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: Tim Harford in the Financial Times (London)
Jun 2, 2007
... Paul David, an economic historian at Stanford, presented a brief, prescient research paper to the American Economic Association back in 1990, titled "The Dynamo and the Computer". Professor David's aim was to persuade economists that the history of the electric dynamo would tell them something about the ongoing information revolution.
Electric light bulbs were available by 1879, and there were generating stations in New York and London by 1881. Yet a thoughtful observe
Source: WSJ
Jun 2, 2007
1. "An Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania" by Peter Markoe (1787)....
2. "Sufferings in Africa" by James Riley (1817)....
3. "The Valley of Vision" by George Bush (1847).
The Puritans viewed themselves as the New Israel and America as the New Promised Land. Accordingly they felt a sense of kinship with the Old Israel--the Jews--and the old Promised Land, then known as Palestine, a part of the Ottoman Empire. Many of the Puritan
Source: Roundtable in the Journal of American History: American Faces: Twentieth-Century Photographs
Jun 1, 2007
Several of the essays speak with a personal voice. This departure from traditional JAH tone and style is deliberate, as one of our purposes is to juxtapose different voices on related topics and themes in the history of American photography, to provoke further questions about the images, and to tease out the connections and tensions be-tween them. For example, Claude Cookman and Ted Engelmann contemplate the painful (and, for the victims of the My Lai massacre, fatal) consequences of taking ph
Source: NYT
Jun 1, 2007
[Click here for background.]
Dear Editor,
We were shocked and disappointed that the Horace Mann school would dismiss a faculty member for writing a novel, and we applaud the many Horace Mann students who courageously and thoughtfully protested this action and advocated for academic freedom. This shows Horace Mann students at their finest.We believe that academic freedom should be the cornerstone
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Jun 1, 2007
Canada's baby boomers have been waiting to hear this: Flower-power worked. The hippies' giddy make-love-not-war-movement of four decades ago actually resulted in a more loving country.
University of Victoria historian Dominique Clément says today's plethora of human-rights legislation and institutions can be traced directly back to the demands by young people in the 1960s and 1970s for a Canada that would be more caring and sensitive toward their marginalized fellow citizens: the po
Source: http://blog.wired.com
Jun 1, 2007
Students will be learning history Sid Meier-style when HistoriCanada: The New World, a Civ III mod, is donated to 100,000 Canadian high schools. Produced by Bitcasters and developed by 2k Games, HistoriCanada lets players take control of one of Canada's early European or aboriginal civilizations, making decisions for them about everything from crop development to war.
The history-teaching part comes from playing through scenarios and answering questions about Canada's history as the
Source: NYT
Jun 1, 2007
A furor has erupted at a New York City private high school over a history teacher’s satirical novel, his impending departure and, now, accusations that administrators barred the student newspaper from publishing a letter by prominent historians and scholars who had come to the teacher’s defense.
The controversy, which has divided teachers, parents and students at the Horace Mann School, a private school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, erupted this week.
The Recor
Source: http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk
Jun 1, 2007
A brilliant new book by a Mexican-American historian documents how, in the Twenties and Thirties, the Nazis were inspired by what the United States had been doing to their Mexican neighbours since 1917.
In Ringside at the Revolution: An Underground Cultural History of El Paso and Juarez, David Dorado Romo establishes the US Immigration Department's systematic brutality along the Rio Grande border.
Mexican visitors were forced to strip naked and subjected to 'screening'
Source: WaPo
May 31, 2007
It was a hard enough day for Shaul Bakhash, as he dealt with the ongoing drama surrounding the imprisonment in Iran of his wife, noted American scholar Haleh Esfandiari. Then he found an express letter on the doorstep of his Potomac home yesterday morning announcing that Citibank had frozen his wife's bank accounts on grounds that she is now a "resident" of Iran.In the letter, Citibank said the accounts had been frozen "in accordance with U.S. Sanctions regula
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
May 31, 2007
The National History Center is hosting a day-long conference on Reforming History Education on June 12, 2007, at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. beginning at 10:00 a.m. The conference, co-sponsored by the American Historical Association, Newberry Library, National Council for the Social Studies, and Organization of American Historians, will address the current state of history education policy and future reforms in light of recent advances in student learning, teacher preparation, asse
Source: Gerard Baker in the WSJ
May 31, 2007
... The European Union's leaders are in the midst of lengthy celebrations to mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the European Communities. At the same time, the gloom that enveloped the EU after the French and Dutch rejected its beloved constitutional treaty two years ago has been replaced by a restrained optimism that the show might just be put back on the road this summer.
Is it possible, then, that the writers who have spent the past few years predicting Europe's collaps
Source: Steve Paulson at Salon
May 30, 2007
Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the
author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book"A
History of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known
as one of the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work
displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the
monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she
carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.
At 1
Source: Victor Davis Hanson at National Review
May 30, 2007
The great American classicist W. K. Pritchett passed away this Tuesday at 98 in Berkeley. WKP, as he was called, reshaped the study of ancient Greek topography, and spent much of his life finding ancient routes, battlefields, and harbors, establishing the nature of the Athenian calendar, defending the authority of the Greek historians from postmodern attacks, and writing a massive five-volume history of the Greek state at war-much of all this in his retirement after a long career of philological
Source: Staten Island Advance
May 30, 2007
Borough President James P. Molinaro has named Tottenville resident Thomas Matteo to be the fourth borough historian to serve Staten Island.
"Staten Island is a rich borough in history," Molinaro said. "We need somebody who can exemplify that, explain that."
Staten Island Advance/Irving SilversteinBorough President James Molinaro, right, and new borough historian Thomas Matteo talk at a press conference at Borough Hall.
Matteo, 58, succeeds Ric
Source: AP
May 30, 2007
Patrick Stockstill, historian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and backstage "keeper of the Oscars" during ceremonies, has died. He was 57.
Stockstill died May 24 of complications following a heart transplant, according to the academy and Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills, where a funeral was planned Wednesday afternoon.
Stockstill started as an assistant librarian at the academy's Margaret Herrick Library in 1982 and was named acad
Source: Alexandra M. Lord at the website of the Chronicle of Higher Ed
May 30, 2007
[Alexandra M. Lord is the acting historian for the U.S. Public Health Service and the cocreator of a Web site, Beyond Academe, designed to help historians find nonacademic careers.]
"How long did you adjunct," whispered the professor, "before you became a public historian?" He glanced over his shoulder, as though concerned that we might be overheard discussing that great taboo for Ph.D.'s, a nonacademic career path.
Surely the only reason I had left
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 30, 2007
Simon Sebag Montefiore's young son, Sasha, knows what it feels like to live with a dictator. When his dad came down to breakfast the other day, the four-year-old chirped up: "Morning, Young Stalin!'' Like the rest of us, he is finding his father's obsession difficult to ignore.
Between recommendations for hair loss treatments, vasectomies and the musical Spamalot, Stalin's sinister portrait is currently hogging five consecutive escalator advert boards on the London Tube. "
Source: Cinnamon Stillwell at the website of CampusWatch
May 30, 2007
[Cinnamon Stillwell is Northern California Representative for Campus Watch.]
What's ailing contemporary Middle East studies? A symposium earlier this month at Stanford University provided a clue.
A paranoid fixation on imagined American and Israeli"empire"; the refusal to accept legitimate criticism; an insulated, elitist worldview; an inability to employ clear, jargon-free English; and a self-defeating hostility towards the West: these vices and more were made clear at
Source: Maureen Dowd in the NYT
May 30, 2007
... Donald Kagan, a respected Yale historian who has written authoritatively on the Peloponnesian War, is the father of Robert Kagan, a neocon who pushed for the Iraq invasion, and Frederick Kagan, a military historian who urged the surge.
I called Professor Kagan to ask him if Thucydides, the master at chronicling hubris and imperial overreaching, might provide the new war czar with any wisdom that can help America sort through the morass of Iraq.
Very much his sons’ f
Source: NYT
May 30, 2007
[Shaul Bakhash is a historian at George Mason University. He is married to Haleh Esfandiari, the American citizen and the director of the Middle Eastern program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington who has been charged by Iran with undermining the regime.]
... Yes, big, tough President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — the man who shows us how tough he is by declaring the Holocaust a myth — had his goons arrest Haleh Esfandiari, a 67-year-old scholar, grandmothe
