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: Chicago Tribune
Aug 26, 2007
Bessie Louise Pierce, born in 1888, lived life her own way. And Chicago is better for that.
Never married, she devoted herself to scholarship, first in the field of education as an Iowa high school teacher and professor at the University of Iowa. Then, in midlife, she moved to the University of Chicago where she wrote "A History of Chicago," the definitive account of the city's first years.
That magisterial, three-volume history, begun in 1929 and completed in
Source: WSJ (Click on SOURCE link to read Winik's summaries of each book)
Aug 25, 2007
1. "Thomas Jefferson" by Fawn M. Brodie (Norton, 1974).
2. "The Memoirs and Anecdotes of the Count de Ségur" translated by Gerard Shelley (Scribner, 1928).
3. "The Age of the Democratic Revolution" by R.R. Palmer (Princeton, 1959, vol. 1; 1964, vol. 2).
4. "George Washington" by Douglas Southall Freeman (Scribner, 1948).
5. "The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson" by Bernard Bailyn (Harvard, 1974).
Source: NYT
Aug 25, 2007
Madeleine B. Stern, a prominent rare-book dealer, biographer and literary sleuth who helped bring to print Louisa May Alcott’s long-lost Gothic tales of murder, sexual subjugation, opium dens and other things simply too dreadful to mention, died on Saturday at her home in Manhattan. She was 95.
Ms. Stern’s executor, Richard Koch, confirmed the death.
With her companion and business partner of many years, Leona Rostenberg, Ms. Stern presided over Rostenberg & Stern R
Source: Daniel Pipes at his blog
Aug 24, 2007
In their sensational historical detective work, Foxbats over Dimona: The Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War (Yale University Press, 2007), Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez have challenge the widely-accepted idea that the Six Day War happened without anyone wanting it. Instead, they present a theory that the U.S.S.R. instigated the war as a way preemptively to destroy the Israeli nuclear facilities.
Source: Times (UK)
Aug 23, 2007
[Professor Norman Cohn, historian, was born on January 12, 1915. He died on July 31, 2007, aged 92]
The historian Professor Norman Cohn achieved great international popularity by linking his profound knowledge of the medieval and earlier past to the most contemporary concerns of his 20th-century audience.
His chief interest, most memorably described in his book The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957), w
Source: Robert Townsend writing at the website of the AHA blog
Aug 23, 2007
As the dustup last fall about the deletion of “psychohistory” from our membership taxonomy indicated, inclusion on the AHA’s list of membership categories can be highly political—serving in many eyes as a mark of standing in the discipline.
Unfortunately, this sets up two competing problems. The taxonomy needs to be open to the emergence of new areas in the discipline, but it also needs to be functional in a variety of contexts—for members trying to identify themselves, historians trying t
Source: SMU newspaper
Aug 23, 2007
Ned Blackhawk, an author and historian at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is this year's recipient of the William P. Clements Prize for the Best Non-Fiction Book on Southwestern America.
Published in 2006, "Blackhawk's Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West" describes the violence and its consequences experienced by the Ute, Paiute and Shoshone residing in what is now Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and California.
Source: Daily Freeman
Aug 23, 2007
The 200th anniversary of one of the most stupendous events in American history was marked on Aug. 17: Robert Fulton's steamship voyage up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany.
Fulton and crew made the 150-mile trip in the astonishing time of 32 hours, "equal to near five miles an hour," the captain observed.
Unfortunately, New York did not have a resident historian to properly commemorate this occasion. In fact, New York hasn't had a state historian s
Source: Politico
Aug 23, 2007
A historian quoted by President Bush to help argue that critics of the administration’s Iraq policy echo those who questioned the U.S. effort to bring democracy to Japan after World War II angrily distanced himself from the president’s remarks Thursday.
“They [war supporters] keep on doing this,” said MIT professor John Dower. “They keep on hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and it’s always more and more implausible, strange and in a fantasy world. They’re desperately groping
Source: Jonathan Dresner at Froginawell.net
Aug 23, 2007
[Disclosure: Mr. Dresner is an assistant editor at HNN.]
Here we go again.The American Historical Association has proposed new rules for adding and eliminating membership categories, those “areas of scholarly interest” which allow university presses and conferenc
Source: Letter to NYT Ombudsman, Clark Hoyt
Aug 23, 2007
Dear Mr. Hoyt:
I am writing in regard to the article by Thom Shanker that appeared on Aug.23rd. The headline says "Historians Question Bush's Reading of Lessons of Vietnam War for Iraq" Mr. Shanker writes that "President Bush is right on the factual record, according to historians. But many of them also quarreled with his drawing analogies[to Vietnam]...to predict what might happen in Iraq should the United States withdraw."
The article suggests
Source: NYT
Aug 23, 2007
Philip Masters, whose passion was history, which he literally dived into to help find the undersea wreck of the ship of Blackbeard the pirate, died on Aug. 18 in the Bronx. He was 70.
The cause was a metastasized melanoma, his daughter Torrie Lloyd-Masters said.
Mr. Masters, whose jobs ranged from jewelry salesman to lighting executive to cabdriver to stockbroker, was that unusual amateur who succeeds in a professionalized field. He used evenings, weekends and vacations
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Aug 23, 2007
Haleh Esfandiari, the Iranian-American scholar who was released on bail from prison in Iran on Tuesday, will not be able to leave the country anytime soon. Shirin Ebadi, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning lawyer who is representing Ms. Esfandiari, told the Associated Press that her client’s passport had not been returned and that the Iranian authorities had not indicated when or if it might be.
Ms. Esfandiari is accused of endangering Iranian national security by trying to foment a “soft
Source: Tiraspol Times
Aug 23, 2007
In the opinion of a British professor and Balkan expert, Mark Almond, one of the possible solutions to the Kosovo issue involves a "Great Agreement" between the U.S. and Russia on all unresolved separatist issues.
Such a deal would involve Russia agreeing to hold its nose over Kosovo independence, with the United States and its allies promising to look the other way while the people of Pridnestrovie and some other unrecognized countries in the post-Soviet space exercise th
Source: Euro Topics
Aug 22, 2007
The French historian Jean-Yves Mollier, interviewed by Gilles Heuré, criticises the Google intiative to create an on-line library. The purpose of the search engine is "to make money and pay its share-holders. With this in mind, it will not be recommending books that are hardly ever ordered. This is why public power ... should introduce other search engines. Personally, I am more in favour of engines that function according to language rather than states. ... I am afraid that with a European
Source: Andrew Sullivan at his blog
Aug 22, 2007
In his NRO splutter this morning, military expert Victor Davis Hanson hyperbolized the following:No one necessarily believes anything in once respected magazines, whether the Periscope section of Newsweek or anything published in The New Republic. Let me suggest two articles in The New Republic that no one should have believed at the time, two articles that h
Source: Daily Mail (UK) (Click here to see pictures.)
Aug 22, 2007
An historian has retired after spending his entire career writing a book for his local council.
And he hasn't finished it.
Robert Dunning, 69, began his definitive history of Somerset in 1967 and has been paid up to £38,000 a year since then.
But the work, covering every aspect of the county back to the beginnning of records, is so detailed that he's not reached half way and is handing the project over to an assistant.
In that time he has spent
Source: http://www.bianet.org
Aug 22, 2007
In a press briefing following his controversial comments on Kurds, Alevis and Armenians in Anatolia, historian Yusuf Halacoglu has refused to heed calls for his resignation. He argues that his comments were misunderstood.
Historian Yusuf Halacoglu, who is president of the Turkish Historical Society (TTK), has arranged a press briefing in order to defend his controversial comments on the ethnic make-up of Turkey.
Rejecting calls for his resignation, Halacoglu said, "
Source: NYT
Aug 22, 2007
[Editor's Note: Haleh Esfandiari is the wife of George Mason University historian Shaul Bakhash.]
The lawyer for the American-Iranian scholar released Tuesday after over three months in jail said the Iranian authorities still held the scholar’s passport, but that by Iranian law, she should be permitted to leave the country.
The scholar, Haleh Esfandiari, 67, said in a brief telephone interview in Tehran that said she was “fine and happy,” but declined to be interviewed.
Source: Counterpunch
Aug 22, 2007
[Norman Finkelstein's most recent book is Beyond Chutzpah: On the misuse of anti-Semitism and the abuse of history (University of California Press). His web site is www.NormanFinkelstein.com.]
Raul Hilberg died on August 4. A refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria, Hilberg was the founder of the field of Holocaust studies.
I cannot now remember when I first read Hilberg's magnum opus The Destruction of the European Jews, but it
