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: Malise Ruthven in the New York Review of Books
Aug 16, 2007
Tariq Ramadan is a Swiss-born academic and a prolific writer on Islam who has achieved fame—and notoriety —on both sides of the Atlantic for his engagement with the issues that concern the millions of Muslims now living in Western countries. In France, especially, he has been depicted as an Islamist wolf in sheep's clothing. Strip off the wool, say his critics, and you will find a hard-line fundamentalist hostile to the values of freedom and democracy he claims to espouse. Two causes célèbres ha
Source: Michael Neumann at Counterpunch
Aug 15, 2007
[Michael Neumann is a professor of philosophy at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. ]
In December 2000 I had the privilege of meeting Raul Hilberg at a conference in Berlin.
The conference celebrated the 100th anniversary of Franz Neumann's birth. Franz Neumann was at first a politically engaged legal theorist, close to the German Social Democratic Party. Forced into exile by the Nazis, he gained respect for his work Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National So
Source: AP
Aug 14, 2007
Thomas W. Gaehtgens, an internationally respected art historian, has been appointed director of the Getty Research Institute.
Gaehtgens, 67, will join the institute on Nov. 1. He currently heads the German Center for the History of Art in Paris, which he founded in 1997.
His appointment, announced Tuesday, concludes a 10-month search for a successor to Thomas Crow, who said last fall that he was accepting a chair in modern art history at the Institute of Fine Arts at N
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Aug 14, 2007
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has posted a job vacancy announcement seeking to fill the position of Historian in the Office of the Secretary for Homeland Security. The deadline for applying for the position is August 21, 2007.
Dr. Priscilla Jones was appointed as the first Historian of the Department of Homeland Security in February 2004. She left her position in early August 2007 to return to the Air Force History Office where she worked for ten years before joining DHS
Source: Press Release--National Archives
Aug 14, 2007
On Tuesday, September 11, at 7 p.m., Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein will host an "American Conversation" with award-winning historian and biographer Geoffrey Ward. They will discuss Ward's book The War: An Intimate History, a companion to the PBS documentary by Ken Burns. A book signing will follow the discussion. The book will be released nationwide by Alfred A. Knopf Publishers on September 11.
The War: An Intimate History, 1941-1945, is the companion vol
Source: NYT
Aug 14, 2007
In Gino Segre’s family, physics seems to be in the genes.
Dr. Segre is physics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His uncle, Emilio Segre, was a winner of the 1959 Nobel Prize for the discovery of the antiproton. An older brother is a physicist, and an additional “six or seven” cousins do physics, too.
But Dr. Segre, 68, has a second profession: he writes popular books about the history of science. His most recent book, “Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the
Source: Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com
Aug 14, 2007
[Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in U.S. and Canadian foreign policy. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist.]
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Gregory Davis, the a
Source: AHA Blog
Aug 13, 2007
Earlier this year, the National History Center (NHC) created the Teagle Foundation Project, through a grant from the Teagle Foundation, to examine the role of historical study in liberal learning.
The American Association of Colleges & Universities defines liberal education as “a philosophy of education that empowers individuals with broad knowledge and transferable skills, and a strong sense of value, ethics, and civic engagement.” The Teagle Foundation Project will examine how
Source: NYT
Aug 13, 2007
[Editor's Note: Haleh Esfandiari is the wife of George Mason University historian Shaul Bakhash.]
TEHRAN, Aug. 12 — A senior judiciary official said Sunday that Iran had finished its investigation into two Iranian-American academics who were arrested in May on espionage charges, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
But the official, Hassan Haddad, who is Tehran’s deputy prosecutor, did not disclose the conclusions of the investigation into the detainees,
Source: Richard Brookhiser in the NYT Book Review of Richard Kluger's Seizing Destiny: How America Grew from Sea to Shining Sea
Aug 12, 2007
I cannot recommend this book, however [compelling the subject: American expansionism]. Kluger’s writing is some of the worst I have ever had to read. Let facts be submitted to a candid world. Kluger on the French Revolution: “French grievances were vented in alternating waves of liberation and repression that swept the overwrought masses toward the cauldron of anarchy.” Kluger on James K. Polk: “Perhaps, if one favors a Freudian frame of reference, Polk’s almost reckless aggressiveness in offic
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Aug 12, 2007
... [Ken] Burns wasn't looking to document another war. Quite the opposite, in fact.
His 1990 masterpiece The Civil War - the top-rated limited series in PBS history - "was so wrenching for us, we felt spent. We vowed not to do another war film. Period. End of statement.
"It was too heavy. Too close. We're emotional archaeologists. We're not just excavating dates from the past. These are not products or ways to make a living. These are grand obsessions."
Source: Press Release--International Pen (distributed by Network of Concerned Historians)
Aug 12, 2007
The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN is seriously concerned for the health of teacher and writer Dolma Kyab (also known as Lobsang Kelsang Gyatso), whose health is said to have deteriorated in detention. International PEN believes Dolma Kyab, who is serving a ten-year sentence for his writings, is held in violation of his rights to freedom of expression as guaranteed under Article 19 of the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which China is a s
Source: Walter Reich in the LAT
Aug 11, 2007
[Walter Reich is a professor of international affairs, ethics and human behavior at George Washington University, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.]
If you're not overwhelmed by human catastrophe, can you be truly human? But if you are overwhelmed by human catastrophe, can you truly study it? One of the triumphs of Raul Hilberg, the great Holocaust historian who died last week, was th
Source: Campus Watch
Aug 10, 2007
Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature and Chairman of the Middle East Languages and Cultures department at Columbia University, figures prominently in the work of those of us trying to bring accountability and balance back to the field of Middle East studies. His anti-Western, pro-Islamist, and, at times, anti-Semitic commentary have been noted by Campus Watch on many occasions.
Indeed, he holds the current "Quote of the Month&qu
Source: David Brooks in the NYT
Aug 10, 2007
Early on, before the campaigning begins in earnest, presidential candidates lunch with journalists in order to get acquainted. During one of these lunches, Mitt Romney was talking about the global economy and was asked why he thought some nations grew rich and others didn’t.
He said there are at least two schools of thought on this question, one associated with Jared Diamond of U.C.L.A., which emphasizes natural resources, and another associated with the Harvard historian David Land
Source: Guardian
Aug 9, 2007
The distinguished historian Norman Cohn, who has died aged 92, unearthed the roots of European barbarism. His best known study, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (1957), demonstrated convincingly that the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, chiefly Marxism and nazism, shared a "common stock of European social mythology" with apocalyptic medieval movements such as the Flagellants and the Anabaptists.
Comm
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
Aug 9, 2007
To the Editor:
Re: "U.S. Says Bomb Suppled by Iran Kills Troops in Iraq" by Michael R. Gordon, August 8, 2007
It is increasingly suspicious that every time the United States has begun a diplomatic initiative with Iran--the latest on August 6, some United States military official in Iraq comes forward to accuse Iran of supplying weapons to attack U.S. troops. Perhaps it is coincidence, but the reporter rendering these accusations for the public seems always t
Source: Israel National News
Aug 9, 2007
Israeli writer and Barnard College graduate Paula Stern has begun a petition against the permanent appointment of a Muslim anthropologist, who asserts that the Israeli Biblical kingdoms are "pure political fabrication."
In an open letter to Columbia University and its Barnard College affiliate, Stern charged that anthropology Prof. Nadia Abu El Haj is unqualified for tenure at the institutions. Her book Facts on the Ground alleges that archaeologists have "created the
Source: Letter to the New Republic
Aug 9, 2007
We were flattered and gratified by Benny Morris's appreciation of our book Foxbats over Dimona: the Soviets' Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day War, and hope indeed that--in his words--we have come closer to an approximation of the historical truth ("Provocations," July 23).
Since the book went to press, some new evidence has emerged that further confirms our thesis from several angles, including additional testimonies to Soviet preparations in May 1967 for a paratroop drop, as
Source: Anthony Holden in the Times Literary Supplement
Aug 8, 2007
... As a follow-up to Black’s hefty biography of his acknowledged hero, F. D. Roosevelt (2003), what other American President would he choose but the only one to have resigned his high office in disgrace? How not to read more than coincidence into the fact that Black – no ordinary biographer, but a press baron with time on his hands since being obliged to resign from his own public position in 2003 – is also disgraced, in the eyes of a world seen by both as malicious, just as his book appears?
