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: Baltimore Sun
May 23, 2007
Baltimore historian Taylor Branch is to receive a major literary award today for the final installment of his trilogy on Martin Luther King Jr. and his times.
The book, At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68 (Simon & Schuster, 2006), is to be honored at George Washington University by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial, a nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing human rights.
At Canaan's Edge has already won the 2006 Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize fo
Source: WaPo
May 23, 2007
Charles Rappleye, who was once an investigative journalist, has won the third annual $50,000 George Washington Book Prize for his biography "Sons of Providence: The Brown Brothers, the Slave Trade, and the American Revolution." It's the story of John and Moses Brown, brothers who founded Brown University but were dramatically opposed to each other on the business of slavery. It was a system that Rappleye describes in his book as "the most hazardous and the most lucrative business
Source: PRNewswire
May 22, 2007
Award-winning television historian Tim Brooks, whose seminal book The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present is considered the pre-eminent industry reference work, will conclude his remarkable 30-plus-year career as a research executive when he retires as Lifetime Networks' Executive Vice President of Research at the end of 2007.
Brooks, whose career has spanned senior positions at NBC, USA Networks and NW Ayer, joined Lifetime in January 2000. His
Source: http://www.democratandchronicle.com
May 22, 2007
Local historians use words like "incomprehensible" to describe a proposal to eliminate the full-time city historian in favor of a part-time position subcontracted through the Rochester Historical Society.
Mayor Robert Duffy has proposed such a move in his 2007-08 budget released Friday.
The administration argues that working through a private nonprofit agency is more cost-effective. Preparations will continue for an international Underground Railroad conferenc
Source: Crimson
May 22, 2007
Robert C. Darnton '60, a historian of 18th-century France from Princeton, will serve as the director of the Harvard University Library, Provost Steven E. Hyman announced Tuesday afternoon.
Darnton will replace long-time library director Sidney Verba '53 on July 1 and assume Verba's post as the Pforzheimer University Professor. Verba announced his intention to retire in September after directing the University's 90 libraries for 23 years.
Darnton, a scholar in the &quo
Source: Judith Dobrzynski in the WSJ
May 22, 2007
If Mr. Cole is known at all--NEH chairmen rarely make headlines--it's for statements like "History is a safeguard for our democracy" and "It's part of our national security." In speeches, he frequently cites appalling statistics--half the students in elite universities cannot date the Civil War to the correct half-century, for example, and more people can name the Three Stooges than can list the three government branches. Noting that Americans are united not by race or religi
Source: Juan Cole at Informed Comment (blog)
May 22, 2007
[HNN Editor: Shaul Bakhash teaches history at George Mason University. His wife is Haleh Esfandiari.]
The Iranian government has now charged detained Iranian-American academic Haleh Esfandiari with trying to overthrow the current regime, according to the Washington Post's Robin Wright. This AP
Source: PBS NewsHour
May 21, 2007
JUDY WOODRUFF: From Vietnam to the open-door policy with China, and of course Watergate, the tumultuous years of the Nixon White House had a profound effect on the modern presidency. But behind the scenes, it was the interaction between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser and secretary of state, that influenced much of the administration's policy.
Not long ago, the National Archives released tens of thousands of pages of documents and hours of audiotapes
Source: American Conservative
May 21, 2007
[Wilson Burman is the pen name for a New York City financial executive who writes The Cunning Realist blog. ]
If Alexis de Tocqueville had sat in the bleacher seats at Yankee Stadium for an entire summer, he would have been an even more interesting read. Fortunately, we had our own master observer of Americana. That the essence of the nation’s character resides in its grandest pursuits as well as its simplest rituals is the legacy of David Halberstam.
Halberstam’s death on Apr
Source: Democracy Now
May 21, 2007
AMY GOODMAN: Today, we spend the hour examining the life and death of Malcolm X, one of the most influential political figures of the twentieth century. Saturday would have been Malcolm X's eighty-second birthday. This is Malcolm X speaking a week before he was assassinated in 1965.
MALCOLM X: …my house was bombed. It was bombed by the Black Muslim movement upon the orders of Elijah Muhammad. Now, they had come around to -- they had planned to do it from the front and the back so t
Source: Haaretz
May 21, 2007
Hebrew University sociologist Baruch Kimmerling, one of the first to apply post-colonial theories to the Zionist movement, died Sunday after a long battle with cancer. He was 67.
Despite his lack of training as a historian, Professor Kimmerling was identified with "the new historians" who provided alternative views on Israel's history. He also studied Israeli power structures.
Defining himself as a "sociologist of politics in the wider sense of the term
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 21, 2007
Will a surge of U.S. troops make a difference in Iraq? How viable is the current Iraqi government? Will an American withdrawal lead to all-out civil war?
In a new book, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace (Yale University Press), Ali A. Allawi argues that American forces failed to understand what they were getting into and made numerous costly mistakes along the way. He brings an insider's perspective to the subject: A longtime opponent of the Baathist regime,
Source: Clive Thompson in Wired
May 21, 2007
What if the great events in history had turned out differently? How would the world today be changed?
Niall Ferguson wonders about this a lot. He's a well-known economic historian at New York University, and a champion of "counterfactual thinking," or the re-imagining of major historical events, with the variables slightly tweaked. In a 1999 book Virtual Histories, Ferguson edited a collection of delightfully weird counterfactual hypotheses. One essay argued that if Mikhai
Source: Scrapbook in the Weekly Standard
May 21, 2007
THE SCRAPBOOK admits it: Sometimes things just fall into our lap, or across our desk, that we couldn't possibly invent. A case in point is this week's announcement that publisher Andre Schiffrin, founder of the New Press, will be celebrating "oral historian" Studs Terkel's 95th birthday on Wednesday, May 16, with a series of fun-filled suggestions on his corporate website.
The literary life just doesn't get any better than this. Admirers of Studs are encouraged to gather i
Source: Jon Wiener in the Nation
May 21, 2007
[Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. Since then he’s written more than 100 stories and reviews for the magazine, many about American history, university politics, and California life. He’s also professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host.]
Alan Dershowitz is at it again: First he tried to get California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to stop the University of California Press (UCP) from publishing a book highly critical of him,
Source: Poland.pl
May 20, 2007
Self-taught British historian David Irving, was ordered out of International Warsaw Book Fair where he was attempting to display his books – the fairs' organizers informed.
Irving is a convicted Holocaust denier – he spent more than a year in an Austrian jail for denying the Nazis organized mass murder of six million Jews during World War Two.
According to Grzegorz Guzowski, the organizers received detailed materials on his work from Irving's publishers only a few hours
Source: Meet the Press
May 20, 2007
MR. RUSSERT: And we are back with “The Reagan Diaries.”
Historian Doug Brinkley, you are the editor. What is the importance of “The Reagan Diaries”?
MR. DOUGLAS BRINKLEY: Well, it’s Ronald Reagan in real time. It’s—every day he was president, he would grab these maroon volumes, eight and a half by 11, and handwrite what he felt that day. He’d usually write them before he went to bed in the White House, occasionally bring them on Air Force One, Marine One. So we get to r
Source: WSJ
May 19, 2007
Early this month, 71-year-old Philip Herzog gathered with his two brothers and several descendants in the spartan conference room of the family's kosher wine firm. A representative of the company's bank was coming to make a presentation -- not about the Herzogs' business, but about their family tree.
"Your family has a history of great tragedy, but also great joy," said Andy Anderson, the chief historian at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo & Co. Bringing out books and d
Source: NYT
May 19, 2007
Karen Hess, an American culinary historian who brought an academic rigor to the study of recipes, cooking techniques and ordinary American kitchen practices, died Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 88.
She died after suffering a stroke the week before, her son Peter Hess said.
Ms. Hess, known as a kind but combative personality, did not shrink from taking on the icons of American cookery, who she felt presented a false picture not only of the quality of American food and coo
Source: Press Release -- UCLA
May 18, 2007
Eugen Weber, an internationally renowned historian and former dean of UCLA's College of Letters and Science, died Thursday. He was 82.
A member of UCLA's faculty since 1956 and a prolific author, Weber wrote about French culture and politics in the 19th and 20th centuries, anti-Semitism and the origins of the Holocaust, fascism, intellectual history, and many other subjects. He served as dean from 1977 to 1982 and held a UCLA endowed chair in modern European history, which is now na
