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: NewsHour (PBS)
May 17, 2007
JIM LEHRER: And finally tonight, Judy Woodruff talks to Michael Beschloss about his new book on presidents.
JUDY WOODRUFF: Standing up for principle. Throughout the history of the United States, there have been moments when American presidents have stood for principles that were not popular at the time. Michael Beschloss, historian and NewsHour regular, looks at nine presidents in his new book, "Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America, 1789-1989."
Source: AHA Blog
May 17, 2007
On April 27-28, 2007, the New-York Historical Society held its annual Weekend with History gala event. This two-day program of informal conversations and presentations featured some of America’s leading historians, like Eric Foner, Kenneth T. Jackson, and Sean Wilentz among others, as well as media figures like Cokie Roberts and Lesley Stahl. In a ceremony on the 27th, City University of New York Professor David Nasaw was named the society’s American Historian Laureate.
Nasaw was al
Source: Economist
May 17, 2007
[HNN Editor: Each week the Economist runs just a single obituary. This week it was for Chandler.]
TODAY'S business leaders are voracious consumers of management advice. They are forever calling in the consultants and surfing the business press for the next big thing. So here is a free tip. Get off the whirligig of management fads. Forget about “long tails” and “wikinomics” for a while and do something old-fashioned. Sit down with a handful of books—admittedly rather fat books—and
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 17, 2007
[Leon Fink is a professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago and editor of Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas.]
... Though reviewers of book manuscripts customarily receive an honorarium, the routine work of journal reviewers regularly goes unrewarded, as well as unrecognized by the outside world. In both cases, the satisfaction of the peer reviewer comes mostly from recognition as an expert in the field and from intimate association with a crea
Source: NYT
May 17, 2007
[On May 17, 2007 Forbes suspended publication of American Heritage (the website remains in operation). Richard Snow is the editor.]
... Mr. Snow, 59, went to work in the American Heritage mailroom in 1965, when Columbia University insisted he take a little time off, and joined the staff full time when he finally graduated, in 1970. He has been there ever since, and in 1990 he became the magazine’s sixth editor, succeeding Byron Dobell.
Either he was a perfect fit to be
Source: Campus Watch
May 17, 2007
Stanford Middle East history professor and former president of the Middle East Studies Association Joel Beinin is known for letting his one-sided political perspectives invade the classroom. As former Stanford professor Steven Zipperstein told The Jewish Weekly of Northern California in 2002,"It's said that Joel Beinin doesn't believe in balance as an intrins
Source: Raymond Ibrahim in National Review Online
May 16, 2007
Islamic apologist extraordinaire Karen Armstrong is at it again. In an article entitled “Balancing the Prophet” published by the Financial Times, the self-proclaimed “freelance monotheist” engages in what can only be considered second-rate sophistry.The false statements begin in her opening paragraph:Ever since the Crusades, people in the west have seen the prophet Muhammad as a sinister
Source: http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk
May 16, 2007
A HISTORY professor who wrote a best-selling book about Scotland was yesterday banned from the road for drink-driving.
Cops spotted Tom Devine's car swerving from lane to lane on the M8. He was doing just 40mph in a 70mph section in his Jaguar XJ8.
A court yesterday heard that Devine, 61, left, was more than twice the booze limit.
Devine is the Sir William Fraser chair of Scottish history at Edinburgh University - the top job in the field.
His
Source: CBS
May 16, 2007
The author of "The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast" is leaving the city where he chronicled storm survivors' tales. After 14 years in New Orleans, Douglas Brinkley has accepted a job at Rice University, where he will become a professor of history and fellow at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy in Houston.
Brinkley, who currently teaches at Tulane and has worked as a CBS News consultant, said he was enticed not only
Source: Reuters
May 16, 2007
CHICAGO -- American original Studs Terkel, the author and oral historian who for decades gave a voice to working men and women, turned 95 on Wednesday. But don't worry about his memory. He's sharp as a tack.
In fact, he's the one doing the worrying -- about what he describes as the memory loss of a country he suggests may be more interested in the transgressions of celebrities than more substantive affairs such as the politics of the Bush administration, which he characterizes as a"burlesq
Source: USA Today
May 15, 2007
... "This was a private library that saw itself as a Republican institution, and its programming reflected that. This will change," says Timothy Naftali, 45, the University of Virginia historian who will become federal director of the [Nixon] library this summer or fall, when the National Archives is to accept the institution into the presidential libraries system under a 2004 law.
When the archives and the Nixon foundation asked Naftali to apply for the library post, he i
Source: Alternet
May 15, 2007
By the time you read this, Studs Terkel will have had a big birthday. On April 16, a month before he turned 95, I visited his stolid brick home in Uptown on Chicago's north lakefront. While he's had his "ups and downs" in recent months, his eyes still twinkle with the promise of more stories to tell.
He waved me over to his customary spot, a rumpled chair in a sun-drenched corner of the living room. Studs was suited up in his trademark red-checked flannel shirt and red soc
Source: AP
May 14, 2007
The Idaho State Historical Society said Monday it has hired a new executive director, replacing the one who quit last year after auditors found he'd accepted thousands in improper payments and travel reimbursements.
The money was later repaid.
Janet L. Gallimore, who has headed up fundraising and community outreach at the public- and privately funded Confluence Project in Vancouver, Wash., starts next month in Boise. She replaces Steve Guerber, who quit in November afte
Source: Steven Clemons in the Washington Note
May 14, 2007
Boston University Professor Andrew J. Bacevich is a brave, thoughtful public intellectual who has tried -- in reserved, serious terms -- to challenge the legitimacy of the Iraq War. He has been one of the most articulate leading thinkers among military-policy dissident conservatives who have exposed the inanity of this war and the damage it has done. He authored the critically-acclaimed book,
Source: PBS NewsHour Interview
May 14, 2007
Jeffrey Brown provides a Media Unit report on the debate over Ken Burns’ PBS series on World War II. Then, Brown speaks with guests including: Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, director of the U.S. Latino and Latina World War II Oral History Project at the University of Texas at Austin, who is also one of the founders of the Defend the Honor campaign, formed to create greater awareness about the World War II Hispanic community; and, Nancy Buirski, the CEO, founder and artistic director of the Full Frame D
Source: Scrapbook in the Weekly Standard
May 14, 2007
The accidental death of David Halberstam, onetime war correspondent and author of The Best and the Brightest (1972), has inspired the sort of mournful, sometimes impassioned, obituary language reserved for deceased journalists. THE SCRAPBOOK, in its wisdom, looks upon this as a form of professional courtesy: Only among journalists, after all, is the death of a journalist a national calamity.
Yet Halberstam's demise has yielded an unexpected chief mourner: Democratic foreign policy g
Source: HNN Staff
May 14, 2007
The latest issue of Newsweek features a picture of Harry Truman next to the caption: WANTED: A NEW TRUMAN.
The cover story plays off interviews with Michael Beschloss, whose latest book concerns presidential courage: Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989.
The isue includes an op ed by Beschloss and an excerpt from his book.
Source: Mark Stood Lawrence in the NYT Book Review
May 13, 2007
... “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power” makes a valuable contribution to the study of American policy making during the turbulent years from 1969 through 1974. Partly, it does this by transcending the stale polemics that have surrounded the study of Nixon and Kissinger. But its more significant, if not wholly convincing, achievement is to connect the unevenness of their policy-making performance with the ups and downs of their peculiar personalities. “The careers of both Nixon and Kissinger
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
May 13, 2007
Stanley A. Karnow:
Withdraw now
Karnow is a veteran Time-Life journalist who covered U.S. combat in Vietnam from 1959 and wrote "Vietnam: A History."...
Mark Moyar:
Be wary of withdrawing
Moyar is a scholar at the U.S. Marine Corps University at Quantico, Va., who wrote "Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War 1954-1965."...
Robert K. Brigham:
Negotiate with neighbors
Brigham is a professor of history and internati
Source: Independent (UK)
May 13, 2007
When I met Ronald Hutton, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, at the British Library, he had just come from lecturing to a group of sixth formers at the Camden Centre. When I asked what he had been lecturing on, he answered briskly: "Oliver Cromwell." For an author who's just published a book on Druids, and whose earlier work (Triumph of the Moon, The Stations of the Sun, Shamanism) centres on paganism, wicca, ceremonial magic and seasonal rituals, this seemed fairly mil
