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: http://www.scoop.co.nz
Aug 8, 2007
Noted historian donates Te Kooti paintings to University collection
Emeritus Professor Bill Oliver has donated three paintings by the late Frank Davis to the University Art Collection.
The gift will be acknowledged tomorrow (Thursday, 9 August) at the inaugural WH Oliver lecture in the Old Main Building auditorium, Palmerston North campus, at 5.30pm.
Mr Davis worked as a lecturer in the former Palmerston North Teachers’ College (now Massey College of Education) a
Source: http://www.bucksfreepress.co.uk
Aug 8, 2007
AN area of woodland in Penn is to be named after one of the village's most famous and enigmatic residents.
Sir Oliver Millar, an acclaimed art historian and former surveyor of the Queen's pictures, left the three quarters of an acre site off Elm Road to the residents' society to look after.
Sir Oliver was a well known face in and around the village and had lived in nearby Penn for 49 years - first in Yonder Lodge in Elm Road and later in Rays Lane.
He died
Source: http://www.stateline.org
Aug 8, 2007
BOSTON – Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough told the nation’s state legislators Tuesday (Aug. 7) schools need to do a better job of educating American students about significant past events and personalities.
Speaking for nearly an hour without notes, the best-selling author warned that students in this country are growing up historically illiterate. A key to solving that problem is to make sure teachers are better prepared for the classroom, he told the annual meeti
Source: Newsbusters
Aug 7, 2007
Whenever NBC News needs someone to put the current presidential campaign into historic context they usually go to liberal historian Doris Kearns Goodwin and in recent days, on two different NBC News outlets, Goodwin has delivered with her unique historic and liberal perspective on Hillary Clinton.
On this morning's "Today" show, NBC's Andrea Mitchell went to Goodwin for a critical take on Hillary, but even when asked to find a negative about the Senator from New York, Good
Source: Nicholas Wade in the NYT
Aug 7, 2007
For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.
Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers fo
Source: http://www.stuff.co.nz
Aug 7, 2007
Palmerston North can lay claim to one the world's finest war historians with news Massey University associate Professor Glyn Harper has been invited to speak at an international conference in Belgium later this year.
Titled Such Anger, Such Danger: Passchendaele 1917, the prestigious November gathering, featuring the world's foremost World War I authorities, involves three days of lectures and battlefield tours.
"It's an absolute honour to be chosen to go," Dr
Source: http://www.courant.com
Aug 7, 2007
In his brilliant overview, "The Cold War: A New History," Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis provides the following account of the escalation of the Korean War:
"On December 2nd [1950], acting under the authority Truman had delegated, MacArthur ordered the United States Air Force to drop five Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs on Chinese columns advancing down the Korean peninsula. Although not as effective as they had been against Japanese cities at the end of World War II,
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Aug 6, 2007
Atlanta's history museum has found its new leader from within.
The Atlanta Historical Society has hired Sal Cilella to be its president and chief executive officer, spokeswoman Hillary Hardwick said Monday. The historical society oversees the Atlanta History Center and the Margaret Mitchell House & Museum.
Cilella had served as the society's interim CEO since the March announcement that Jim Bruns, the prior CEO, was leaving to head the New York-based Theodore Roosev
Source: AP
Aug 6, 2007
Henri Amouroux, a French historian who testified on behalf of Maurice Papon at his war crimes trial and wrote several books on the Nazi occupation, has died, news reports said Monday. He was 87.
Amouroux died Sunday in Normandy, Le Parisien newspaper and France-Info radio reported. No cause of death was given.
Amouroux, who served as president of the history section of the prestigious Academie Francaise, testified at Papon's 1997 trial for his role in deporting Jews dur
Source: NYT
Aug 6, 2007
Dr. Raul Hilberg, a renowned Holocaust scholar, died Saturday. He was 81.
Hilberg, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Vermont, died at the Vermont Respite House of lung cancer, although he never smoked, said his wife, Gwen.
Hilberg wrote ''The Destruction of the European Jews,'' published in 1961, a landmark study of the Nazi killings of more than 5 million Jews.
He was honored by the German government for his contributions and t
Source: AHA Blog
Aug 5, 2007
Blackpast.org, led by University of Washington Professor and former AHA Council member Quintard Taylor, contains an abundance of resources on African American history. This site features an online encyclopedia containing 800 plus entries, transcripts of speeches from 1789 to 2004, collections of links and info on hundreds of other resources, and so much more.
Peruse the Digital Archives and find links, separated by state, to sites like the Lib
Source: NYT Magazine
Aug 5, 2007
The unfolding catastrophe in Iraq has condemned the political judgment of a president. But it has also condemned the judgment of many others, myself included, who as commentators supported the invasion. Many of us believed, as an Iraqi exile friend told me the night the war started, that it was the only chance the members of his generation would have to live in freedom in their own country. How distant a dream that now seems.
Having left an academic post at Harvard in 2005 and retur
Source: Times (UK)
Aug 5, 2007
Norman Stone is Britain’s most idiosyncratic historian, famed for his bibulous tutorials at Oxford, many delivered across a pool table. A natural rebel, he was one of the few academics to speak up for Margaret Thatcher and was the only man on earth to find lunch with Princess Diana a bore.
Although he does not seem like a misanthropist, there are plenty of things about British society that Professor Norman Stone does not like. Let us begin with the big one.
Stone has in
Source: Pine Bluff Commercial
Aug 4, 2007
Though she grew up in Little Rock as the city divided itself over the integration of its largest high school, Elizabeth Jacoway said she never thought much about Central High School or the nine black students at the center of the desegregation crisis.
Jacoway's mother's cousin, Virgil Blossom, was the superintendent of the Little Rock School District when the black students were escorted into the school by members of the 101st Airborne, but as a 13-year-old, Jacoway was hardly curio
Source: Andrew Lawler at Discover
Aug 3, 2007
... With regard to the care of antiquities, how do you compare the Saddam era with the way things are today?
Saddam wanted projects to bolster his image, to show that he was a patron of history and antiquities, as were the ancient leaders of Iraq. Now, with the interference of new people who are illiterate about cultural heritage, everything is much more problematic.
... What is the status of the museum today? Is it threatened?
About three or four months before I left, we h
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 3, 2007
PROFESSOR NORMAN COHN, who died on Tuesday aged 92, was a historian, philosopher, linguist, author and expert on persecution, genocide and extermination; his seminal book, The Pursuit of the Millennium: revolutionary millenarians and mystical anarchists of the middle ages (1957), earned cult status.
Translated into 11 languages since its initial publication, The Pursuit of the Millennium became Cohn's best-known work and was acclaimed as one of the most important studies of apocalyp
Source: State Journal-Register
Aug 2, 2007
Phillip Shaw Paludan, beloved father, husband, teacher, scholar and friend died at his home Wednesday, Aug. 1, 2007.
He was born Jan. 26, 1938, in St. Cloud, Minn., the son of Paul and Marguerite Shaw Paludan.
Phillip Shaw Paludan was a professor of history and the Naomi B. Lynn Distinguished Chair in Lincoln Studies at the University of Illinois at Springfield. One of the nation's foremost authorities on Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War, he joined the faculty of the h
Source: Amotz Asa-El in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Aug 2, 2007
Seventy years since its publication, Belgian historian Henri Pirenne's "Mahomet et Charlemagne" still boggles the mind. The thought that the Middle Ages dawned not with the decline of Rome in the 5th century, but with the rise of Islam about 200 years later, bewildered scholars in the late 1930s and would excite some decision-makers in today's EU had they heard about it.
Being the holy-war faith it is, Pirenne argued, Islam is intrinsically opposed to foreign trade. As suc
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria (HNN Blog)
Aug 2, 2007
Whatever its flaws, Wikipedia has become a significant influence in history education. Some of our colleagues have determined to improve it with their own contributions. Here are some instances in which they have assumed significant responsibility for their fields:History of Science: Sage Ross and 80 other specialists in the field are contributing.
Source: OAH Newsletter
Aug 1, 2007
[Mr. Cole is the chairman of the NEH.]
... We will soon be formally announcing the pilot of a new project under the We the People banner titled Picturing America. This new initiative will open up another avenue of discovery and appreciation of our legacy, which stresses the importance of the visual arts in American history.
The major focus of Picturing America is to show that art speaks dynamically and forcefully about where a people have come from, what they have endur
