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: Cinnamon Stillwell at the website of CampusWatch
Jul 21, 2007
After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it became painfully clear that if America was to become more engaged in the Middle East, it would need to develop a greater understanding of the area. Scholars of Middle East studies at our nation's universities were called upon to explain the religious, cultural and political dynamics of the region to students, journalists, and politicians
Unfortunately, many of the leading academic lights in the field proved to be woefully unprepared
Source: http://www.eadt.co.uk
Jul 20, 2007
TWO prominent residents of Wivenhoe have received honorary degrees from Essex University.
Historian Hugh Brogan and artist James Dodds received the special recognition as part of the university's graduation ceremonies at the Wivenhoe Park campus yesterday.
Professor Brogan, an expert on the history of the United States, taught in the university's history department for 24 years before his retirement in 1998.
Before coming to Essex, Prof Brogan was a fellow
Source: Michael Nelson in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Jul 20, 2007
[Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College. He is author, with John Mason, of How the South Joined the Gambling Nation: The Politics of State Policy Innovation (Louisiana State University Press, 2007) and, with Sidney Milkis, The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-2007 (CQ Press, 2007).]
... In trying to make sense of Nixon, Dallek seems to follow Reeves's 2001 book, President Nixon: Alone in the White House, in arguing that Nixon was mainly motiv
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Jul 20, 2007
After a five-year struggle, a history instructor who won a reverse-discrimination lawsuit against Bishop State Community College will return to work on the Alabama campus.
The college announced a settlement with the instructor, Sarah E. Taylor, on Wednesday. Ms. Taylor will return to her former position on August 1 and receive $120,000 each year for the next three years in addition to her salary and legal fees amounting to $85,000, said her lawyer, Steven L. Terry, in an interview o
Source: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
Jul 20, 2007
To the Editor:
Re “Who Killed Ashraf Marwan?,” by Howard Blum (Op-Ed, July 13):
In a forthcoming study, we present new evidence confirming the assumption that Ashraf Marwan was deployed by the Egyptian authorities to convey disinformation, to Britain as well as to Israel.
Our study includes a cable from a British military attaché in Cairo dated July 22, 1972, four days after President Anwar el-Sadat announced what became fixated in Western and Israeli perce
Source: http://www.heraldonline.com
Jul 19, 2007
Author and historian [Jane] Douglas Summers Brown was so particular about her research and writing that she wrote her own obituary. She gave it to family members who updated it for the Lynchburg (Va.) News & Advance when Brown died Friday.
She was 104.
In 1953, Brown wrote "A City Without Cobwebs," an in-depth history of Rock Hill. The book traces the city's existence from its discovery by European explorers, through the Civil War, Reconstruction and up to the f
Source: Bloomberg News
Jul 19, 2007
For most Israelis and much of the world, the 1967 Six-Day War is a simple David and Goliath story.
Syria lobs shells onto the Galilee. Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser orders United Nations troops out of his way, masses his army opposite the border with Israel and vows to drive the Jews into the sea. Israel hesitates but finally strikes, smashing its enemies and conquering territory more than three times its size in the time it took God to create the world.
In "1967: Isr
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
Jul 19, 2007
THE commemoration of today's 91st anniversary of Australia's worst 24-hour battle has been described as a sham by the historian Neville Kidd. He says the name of the battle, Fromelles, is not even on the Anzac Memorial where the ceremony is taking place at Hyde Park.
"It is a travesty to the memory of nearly 2000 soldiers killed at Fromelles," said Mr Kidd, of Pymble, whose father fought on the Western Front.
He said it was "such a disgrace that the NSW G
Source: Deutsche Welle
Jul 18, 2007
A German historian has called on the Bavarian government to lift a ban on publishing Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf," saying that an annotated edition could expose the book as a badly written hate tirade.
In an interview with Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Horst Möller, director of the Institute of Contemporary History, said that historians should be given a chance to publish an edition of Hitler's 1924 book.
"All kinds of Nazi incend
Source: NYT
Jul 18, 2007
F. Champion Ward, a noted educator and former Ford Foundation executive who helped devise the process by which winners of the MacArthur Foundation's ''genius awards'' are selected each year without their even knowing they have been nominated, died July 2 at his home in North Branford, Conn. He was 96.
The death was confirmed by his son Geoffrey C. Ward, the historian.
Dr. Ward was chancellor of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan from 1980 until 1983. From
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jul 17, 2007
Joseph Martin Hernon, a history professor and author of a study of character in the U.S. Senate, has died of cancer in Boston. He was 70.
Mr. Hernon, who died June 29, was a professor of Irish history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for more than 25 years. He attracted attention with the publication of his 1996 book "Profiles in Character: Hubris and Heroism in the U.S. Senate, 1789-1990."
"Too much of our history centers on presidencies,&qu
Source: John H. Taylor at the website of the Nixon Library
Jul 17, 2007
[John H. Taylor is Executive Director, Nixon Foundation.]
“It’s the opposite of truth” – in other words, a lie – to say that the famous 18 and a half-minute gap on a Watergate tape could have resulted from a mechanical malfunction rather than deliberate erasure.
So claims historian David Greenberg. Not a stretch, mind you; not a controversial -- or even a ridiculous -- assertion. A lie.
In fact, some experts did say that the erasures might have been acciden
Source: Ascribe
Jul 17, 2007
Jeffrey Wasserstrom has watched China's history unfold over the last 20 years - witnessing Starbucks gain popularity in Shanghai and photographing a student protester in Beijing wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt.
"Sometimes I get wrapped up in the uniqueness of what I've experienced," said Wasserstrom, a UC Irvine history professor.
With his new book of essays, "China's Brave New World - And Other Tales for Global Times" (Indiana University Pr
Source: New York Post
Jul 17, 2007
IN Ken Burns' "The War," historians are missing in action.
It's the most noticeable difference between "The War," Burns' gut-wrenching, 14-hour documentary on World War II, and the most famous of his other films, "The Civil War," in which historians such as the late Shelby Foote played such an important part.
The only talking heads in "The War" are a handful of men and women, now elderly, who lived through it, either overseas in
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock)
Jul 17, 2007
Gov. Mike Beebe expressed support Monday for the state's new public school social studies curriculum, which some Arkansas historians say shortchanges the teaching of state history.
Spokesman Matt DeCample said Monday that Beebe won't back the Arkansas History Education Coalition's call for a one-year moratorium of the new curriculum. The governor also refused to create a special committee to study the revision process.
Beebe believes the new curriculum, which incorporat
Source: NYT
Jul 17, 2007
Two Iranian-Americans detained here on national security charges appeared Monday for the first time on state television, with one saying in a brief video clip that his foundation may have targeted ''the world of Islam.''
The TV images followed Iran's announcement this month that fresh evidence had pushed its judiciary to launch new investigations into the cases of Haleh Esfandiari [wife of George Mason University historian Shaul Bakhash] and Kian Tajbakhsh.
State TV sai
Source: Inside Higher Ed (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.)
Jul 17, 2007
In an urgent effort to save a critical mass of scholars unlike any initiative undertaken since World War II, the Institute of International Education’s Scholar Rescue Fund is finalizing plans to rescue hundreds of Iraqi professors beginning in the coming months.
“We consider it to be the first large-scale effort of its kind since the 1930s, when IIE’s Emergency Rescue Committee rescued over 300 senior European scholars and brought them to safety in the United States,” said Jim Mille
Source: Max Holland--Letter to Howard Kurtz, media critic of the WaPo
Jul 17, 2007
Dear Mr. Kurtz,
I'm writing to bring to your attention some unbecoming behavior at
Slate by one of its columnists, Ron Rosenbaum.
Four months ago, John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr wrote an article for
the website I edit, Washington Decoded, about McCarthyite tactics being
employed by Alger Hiss's shrinking band of true believers. The article,"The New McCarthyism," was also linked from the
Source: Sandstorm, the blog of Martin Kramer
Jul 17, 2007
Last week, Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign announced the Mayor's team of foreign policy advisors. Charles Hill, a renowned former diplomat who now teaches at Yale, has been named Giuliani's chief foreign policy advisor and head of his foreign policy advisory board. Other senior advisors whom I know personally include my old frien
Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review
Jul 17, 2007
To the Editor:
As a historian who has written about Andrew Carnegie and Gilded-Age America, and as an ex-journalist, I read your article with great interest.
While you unearthed many telling similarities of our era and that of Carnegie, an important matter was not mentioned: In the 1880s millions of Americans — urban workers and farmers, native-born and immigrant, Southerners and Northerners — launched mass democratic movements out of the belief that something had gone
