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: Kirstein blog
Apr 1, 2007
Chuck Suchar, DePaul University’s Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, opposes tenure for Norman Finkelstein in a three-page memorandum dated March 22, 2007. Dr Finkelstein received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. The Political Science department voted 9 to 3 in favour of granting tenure. Three filed a minority report and the dean sided with that. The five-member College Personnel Committee was unanimous in favour of granting tenure. The dean’s letter basically attacks the tone
Source: Jerusalem Post
Apr 1, 2007
Ilan Pappe, a senior lecturer in the University of Haifa's Department of Political Science, says he is moving to the UK because it is "increasingly difficult to live in Israel" with his "unwelcome views and convictions."
In an interview in The Peninsula, Qatar's leading English-language daily, during a visit last week to Doha as a guest of the Qatar Foundation, Pappe said: "I was boycotted in my university and there had been attempts to expel me from my job
Source: NYT
Apr 1, 2007
Los Angeles: IF you are even a casual visitor to the pawn shops and junk emporiums that make this city a scavenger’s paradise, you might have run into him: a burly, dark-bearded man with a thick Czech accent and a certain glow in his eye as he riffles through the boxes of castoff photographs.
His name is Dusan Stulik, and his appetite for old pictures is not sated by secondhand bins. He wants them from you too, from your old family albums and rubber-banded shoeboxes, from your Aunt
Source: Detroit Free Press
Mar 31, 2007
"Hell shivered! The angels sang!" So read a feverishly scribbled news flash wired from a jam-packed Masonic Temple in 1929. Sister Aimee Semple McPherson's staff telegraphed that message from Detroit to the evangelist's followers at her Los Angeles home base, the Angelus Temple.
Even Detroit newspapers agreed that the cross between Hollywood and holy roller had hit the city like a spiritual cyclone. Front-page stories leered at her beauty and made fun of the idea that a wo
Source: Peter Steinfels in the NYT
Mar 31, 2007
In 1973, Morton Smith published both a dense scholarly tome (“Clement of Alexandria and a Secret Gospel of Mark,” Harvard University Press) and a popular book (“The Secret Gospel,” Harper & Row) describing a manuscript that he had found in a Greek Orthodox monastery south of Jerusalem.
Used as reinforcement for the binding of an early modern book, it was an 18th-century copy of an otherwise unknown “letter to Theodore” from Clement of Alexandria, a church father of the late seco
Source: NYT
Mar 31, 2007
IT was about 15 years ago, recalled Yoshiaki Yoshimi, a mild-mannered historian, when he grew fed up with the Japanese government’s denials that the military had set up and run brothels throughout Asia during World War II.
Instead of firing off a letter to a newspaper, though, Mr. Yoshimi went to the Defense Agency’s library and combed through official documents from the 1930s. In just two days, he found a rare trove that uncovered the military’s direct role in managing the brothels
Source: Savannah College of Art and Design Chronicle
Mar 30, 2007
Anyone who thinks art history isn’t intimately related to studio practice hasn’t talked to Jonathan Field, Ph.D.
Field, an art history professor at the Savannah College of Art and Design, also is a practicing artist devoted to interdisciplinary perspectives.
“There has always been a crossover in my mind between understanding the history and theory of art and the practical problems of making it,” he said. “History is not separate from making art; I see it all as very int
Source: Pittsburgh Tribune Review
Mar 30, 2007
When high schools are indifferent about complete works of nonfiction and 5,000-word term papers, Will Fitzhugh says any claim that students are getting a comprehensive education is fiction. He also believes that too much time, money and energy are spent on methods and theories of education instead of content. And that “edu-pundits” should change their focus from teacher performance to student performance.
Mr. Fitzhugh is trying to solve a problem that costs billions of dollars annua
Source: Jacob Weisberg at Slate.com
Mar 28, 2007
President Bush is sometimes a boastful anti-intellectual, but in the past year he has been touting his reading lists and engaging in who-can-read-more contests with his chief political adviser, Karl Rove. (Bush claimed to have read 60 books in just the first seven and a half months of last year, the pace of a full-time reviewer.) There even seems to be a White House book club.
The most recent selection was A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 by conservative British
Source: LAT & WaPo
Mar 27, 2007
Mary Walton McCandlish Livingston, a federal archivist whose testimony before Congress revealed that President Nixon's donated papers were improperly backdated, died March 23 in Alexandria, Va. She was 92 and had Alzheimer's disease.
Livingston, a senior archivist in the Office of Presidential Libraries at the National Archives for 30 years, supervised work on Nixon's early papers. In March 1970, while working with a manuscript dealer chosen by Nixon, she selected 1,176 boxes of pe
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria (HNN Blog)
Mar 27, 2007
Two years ago, a diverse group of us (Max Boot, David Greenberg, Jeffrey Rogers Hummell, Eric Muller, Ronald Radosh, and Cathy Young) gave the paleo-conservative historian,
Source: Press Release -- New-York Historical Society
Mar 27, 2007
Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society announced today that David Nasaw would receive the second annual New-York Historical Society American History Book Prize for Andrew Carnegie. The award will be presented at a ceremony during the annual Chairman’s Council Weekend with History on April 27, where Nasaw will also be named American Historian Laureate.
“David Nasaw’s thoroughly researched biography makes Carnegie relevant and compelling to a 21st century audienc
Source: http://www.juf.org
Mar 26, 2007
American historian and writer Peter Gay -- who as a young boy watched in horror as the Nazis rounded up Jews, ransacked Jewish homes and shops and burned down synagogues on that fateful November evening in 1938 known as Crystal Night -- will deliver the 2007 Klutznick Lecture in Jewish Civilization Tuesday, April 17, at Northwestern University.
Born Peter Joachim Frohlich, the eminent cultural historian and prolific writer will speak at 7:30 p.m. at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, 50 Art
Source: Interviewed by Reuters
Mar 26, 2007
Professor Mark Naison of Fordham University tells Reuters Global Coverage that even plantation owners in the state of Virginia, which was known for its humane treatment of slaves, were self-serving: they sold their slaves when their businesses deteriorated to save themselves.
Virginia became the first state last month to pass a resolution expressing "profound regret" over slavery, and other states are considering simliar measures.
Source: Fox News
Mar 26, 2007
... Lt. Gen. William E. Odom (Ret.), who advanced counterinsurgency efforts nearly 40 years ago in Vietnam, is wary of the silence.
“Sure, those guys are going to get out of the line of fire,” he said of the Mahdi. "They'll wait and see what happens and then design a way to come back and attack the U.S. position with tactics more favorable to them.”
Yet the calm in Sadr City it is the first sign of an unofficial, albeit uneasy truce between the U.S military and the
Source: International Herald Tribune
Mar 26, 2007
... The Vietnam Project [at Texas Tech in Lubbock, Texas] is the brainchild of a remarkable academic entrepreneur named James Reckner, who, decades ago, served two tours of duty in Vietnam, advising the South Vietnamese Army in riverine warfare.
Reckner's academic specialty is Theodore Roosevelt and the development of American naval power, but he started the Vietnam Project in 1989 when he began teaching a course on the Vietnam War and discovered that the university possessed very l
Source: Mark J. Drozdowski is executive director of the Fitchburg State College Foundation, in Fitchburg, Mass. in the Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 26, 2007
Dear Dr. Faust:
You probably don't remember me, but I was in your "History of the American South" class at Penn. I think it was 1988, spring semester. I sat in the fourth row, toward the left, and wore a Red Sox cap. You gave an especially tough midterm, as I recall.
Anyhow, that's not why I'm writing. I am writing, first, to say congratulations on your appointment as the new president of Harvard University. Boy, you came out of nowhere, at least to people pay
Source: Email sent to HNN
Mar 26, 2007
It is with profound sadness that Emory University announces the death of our courageous colleague, Betsey Fox-Genovese, who passed away after a prolonged struggle against failing health on Tuesday, 2 January 2007. Betsey joined Emory University in 1986 as Professor of History and Founding Director of Women’s Studies. Two years later she was appointed as the Eléonore Raoul Professor of Humanities, an honor she held throughout the remainder of her long and illustrious career. She was well known
Source: Doug Monroe in Atlantic Magazine
Mar 26, 2007
Last week, I wrote about about the controversial book Buried in the Bitter Waters by Cox Washington correspondent Elliot Jaspin, who blasts the Cox-owned Atlanta Journal-Constitution for allegedly whitewashing the racial cleansing of Forsyth County, Ga.
I mentioned a blog comment in which James Loewen, author of Sundown Towns, found it "astonishing" that Jaspin hadn't credited his book.
Jaspin responded with a comment to my blog, saying "Prof. Loewen was
Source: San Jose Mercury News
Mar 25, 2007
A Stanford legal team prevailed in its battle against the estate of Irish writer James Joyce, gaining the right for an English professor to publish family correspondence, notebooks and a manuscript containing a description of dreams by his troubled daughter, Lucia Joyce.
But the Joyce Estate fended off a broader legal and philosophical challenge to copyright law and avoided a sweeping concession to make Joyce's works available to other scholars.
Joyce's fiercely protect
