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: Reuters
Aug 21, 2007
Germans are starting to rethink their negative views about Prussia, the state which ruled much of northern Germany for centuries and which has been viewed for decades through the prism of Nazism.
In particular, a book by Australian historian Christopher Clark has stirred a debate about Prussia which Germans have vilified since World War Two for representing the militarism, discipline and blind obedience that helped Hitler rise to power.
"The Rise and Downfall of Pr
Source: MSNBC
Aug 21, 2007
[Editor's Note: Haleh Esfandiari is the wife of George Mason University historian Shaul Bakhash.]
A detained Iranian-American academic was suddenly released from a notorious Tehran prison Tuesday after spending months behind bars on charges of endangering Iranian national security — allegations her family vehemently denies.
Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, had been jailed in Evin prison since
Source: Turkish Daily News
Aug 21, 2007
Turkey History Institution chairman Halaço?lu claims Kurds are converted Turkmen and Kurdish Alevis are converted Armenians. Alevi institutions, politicians demand his resignation and accuse him of racism.
***
There is no such thing as a Kurdish Alevi claimed Turkish History Institution chairman, Yusuf Halaço?lu, whose comment prompted a demand for his resignation by the Alevi-Bekta?i institutions and the pro-Kurdish Democratic Society Party (DTP).
At a
Source: http://www.hometownannapolis.com
Aug 21, 2007
A local historian hit gold earlier this month when she came across an Eastport midwife’s diaries dating back to 1898.
The diaries, or registries, listed 406 children that Annie Hanson Christensen, an immigrant from Denmark, delivered between August 1898 and August 1908. Historian Ginger Doyel, who is including some of the material in a pending book about Eastport, said Christensen went out at all times of day and night, and in all kinds of weather, to deliver babies.
“S
Source: Press Release--Defend the Honor Campaign Website www.defendthehonor.org
Aug 21, 2007
The Latino "war" against Ken Burns' upcoming documentary, "The War," to be aired on PBS is not over. Despite recent press statements, key Latino organizations and leaders across the country today publicly announced that the issue is far from resolved and that they will continue pressing for a respectful resolution.
Latino organizations and leaders called on Ken Burns and Florentine Pictures to meet with a representative cross-section of the national Latino leader
Source: AFP
Aug 21, 2007
[Editor's Note: Haleh Esfandiari is the wife of George Mason University historian Shaul Bakhash.]
Iran is to release US-Iranian academic
Haleh Esfandiari, detained in Tehran since May on
security charges, as soon as a bail payment has been
made, a judiciary source told AFP on Tuesday.
"Her arrest has been changed to bail. Probably she
will be released tonight. We are waiting for the
deposit of the bail," said the source in t
Source: Derek Catsam at dcat (blog)
Aug 20, 2007
Howard Zinn is probably the best selling historian of all time. And yet many of his supporters (rarely the professional historians who write in the areas about which Zinn has written) like to pretend that he is a maligned outsider who has been ignored by all but a brave, enlightened cadre willing to speak truth to power. While his books have sold a gazillion copies, I do not find him to be an especially good historian. By wearing his ideology on his sleeve, some might see Zinn as ruthlessly hone
Source: http://dailyheadlines.uark.edu
Aug 20, 2007
Tony Badger, a British historian, is generally considered to be one of the very best historians of the American South. New Deal / New South: An Anthony J. Badger Reader (paperback, $19.95), just published by the University of Arkansas Press, includes some of Badger's best work in his ongoing examination of how white liberal Southern politicians who came to prominence in the New Deal and World War II handled the race issue when it became central to politics in the 1950s and 1960s.
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at the website of CampusWatch (embedded links in the original)
Aug 20, 2007
[Cinnamon Stillwell is the Northern California Representative for Campus Watch. She can be reached at stillwell@meforum.org.]
Instead of providing moral clarity in a time of war, too many academics busy themselves inventing strategies to get along peaceably with genocidal terrorist groups and the governments that aid and abet them. Among the appeasers, three professors of Middle East studies stand out: the University of Minnesota's William
Source: John Gravois in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Aug 20, 2007
Scholars of anthropology and of Middle East studies are rallying around Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology at Barnard College whose tenure bid, like that of Norman G. Finkelstein at DePaul University earlier this year, has become the subject of an online skirmish in the larger conflict over research on the Middle East.
Central to the controversy is Ms. Abu El-Haj's book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Soc
Source: CBS News Sunday Morning
Aug 19, 2007
In America, more land is devoted to growing turf grass than any other plant. NASA has even mapped America's lawns from space. But you might be surprised to learn that neither the lawn nor the lawnmower are American at all — they come to us from Britain.
"Edwin Budding invented the lawnmower in 1830," Ted Steinberg, a history professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, told Sunday Morning correspondent Serena Altschul. "He got the idea for the lawnmower
Source: Times (UK)
Aug 18, 2007
IT’S 9.30AM IN MINNEAPOLIS. The bridge over the Mississippi that used to take Taner Akçam to work won’t be rebuilt for a year, but that’s not what’s vexing him. His problem is the Turkish Secret Service.
Professor Akçam is a Turk and an historian. In 1999, 84 years after the event, he completed a harrowing doorstop of a book on the Armenian genocide – densely factual and unsparing of the Turkish culprits – now published in English. As a result, he is being hounded from Istanbul to h
Source: Richard Silverstein at Tikun Olam
Aug 17, 2007
[Richard Silverstein runs Tikun Olam, a blog dedicated to resolution of the Israeli-Arab conflict.]
Yesterday, I wrote a post about the scurrilous campaign waged by Campus Watch, Frontpagemagazine and their allies against Barnard anthropology professor Nadia Abu El-Haj. Distressed that this Palestinian-American academic is verging on earning tenure from a dis
Source: http://www.earnedmedia.org
Aug 17, 2007
The American Civil War was more unpopular than the current war in Iraq. During the Civil War, 630,000 men died during the fight to end slavery and gain liberty for African-Americans.
Historian and defense industry expert Charles Patricoff believes that based on history our role in Iraq should be a permanent one. "Look at how we helped rebuild Germany and Japan after World War II. Because of the good we did there and are doing in Iraq, I don't believe we should ever leave Iraq.
Source: HNN Staff
Aug 17, 2007
Political Scientist Michael Gunter is defending himself from charges of bad ethics in having agreed to review a controversial book about the Armenian Massacres for which he had written a blurb. In his review of Guenter Lewy's The Armenian Massacres in Ottoman Turkey: A Disputed Genocide, Michael Gunter praises the author for writing a fearless book. The book takes the position that the Turks are not guilty of the crime of genocide against the Armenian people.
The review a
Source: Winfield Myers at the website of Campus Watch (Source includes embedded links.)
Aug 16, 2007
Lisa Anderson, the former dean of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs best remembered for her failed attempt to bring Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to campus, had a complaint yesterday for the Web publication Inside Higher Ed.
"Young scholars of Middle Eastern literature or history are finding themselves ‘grilled' about their political views in job interviews, and in some cases losing job offers as a result of their answers," Anderson s
Source: http://eurweb.com
Aug 16, 2007
Asa Grant Hilliard, III, world renowned Pan-Africanist, educator, historian, and psychologist, passed from this life on August 13, 2007 in Cairo, Egypt.
Dr. Hilliard was in Egypt to deliver a keynote lecture at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of Classical African Civilization (ASCAC), an organization he helped found.
He was also lecturing for a study trip led by Reverend Jeremiah Wright of Chicago. The cause of death is attributed to com
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Aug 16, 2007
Controversial research on Israel and the Palestinian territories has become the basis of yet another campaign to prevent a professor from winning tenure. A group of Barnard College alumni has drafted an online petition asking their alma mater to deny tenure to Nadia Abu El-Haj, an assistant professor of anthropology whose scholarship, they say, is flawed and skewed against Israel.
The group’s criticisms of Ms. Abu El-Haj focus on her book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Aug 16, 2007
Like many academics, Christopher Wolfe has lots of ideas about what the ideal university should be. Unlike all but a handful, though, he’s decided to take action in a big way, by creating a new institution.
After close to 30 years at Marquette University, Wolfe, a political science professor known for his course on constitutional law that weeds out the formerly pre-law undergraduates from the future lawyers, will leave his tenured job to prepare full-time for the fall 2011 launch of
Source: NYT
Aug 16, 2007
“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” is not even in bookstores, but already anxieties have surfaced about the backlash it is stirring, with several institutions backing away from holding events with the authors.
John J. Mearsheimer, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, a professor at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, were not totally surprised by the reaction to their work. An article last spring in the London R
