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: Steve Plaut at frontpagemag.com (click here for embedded links)
Jul 9, 2007
[Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his"blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.]
... Perhaps the best known Israeli academic expatriate who has made a career out of impugning and defaming Israel is Dr. Ilan Pappe, until recently a lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa, now at the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
Jul 9, 2007
[Fatemeh Keshavarz is a professor of Persian language and comparative literature and chair of the department of Asian and Near Eastern languages and literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Jasmine and Stars: Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).]
The recent arrest in Iran of Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, has ignited a storm of protest
Source: Max Boot in the NYT Book Review
Jul 8, 2007
... “counterfactual” history has become fashionable lately, with historians speculating on paths not taken, in books with titles beginning “What If?” Ian Kershaw doesn’t go quite that far in “Fateful Choices,” but he does attempt to show how one of the most consequential events of the 20th century — World War II — took shape, and why it might have turned out differently.
A professor at the University of Sheffield in England and the author of an acclaimed two-volume biography of Hitl
Source: NYT Book Review
Jul 8, 2007
... While it was acceptable to Grass’s critics that he had volunteered for the submarine corps at the age of 15, the revelation that he was drafted into the Waffen SS, the combat force of the SS, in 1944, when he was 17, was a shock. Grass spent the final months of the war with the force — later convicted en masse of war crimes by the Nuremberg tribunal.
Why had he waited so long to tell? his critics asked. (As if there had ever been a time when he wouldn’t have been criticized for
Source: LAT frontpage story
Jul 8, 2007
"I can't run a shrine," says [Timothy Naftali] the man who ordered the demolition [of the old Watergate exhibit at the Nixon library, which claimed that Nixon was done in by enemies] .... Named last year as the library's first federal director, the Harvard-trained historian is guiding the library's shift from a privately run facility — the only modern presidential library not part of the federal system — to an institution that bears the National Archives' imprimatur.
In e
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria (HNN Blog)
Jul 8, 2007
... Last July, Cox News journalist Elliott Jaspin published a four-part series of articles about communities in the United States that drove out their African American residents between 1864 and 1924. The syndicate had allowed Jaspin to devote five years of his time on its payroll exclusively to the series. His story covered 16 pages in Cox's Austin American-Statesman and versions of it appeared in five other Cox newspapers. The American-Statesman even created
Source: Northern Territory News
Jul 7, 2007
A MEMORIAL to Charles Darwin should be built in the city named after him, an historian said yesterday.
Alister Hayes hopes the memorial will be ready for the 200th anniversary of the Englishman's birth in 2009.
A statue of Darwin is to be built near the bus exchange by private developer Allan Garraway.
But some have suggested a bronze monument to the father of evolutionary science should be a centrepiece of the $1.1 billion waterfront development.
Source: Martin Woollacott in the Guardian
Jul 7, 2007
It has been Eric Hobsbawm's fate to live to see the institutions whose rise he analysed as a historian of the modern world decline or disappear. Empires are gone, except for one, and that one is floundering. Nation states control less and less, while often pretending they control more and more. Democracy puffs itself up, but politicians wonder privately how long its eroded routines will continue to command allegiance. Mass parties and ideological movements survive largely as shells. Even the reb
Source: Seattle Times
Jul 6, 2007
Top-notch journalists such as Tim Weiner of The New York Times are often so busy writing about what happened today that they cannot devote their talent to placing those deadline stories in context.
Fortunately, Weiner has stepped back from his daily coverage of the so-called U.S. government "intelligence" agencies to look at the big picture.
With "Legacy of Ashes," Weiner punctures claims by the spymasters at the Central Intelligence Agency that they
Source: Associated Baptist Press
Jul 6, 2007
One of the most prominent historians of American evangelicalism called on “true Baptists” to re-assert their prophetic role “as watchmen on the wall of separation between church and state.”
Randall Ballmer, a history professor at Columbia University, told more than 550 supporters of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty that many of America’s Baptists, in recent decades, have “lost their way.”
“They have been seduced by leaders of the Religious Right into th
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE) (Click here for embedded links.)
Jul 6, 2007
Juan R.I. Cole turned some heads this week when he announced the launch of a new group blog on current events, Informed Comment Global Affairs. We had a number of questions for the University of Michigan historian -- and frequent Review contributor -- that he was kind enough to answer by e-mail.
[CHE] Why did you start the original Informed Comment, your blog on the Middle East, and how important has its growth and popularity been to your car
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jul 6, 2007
... Mr. Dyson's departure had no slice of controversy, only confusion. Before any official moves were announced, the 48-year-old scholar, who is an authority on hip-hop and many other cultural topics, listed himself as a university professor at Georgetown on a Web site promoting his new book.
Terrence P. Reynolds, chairman of the theology department at Georgetown, said this week that he had heard conversations about Mr. Dyson, but that they were at a level above him. "It may be
Source: John Gravois in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Jul 6, 2007
I had a fat chance of finding a Dungeons & Dragons game in Kalamazoo, they told me. It was a harebrained quest. But it was a quest, at least, and that seemed appropriate.
In early May, I set out for the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University, the world's premier annual gathering of scholars who study the middle ages. The congress is probably the best place to hear the latest research on early vernacular Bibles and Norse myths, but my goal was t
Source: Press Release--Northwestern
Jul 5, 2007
Clarence L. Ver Steeg of Evanston, a distinguished historian who played a key role in the development and expansion of Northwestern University in the 1960s, died July 2 at the age of 84 in the Presbyterian Homes, Evanston.
A funeral service and burial were held today (July 5) in Mr. Ver Steeg’s hometown of Orange City, Iowa.
Mr. Ver Steeg was a noted scholar who headed the University’s Faculty Planning Committee on the 1960s that developed strategic plans for academic a
Source: http://www.aikenstandard.com
Jul 5, 2007
A lifelong Civil War historian will be bringing his latest work to The Book Stall later this month for a book signing.
Orangeburg's Walter Brian Cisco, author of "War Crimes Against Southern Civilians," will be at the Hayne Avenue bookstore from noon to 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 25.
Cisco is a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War and a recipient of the Army Commendation Medal. He also served as a captain of the South Carolina State Guard.
His long-he
Source: Hartford Courant
Jul 5, 2007
COLEBROOK, CT Fourth of July orations have long been a chance to measure the nation against its ideals, historian Eric Foner told residents gathered for the annual Independence Day celebration Wednesday.
Two centuries ago, Foner said, speakers questioned how a nation professing to be a beacon of freedom could practice slavery.
Then Foner, the Dewitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, offered a modern-day version of that challenge.
In the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jul 5, 2007
In late April, John D. Lewis, a historian and classicist at Ashland University, flew to Virginia to deliver a lecture at George Mason University about U.S. policy toward Iran. Mr. Lewis is an admirer of the late Ayn Rand, and he shares her belief that democracies should respond to external attacks without much concern for civilian casualties. He wrote in an essay in 2006 that "America, acting alone and with overwhelming force, must destroy the Iranian Islamic State now. It must do so openly
Source: HNN Staff
Jul 5, 2007
Back in January, after the arrest of historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto for jaywalking at the annual convention of the American Historical Association, the Atlanta mayor's offfice indicated that a full investigation would be undertaken to find out what happened.
HNN on several occasions has called the mayor's office in Atlanta to follow-up. Each time we were instruicted to leave a voice mail for the press office. Each time we got no
Source: Ray Raphael in the course of an interview with Allen Barra at the American Heritage Blog
Jul 4, 2007
[Berra;] You write, “Founder chic authors depict political leaders as causal agents who are personally responsible for all the major events of the times. . . . Since the importance of their stories is determined in part by the importance of their protagonists, biographies have a vested interest in endowing their subjects with as much historical significance as the record will bear—and sometimes more.” You take particular exception to David McCullough’s view of John Adams: “‘It was John Adams,’ w
Source: Allen Barra at the American Heritage Blog
Jul 4, 2007
Paul Revere didn't make that ride-except in
Longfellow's poem. Patrick Henry probably didn't say
'Give me liberty or give me death!' The words were
likely put into his mouth by a biographer several
decades after his death. Washington's winter at Valley
Forge really wasn't that bad compared with other
winters during the Revolution. Molly Pitcher probably
never existed, and the colonies most definitely did not
offer slaves their freedom to fight against the
British.
These are just a
