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: Informed Comment (Blog)
May 12, 2007
[Shaul Bakhash teaches history at George Mason University. His wife is Haleh Esfandiari.]
May 11, 2007
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Pasteur Ave
Tehran 13168-43311
Iran
Your Excellency,
I am writing on behalf of the Committee on Academic Freedom (CAF) of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) to express our dismay over the harassment and subsequent detention of Dr. Haleh Esfandiari, director of the Mid
Source: Press Release -- defendthehonor
May 11, 2007
AUSTIN, Texas - This week's announcement that Ken Burns has reached a general "understanding" with two Latino organizations to include the Latino WWII perspective in his upcoming 14-hour documentary may represent a step forward, but, the Defend the Honor Campaign, notes, significant questions remain. The Defend The Honor Campaign has released a letter (see below) they sent to Paula Kerger, President and CEO of PBS, requesting sufficient details about the proposed changes to the film to
Source: The Progressive
May 11, 2007
Michael Baker worked for the Lincoln, Nebraska, public schools since 1981.
But after he showed the documentary “Baghdad ER” to his geography class on April 18, his career there was over.
This, despite the fact that in 2006, Baker was one of only 47 teachers in the state to win National Board Certification, according to the Lincoln Journal Star, which broke the story.
Baker tells The Progressive that he cannot talk freely about what happened because he reach
Source: NYT
May 11, 2007
... [N]ine prominent professors are leading an effort [at Harvard] to rethink the culture of undergraduate teaching and learning. Headed by Theda Skocpol, a social scientist, the group has issued a report calling for sweeping institutional change, including continuing evaluation and assessment of teaching and learning, and a proposal that teaching be weighed equally with contributions to research in annual salary adjustments....
The report is among the initiatives that Drew Gilpin F
Source: Joseph Puder at frontpagemag.com
May 11, 2007
At 91, Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern Studies who for more than half a century has been considered one of the West's foremost scholars of Islamic history and culture, is the author of more than two dozen books, most notably The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, and The Muslim Discovery of Europe and is the subject of envy because of his remarkably lucid mind and memory. Both qualities were on display on Wednesday evening, May 2, 2007
Source: Press Release -- Harvard Business School
May 11, 2007
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., the renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard Business School historian who founded the field of business history, died on Wednesday, May 9, at Youville Hospital in Cambridge, Mass., at the age of 88. In his long and legendary career, he chronicled and analyzed big businesses around the globe in a prolific and extraordinarily influential corpus of books and articles. At the time of his death, he was the School’s Isidor Straus Professor of Business History, Emeritus.
Source: Canadian Jewish News
May 10, 2007
WINNIPEG — Six years ago, Deborah Lipstadt, a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University in Atlanta, found herself thrust into the international media spotlight when she was sued for libel by notorious Holocaust denier David Irving.
In a Winnipeg lecture late last month, Lipstadt recalled that her initial reaction to Irving’s libel charge against her was to dismiss it as ridiculous. But then she realized that it could be serious.
“The problem i
Source: Campus Watch
May 10, 2007
Hatem Bazian is a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies, a member of the faculty advisory board in the religion, politics and globalization program, and an adjunct professor at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his Ph.D. in Islamic studies.
Along with teaching courses in Islamic law, religious studies and Arabic, Bazian, a Palestinian native, also devotes an inordinate amount of time to pro-Palestinian activism. Unfort
Source: Press Release -- American GI Forum and HACR
May 10, 2007
The American GI Forum, the Hispanic
Association of Corporate Responsibility (HACR), and Florentine Films reached an
understanding yesterday that recognizes legitimate Latino concerns about Ken Burns’s
upcoming documentary series, “The War,” and equally recognizes that the artistic
decisions of what appears in his film are his and his alone to make. They announce
today that the narratives and voices of Hispanic World War II veterans will be
incorporated into Ken Burns’s artistic vision for
Source: NYT
May 10, 2007
[Columbia University's Lukas Prize Project Awards for Nonfiction were announced this week.]
... The evening’s third award, the $10,000 Mark Lynton History Prize, was presented to James T. Campbell, an associate professor of American civilization, Africana studies and history at Brown University, for “Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005” (Penguin Press). The prize is named for Mark Lynton, the author of “Accidental Journey: A Cambridge Internee’s Memoir of
Source: HNN Staff
May 10, 2007
Alfred Chandler Jr., the longtime professor of business history at the Harvard Business School has passed away.
We will publish an obituary soon.
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
May 10, 2007
The proposed panel seemed like a perfect pitch at a time when scholars in many fields are studying postcolonial identity and diaspora communities. The idea was to have scholars who study different regions and time periods examine issues of collective memory and identity in post-World War II Germany, modern Pakistan, and Japanese diaspora communities.
The program committee for the next annual meeting for the American Historical Association liked the idea, too. There was just one litt
Source: Comedy Central
May 9, 2007
On May 9 Michael Beschloss appeared on Comedy Central's Daily Show.
He was interviewed by Jon Stewart about his new book, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How They Changed America 1789-1989.
Click on the SOURCE link above to watch.
Source: http://www.budapestsun.com
May 9, 2007
A courageous new generation of historians and teachers is looking beyond a fog of denial and evasions imposed for decades by the region's bygone Communist masters.
A new study based on fresh historical evidence describes the awesome atrocities committed by the Hungarian occupation forces in Poland, Ukraine and Byelorussia, often with the connivance of local population groups.
The book does not condone, but places into context, the subsequent organized mass rape and murd
Source: Democracy Now
May 9, 2007
The battle over political science professor Norman Finkelstein to receive tenure at DePaul University is heating up. Finkelstein - one of the country’s foremost critics of Israeli policy - has taught at DePaul for the past six years. His tenure has been overwhelmingly approved at the departmental and college level, but the dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has opposed it.
A final decision is expected to be made in the coming weeks. Finkelstein has accused Harvard law profes
Source: NYT
May 9, 2007
When the historian Dee Brown published “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” in 1971, it became an instant sensation. In an age of rebellion, this nonfiction book told the epic tale of the displacement and decline of the American Indian not from the perspective of the winners, but from that of the Indians.
But the fact that Mr. Brown’s work has been translated into 17 languages and has sold five million copies around the world was not enough to convince HBO that a film version would draw
Source: AP
May 9, 2007
An Iranian-American academic who works at a Washington-based institute is being held in a notorious prison after being prohibited from leaving Iran for more than four months, the institute and her husband said Wednesday.
Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars, was sent Tuesday to Evin prison after she arrived at Iran's Intelligence Ministry for questioning, the center said.
Iran has not confirmed that it is de
Source: Robin Lindley in Seattle's Real Change (Note: The interview published here is longer.)
May 9, 2007
[Robin Lindley is a Seattle attorney and writer who covers international affairs, human rights, politics, law, medicine, the media, and arts. He was a chair of the World Peace through Law Section of the Washington State Bar Association, and a staff attorney with the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations on the investigation of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.]
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 9, 2007
[Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week.]
... Another combined experience of deja vu and “so what?” came in the wake of the recent appearance in English of the whole of Michel Foucault’s History of Madness, published by Routledge. It was accepted as a doctoral thesis by the Sorbonne in 1960 and published in France the following year.
Foucault's abridged version has long been available under the title Madness and Civilization, translated by Richard Howard. H
Source: National Coalition for History
May 9, 2007
On May 8, 2007, political scientist Harvey Mansfield delivered the 2007 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities here in Washington. The Jefferson Lecture is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and is considered the most prestigious honor the federal government bestows for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities.
Dr. Mansfield is the William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Government at Harvard. His speech was entitled “How to Understand Politics: Wh
