amazon.com is ranking it 370 in all book orders). Written by the National Journal columnist Stuart Taylor Jr. and the historian K.C. Johnson — and with glowing blurbs from names like the columnist George Will, the ACLU president Nadine Strossen, and even John Grisham — it takes a slam at h
Source: NYT
Aug 28, 2007
Peggy Samuels, an amateur art historian who with her husband, Howard, wrote or edited 10 books on art and United States history, including a revealing biography of Frederic Remington, the renowned painter of the American West, died Thursday at her home in East Falmouth, Mass. She was 84.
The death was announced by her daughter Amy Samuels.
Mrs. Samuels and her husband, who died in 2002, were art collectors who roamed from auctions to estate sales in search of Western wo
Source: Khody Akhavi at ipsnews.net
Aug 27, 2007
... If there are historical lessons to be learned from the Iraq debacle, Juan Cole's new book "Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East" may be a good place to start. Cole, a well-respected scholar of Middle East history and author of "Informed Comment", a widely-read blog that covers politics of the region, describes Napoleon Bonaparte's military misadventure in Egypt in 1798 and the Bush administration's Iraq war as historical bookends on modern imperialism in the Middle
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Aug 27, 2007
At Durham-in-Wonderland, our colleague, KC Johnson, has profiled some of the 88 Duke faculty members, who signed an early public statement that seemed to rush to judgment about the guilt of the members of the University's lacrosse team. The historians profiled include: William Chafe, Sally Deutsch,
Source: New Yorker
Aug 27, 2007
... Mearsheimer and Walt are not anti-Semites or racists. They are serious scholars,
and there is no reason to doubt their sincerity. They are right to describe the
moral violation in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. (In this, most
Israelis and most American Jews agree with them.) They were also right about
Iraq. The strategic questions they raise now, particularly about Israel’s
privileged relationship with the United States, are worth debating––just as it
is worth debating
Source: http://en.apa.az
Aug 27, 2007
Professor of California University, historian Tomov confessed his mistake in the response to the protest letter of Azerbaijani Shahla Aliguliyeva working for OXFA organization.
“I am grateful to you for your opinion about my book and revealing my mistake. This is a mistake. Gara Garayev is not Armenian, he is Azerbaijani composer. I will try to correct the mistake in the second edition of the book,” he said.
Gara Garayev is introduced as an Armenian composer in the scie
Source: WaPo
Aug 27, 2007
Writing in the Los Angeles Times on Saturday, Boston University professor Andrew J. Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran, accused Bush of being "oblivious to the history that actually matters." In the Houston Chronicle, Robert Buzzanco, a professor at the University of Houston, said Bush missed the point that it was U.S. intervention in Cambodia that caused the rise of the Khmer Roug
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education summary of article in Gender & History
Aug 27, 2007
Historians need to correct the assumption that women played little part in public debates during the early years of the American republic because society forbade them to do so, writes Carolyn Eastman, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.
The historical record shows, she says, that in the late 18th century, most young white women in the northeastern United States engaged in public speaking, and she suggests that historians overlook that phenomenon
Source: NYT
Aug 27, 2007
Norman Cohn, a historian who influenced a generation of historians and social scientists with his insight that totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, chiefly Communism and Nazism, were propelled by mythologies associated with medieval apocalyptic movements, died on July 31 in Cambridge, England. He was 92.
The cause was a degenerative heart condition, said his son, Nik Cohn.
In highly detailed, laboriously researched studies that depended on his knowledge of many
Source: Financial Times
Aug 26, 2007
A few years ago, Robert Bruner and Sean Carr, two American academics at a Virginia business school, decided to write a comprehensive study of a financial market crash that took place on Wall Street back in 1907.
In normal, calmer times, their worthy opus might have attracted only limited attention. After all, the 1907 turmoil has never carried the fame of 1929. But in a happy burst of brilliant timing – and sheer luck – their work is due to be published this autumn, and the two auth
Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review
Aug 26, 2007
I must confess to a moment of churlishness when, after being lulled by your reviewer’s discussion of my book “Seizing Destiny” (Aug. 12), I was awakened by the artful thrust of the hired assassin’s knife. In the next to last paragraph, Richard Brookhiser wrote: “I cannot recommend this book, however. Kluger’s writing is some of the worst I have ever had to read. ... If I had not agreed to review this book, I would have stopped after five pages. After 600, I felt as if I were inside a bass drum b
Source: Fred Kaplan in the NYT Magazine
Aug 26, 2007
[The claim that H.R. McMaster, the historian-soldier, has been passed over for promotion in the army has surfaced in the mainstream media for the first time in an article by Fred Kaplan, the national security reporter for Slate. The claim appears in Kaplan's article in the current issue of the NYT Magazine about Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, author of a devastating critique of the leadership of the army during the Iraq War published in May by the Armed Forces Journal. Yingling argues that generals
Source: WaPo
Aug 26, 2007
Over the past two years since Hurricane Katrina, I've seen waves of hardworking volunteers from nonprofits, faith-based groups and college campuses descend on New Orleans, full of compassion and hope.
They arrive in the city's Ninth Ward to painstakingly gut houses one by one. Their jaws drop as they wander around afflicted zones, gazing at the towering mounds of debris and uprooted infrastructure.
After weeks of grueling labor, they realize that they are running in pla
