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: Marty Lederman (blog)
May 30, 2007
"Cool, Carefully Considered, Methodical, Prolonged and Repeated Subjection of Captives to Physical Torment, and the Accompanying Psychological Terror"[.]
That's the description of the CIA "enhanced interrogation" program by someone who has studied it -- Philip Zelikow, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and, until recently, a close advisor to the Secretary of State. In what the
Source: HNN Staff
May 29, 2007
Doris Kearns Goodwin was interviewed by Brian Williams on NBC News tonight about JFK. She was asked to consider: "Would life be different if JFK was alive for his 90th birthday?" She answered it would be. She said it was possible that he would not have plunged into Vietnam in the same way as LBJ--"and that would have changed everything."
Source: http://www.news8austin.com
May 29, 2007
The chairman of the Department of History at Texas State University is now the state's first State Historian.
Jesus de la Teja was sworn in on Tuesday.
The duties of the state historian include enhancing the knowledge of Texans regarding Texas history and heritage.
The new State Historian says he got to this point thanks to a very famous author.
"I wound up working for James Michener as a research assistant and that's what got me totally h
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 29, 2007
Edward Behr, who died on Saturday aged 81, enjoyed a long career covering wars from Algeria to Angola and Vietnam for American magazines before turning to writing books and television documentaries.
Notable among his books were The Algeria Problem; Hirohito: Behind the Myth; The Last Emperor, a study of the boy emperor Pu Yi; and Kiss the Hand You Cannot Bite, an account of the rise and fall of the Ceausescus in Romania.
In Hirohito, published in 1989, Behr concluded th
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
May 29, 2007
[Clea Lutz Bunch is an assistant professor of Middle East history at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.]
A doctor's receptionist looked at me, wide-eyed, and said with a Southern drawl, "You're going to the Middle East? You must be so brave! Aren't you afraid?" Such statements tend to make me smile; in fact, I often repeat them to amused Jordanians.
I have been in Amman, Jordan, for two weeks at this writing, and I seldom feel afraid. In this era of &q
Source: Eric Alterman at his blog, Altercation (click on SOURCE for embedded links)
May 29, 2007
I spent this weekend at the beach with (my family and) three books: I read Al Gore's The Assault on Reason (Penguin), Neil Jumonville and Kevin Mattson's edited essays, Liberalism for a New Century (University of California) and went for long beach walks with the audio, unabridged version of Walter Isaacson's Einstein, which was published by Simon & Schuster, here, but on audio by Edward Herrmann, here, a terrific actor who always reminds me of Franklin Roosevelt.
Walter's book
Source: Lloyd Billingsley at FrontpageMag.com -- Review of Larry Berman's Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter & Vietnamese Communist Agent (Smithsonian Books)
May 29, 2007
[Lloyd Billingsley is the author of From Mainline to Sideline, the Social Witness of the National Council of Churches, and Hollywood Party: How Communism Seduced the American Film Industry in the 1930s and 1940s.]
In the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Pham Xuan An is a cult hero and the subject of two officially sanctioned books and a 10-part television documentary produced by Ho Chi Minh television in 2005. An's battered Renault is enshrined in an Army museum along with the pistols his comra
Source: NYT
May 29, 2007
James Beck, a Columbia University art historian who became well known as a critic of what he viewed as the ruinous conservation of world masterpieces, including Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, died on Saturday in Manhattan. He was 77.
The cause was cancer, according to Columbia’s department of art history and archaeology.
An Italian Renaissance specialist, Mr. Beck produced 13 books, including three on Raphael and one about the sculptor Jacopo della Quercia, the
Source: NewsHour (PBS)
May 28, 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 accused by Iran of spying.]
JUDY WOODRUFF: All right, Professor Bakhash, your wife, Haleh Esfandiari, couldn't leave Iran since December, has been in prison since earlier in May. What's the latest on her condition?
SHAUL BAKHASH,
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
May 28, 2007
We were surprised to read in The Globe and Mail that the Canadian Association of University Teachers was so outspokenly supportive of Professor Shiraz Dossa, who attended the Holocaust denial conference in Teheran this past fall.
Professor Dossa's complaint, as we understand it, is that he has been subject to much criticism, not to discipline. Academic freedom and freedom of expression, which we all support, does not render any
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria (HNN Blog)
May 28, 2007
Newt Gingrich has a doctorate in modern European history from Tulane and taught history at West Georgia College before he was elected to Congress. William R. Forstchen has a doctorate in American civil war history from Purdue and is an associate professor of history at Montreat College in Montreat, NC. Apparently neither of them ever mastered English prose. See: Janet Maslin,"
Source: AHA Blog
May 28, 2007
James McPherson, respected Civil War historian and past AHA president, will partake in a daylong colloquium in Andover, Massachusetts on August 25th. Lawrence R. Velvel, Dean of the Massachusetts School of Law will lead the event, entitled "A Day With James McPherson: Interpretations Old and New," with audience-based discussions focused around McPherson’s most recent book This Mighty Scourge. The events of the day, and the discussions generated, will be made into a television program t
Source: Houston Chronicle
May 28, 2007
Historian Douglas Brinkley has written on everything from Hurricane Katrina to Jack Kerouac to civil rights icon Rosa Parks, but presidential history has always been one of his passions. He's produced biographies of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter as well as a book on presidential hopeful John Kerry's Vietnam War experiences.
The Reagan Diaries is the latest from the prolific Brinkley, who in July joins the history department at Rice University. The 767-page Diaries represents a substa
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
May 28, 2007
A Canadian political scientist excoriated for attending what was widely labelled a Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran has retaliated with a blistering published attack on his university president and his colleagues for being illiterate Islamophobes.
Writing in the influential Literary Review of Canada, Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor at Nova Scotia's St. Francis Xavier University, said that his academic integrity and academic freedom were grossly impugned by the university adm
Source: Independent (UK)
May 28, 2007
He was among Poland's most acclaimed and respected writers. His works based on his travels across Africa and Latin America, including his bestknown book The Emperor chronicling the downfall of Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, put him on course to be tipped for the Nobel Prize.
So why has the distinguished journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, who died last January at 74, been posthumously "outed" as a spy for the communist-era secret police, and his reputation tarnished for e
Source: http://www.kansascity.com
May 28, 2007
The appearance by historian David McCullough at the Truman Library on June 13 has been moved outdoors to meet demand.
McCullough had been scheduled to speak that day in the Truman Library auditorium. Now he will speak at 4:30 p.m. on the front steps of the library, 500 W. U.S. 24 in Independence.
Admission is free. Some reserved seating is available by calling 816-235-6222. Others are encouraged to bring lawn chairs or blankets.
Source: http://www.philly.com
May 28, 2007
On the windowsill next to his desk in College Hall, Tom Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, displays photographs of the important people in his life.
Next to pictures of his wife and three children are portraits of two men in uniform. Both fought in World War II. Both are captured in their prime - cinematically handsome, winsomely confident, the cream of American manhood.
Childers knows these men well. One is his uncle; the other, his father. They
Source: Andrew Bacevich in an op ed in the WaPo
May 27, 2007
Parents who lose children, whether through accident or illness, inevitably wonder what they could have done to prevent their loss. When my son was killed in Iraq earlier this month at age 27, I found myself pondering my responsibility for his death.
Among the hundreds of messages that my wife and I have received, two bore directly on this question. Both held me personally culpable, insisting that my public opposition to the war had provided aid and comfort to the enemy. Each sa
Source: Boston Globe
May 27, 2007
Thanks to English novels and countless BBC period pieces, Americans have a rather idealized view of 18th-century English life, impressions that still shape our views of the Mother Country. You could see it in the striking Anglophilia that greeted the queen’s recent visit to our shores, with the deference paid to protocol and ancient notions of refinement.
But the young English historian Emily Cockayne thinks it’s worth noting that historians (and Masterpiece Theatre directors) have
Source: David Broder in the WaPo
May 27, 2007
When historian Douglas Brinkley was asked by the late Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., general editor of the American Presidents series published by Times Books, to undertake a short biography of Gerald R. Ford, the man from Michigan who served less than three years in the White House was a neglected subject.
By the time Brinkley had finished the manuscript, Ford's story had been told, copiously and repeatedly, in newspaper obituaries recording his death at age 93 last December, and his c
