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: Nell Irvin Painter in the OAH Newsletter
Aug 1, 2007
[Ms. Painter is president of the OAH.]
... Though we have many reasons to celebrate as we enter our second century, I want to call us to the task of thinking about our aspirations and our means toward reaching our goals. Here I need to tread a fine line between complacency and alarm. On the one hand, we are nicely solvent, with a financial cushion set aside for the inevitable rainy day. On the other hand, we have in the last couple of years overspent our income to the tune of $179,000 in f
Source: Jon Wiener in Disssent
Aug 1, 2007
Saul Friedlander was born in Prague and spent his childhood in Nazi-run France. When he was nine years old, his parents hid him in a Catholic monastery. Orphaned after the war, Friedländer lived a peripatetic life. He joined the Irgun, fought in Israel's War of Independence, studied in Geneva, and eventually became an esteemed historian of the Holocaust at both Tel Aviv University and UCLA. Dissent's Jon Wiener ("The Weatherman Temptation") spoke with Friedländer in Los Angeles abou
Source: Rick Perlstein at http://commonsense.ourfuture.org
Aug 1, 2007
I've referred here often to my 2005 Princeton speech, and thought I might as well publish it here. It's something of The Big Con project's manifesto—a lesson about why conservative ideology, as it is lived in the real world, is in its way as abominable as Leninism.
The conference included Richard Land, director of the Southern Baptist Convention, New York Times columnist David Brooks, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Moral Majority founder Paul Weyrich, and William Be
Source: George Wright Society website
Aug 1, 2007
[Dwight T. Pitcaithley, chief historian of the National Park Service from 1995 to 2005, has called on Congress to consider tripling the budget of the organization by 2016 to more than $6 billion. He writes:]
A budget of $5–6 billion does not seem unreasonable given the requirements and rising costs of maintaining 20,000 buildings, almost 1,000 campgrounds, 1,600 wastewater systems, 1,300 water systems, 115,000,000 objects, 67,000 archeological sites, and 26,000 historic structu
Source: http://www.abc.net.au
Aug 1, 2007
Professor Colin Tatz brings an intimate understanding of life as an outsider to his studies of Indigenous Australia. Born to a Jewish family in South Africa on the eve of WWII, hatred of intolerance is a recurring theme in his life's work as an historian.
During the 1960s many of Colin's university colleagues were imprisoned without trial for up to eight weeks for protesting apartheid. He describes the atmosphere as fraught, "People were saying 'Get your motor car packed, get y
Source: http://www.townonline.com
Aug 1, 2007
Historian Gerald R. Gill died in his home in Cambridge on July 26. A scholar of 20th-century African-American history, Gill was Tufts University’s most honored and distinguished teacher.
Gerald Gill was born in New Rochelle, N.Y., on Nov. 18, 1948, the son of Robert and Etta Gill. He graduated with a major in history from Lafayette College in 1970, and completed his doctorate in United States history at Howard University, Washington, D.C., in 1985. His scholarly interest in history
Source: Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com
Aug 1, 2007
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ami Gluska, a lecturer of history and political science at the Hebrew University and the Ashkelon Academic College, Israel. He reached the rank of colonel in the Israel Defense Forces and was aide-de-camp, private secretary, speechwriter, and spokesman to Israel's fifth and sixth presidents. He has also served in diplomatic capacities and was speechwriter to three prime ministers. He has held senior positions in the ministries of defense and public security a
Source: Mark Goldblatt at Intellectual Conservative
Jul 31, 2007
SUBHEAD: By intentionally emphasizing facts which support his own deep convictions and suppressing facts which don’t, the historian can, without exactly lying, steer his reader towards an utterly false impression.
Last month, Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States, darling of the political Left and arguably America’s most influential living historian, received a literary smackdown in the Sunday Times Book Review by critic Walter Kirn, who panned Zinn’s latest
Source: Press Release
Jul 31, 2007
The University of Virginia School of Architecture has named landscape historian Ethan Carr to serve as associate professor of landscape architecture. The appointment, announced by Architecture School dean Karen Van Lengen, will begin this fall.
Carr is a nationally recognized landscape architecture historian and preservationist specializing in the public landscape of the United States. He has redefined the scholarship on American national parks and modern landscape design through hi
Source: Interview broadcast on NBC Nightly News
Jul 31, 2007
Brian Williams: Prime Minister, what do you make of President Bush?
Gordon Brown: I enjoyed my discussions with him. I think what what I particularly enjoyed about my discussions is his sense of history.
Source: Andrew Leonard at Salon.com
Jul 31, 2007
The historian Niall Ferguson wishes he could have a free lunch every time he hears "someone declare: 'Malthus was wrong.'" But the converse assertion is equally popular. Throw in some free cocktails every time someone declares that "Malthus was right" and you could be living large for the rest of your natural-born life. (Thanks to Mark Thoma for the link.)
How the World Works' own opinion is that our sample size for determining Malthusian veracity is simply too s
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Jul 31, 2007
Taner Akçam, scholar at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies, has filed a case with the European Court of Human Rights that he says is the first attempt to overturn through that legal channel a controversial provision of Turkey’s penal code that criminalizes “denigrating Turkishness.”He was charged under Article 301 of Turkey’s penal code, which has been used frequently against journalists, academics, and writers, and which Amnesty Intern
Source: Letter to the editor of the WSJ by Robert Higgs
Jul 30, 2007
[Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy for The Independent Institute and Editor of the Institute’s quarterly journal The Independent Review. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Johns Hopkins University, and he has taught at the University of Washington, Lafayette College, Seattle University, and the University of Economics, Prague.]
Dear Editor:
Randy E. Barnett's explication of why some libertarians support the war in Iraq (July 17) cries out for criticism on ma
Source: IFEX
Jul 30, 2007
The Ankara 13th Civil Court of First Instance has accepted part of the court case filed by retired ambassador Sükrü Elekdag against the "Agos" weekly newspaper and historian Taner Akcam.
Akcam wrote an article entitled "Gündüz Aktan and the Saik Problem in the Genocide". It was published by "Agos" on 6, 20 and 27 January and 3, 10 and 17 February 2007. Elekdag filed a suit for 20,000 YTL (approx. US$15,315) claiming that the article "violated"
Source: NYT
Jul 30, 2007
Re “Stacking the Courts,” by Jean Edward Smith (Op-Ed, July 26):
While Mr. Smith begins by warning against the court’s entering into “the vortex of American politics,” insisting that “the court’s authority extends only to legal issues,” he ends by criticizing the current court majority for “thumbing its nose at popular values.”
But popular values are not the stuff of constitutional doctrine. Indeed, the very purpose of a written Constitution is to insulate certain bedro
Source: Jamie Glazov at frontpagemag.com
Jul 30, 2007
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Kevin R. C. Gutzman, J.D., Ph.D. a professor of American history at Western Connecticut State University. An expert in the American Revolution, the Early Republic, and constitutional history, he has published numerous peer-reviewed articles in academic journals and various other articles and reviews there and elsewhere. He is the author of the new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution. He is also the author of the forthcoming Virginia's Am
Source: David Greenberg in the WaPo
Jul 29, 2007
Perhaps because of the pungently Nixonian odor of the Bush White House -- the patriotism politics, the"l'état, c'est moi" declarations, the war -- this season has delivered a bounty of books about the men of Watergate. The current climate has vitalized anxieties about the imperial presidency, drawing fresh scrutiny to the Nixon years from such eminent writers as Robert Dallek, Elizabeth Drew, Margaret MacMillan, James Reston Jr., and Jules Witcover -- not to mention a Nixon biography from the sc
Source: Concord Monitor
Jul 29, 2007
For a historian who has spent much of his career exploring the depths of human violence, Richard Rhodes has reached a surprisingly optimistic conclusion. He believes murder and mayhem have declined across the globe since World War II.
"You don't get rid of violence," Rhodes said. "What you do is bring violence under social control."
Rhodes, 70, won a 1988 Pulitzer Prize for The Making of the Atomic Bomb and has also written books on the hydrogen bomb
Source: Radio Public of Armenia
Jul 29, 2007
If the Armenian Genocide Resolution is put on vote today, it will be certainly adopted, Director of the Genocide Museum-Institute, historian Hayk Demoyan said in an interview with Armenpress. According to the historian, the initial provisions of the international relations are important for the passage of the resolution. “The adoption of the resolution cannot be an urgent issue for the US Congress after the parliamentary elections in Turkey, since both Turkey and Washington need time,” Hayk Demo
Source: http://www.wvgazette.com
Jul 29, 2007
Virgil A. Lewis used his life to capture the past.
Born in 1848, Lewis wrote the first textbook of West Virginian history ever used in public schools. In the early 1900s, he served as the first state historian and archivist. He founded the West Virginia Historical Society and the Southern Historical Magazine.
But now, 95 years after Lewis’ death, some in Mason County fear that the remnants of his own personal history are fading away.
In 1979, his 141-year-o
