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: Newsday
Mar 21, 2007
The Theodore Roosevelt Association has chosen the head of the Atlanta History Center as its new president with the intention of creating a world-class museum and research facility dedicated to the 26th president.
James Bruns, who has run the Atlanta museum for four years after serving as the Smithsonian Institution's development director and founding director of its National Postal Museum in Washington, will begin work full time with the TRA July 1 but will be involved in associatio
Source: Reuters
Mar 21, 2007
DAKAR, Senegal -- The best way Europeans and Americans can make reparations for their past role in the slave trade is to end unfair trade policies that keep Africans shackled in poverty, a U.S. historian said.
Adam Hochschild, whose 2005 work "Bury the Chains" charts the anti-slavery movement that led Britain to abolish the trade 200 years ago this Sunday, said more global campaigns were needed to end many forms of injustice persisting in the world.
In an e-ma
Source: NYT
Mar 21, 2007
The conversations between President Bill Clinton and the historian Taylor Branch were long and late, sometimes stretching until 2 a.m., and always in secret. For eight years, at Mr. Clinton’s urging, they met in a second-floor office in the family quarters of the White House, Mr. Branch scribbling notes and a tape recorder running.
Those sessions, nearly 80 in all, are the fodder for a new book by Mr. Branch, tentatively titled “Wrestling History: The Bill Clinton Tapes,” that Simon
Source: Daily Show
Mar 19, 2007
To watch click on the SOURCE link above.
Source: David Kahn on the op ed page of the NYT
Mar 19, 2007
EVERYBODY knows how to use a library. You look up the card catalogue in the computer, type in the subject, find the Dewey Decimal System number, walk to the shelf and get the book.
It’s different with an archive, where unpublished memorandums, reports, notes and letters are organized not by topic but by the agency that created them. You have to know which agency did the work you are interested in, and whether more than one was involved. The complexity of government means first-time
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Mar 19, 2007
A week after Ohio University announced that Thelma Wills Foote would become the next chair of African-American studies, with the rank of full professor, the university announced that she wouldn’t be coming to the university after all.
The second announcement followed an investigation into her publication record and the university’s conclusion that she claimed to have co-written a book in which her publicly noted contribution consists of only five paragraphs.
When Foote,
Source: Barbara Yost in the Arizona Republic
Mar 19, 2007
Today's technology has proved to be a double-edged sword: There's no dispute that it has improved our lives, but it also has caused us to lose history as fast as we make it.
Correspondence is by e-mail; hit delete and it's wiped out. Thousands of photographs are taken; few are printed. Official records are increasingly digital.
With our fingers poised over the delete button, what will be left of our culture for historians?
Scientists say we have to take ste
Source: Times (of London) in an article titled: "Violence slashed as troop surge hits Baghdad"
Mar 19, 2007
Frederick Kagan, a military historian and leading advocate of the surge, said: “It is very early days but I’m very encouraged by what is happening. America only has two brigades out of five there and we haven’t even started our major operations yet. I had not expected this little resistance.”
Source: Ernest W. Lefever in the Weekly Standard
Mar 19, 2007
ime magazine's April 20, 1962, cover story on Karl Barth announced that the great Swiss theologian would visit the United States for the first, and what turned out to be the only, time. Given Barth's well-known anti-American stance, the visit caused a stir in the White House. President Kennedy, then in his second year, was grappling daily with Soviet threats and Khrushchev's boasts. JFK had already suffered two serious Cold War reverses--the Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba and Khrushchev's raising
Source: Harriet Washington, letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review
Mar 18, 2007
In 15 chapters and 501 well-annotated pages, my book “Medical Apartheid” offers a careful, nuanced discussion of trends, cases, problems, ethics and persistent patterns in the disparate treatment of black research subjects. However, Ezekiel Emanuel’s review (Feb. 18) ignores its rich content in order to claim that “Medical Apartheid” fails to place the experience of African-Americans in context. He dramatically misrepresents the work within an untrustworthy review that is rife with distortions,
Source: www.depauw.edu/news
Mar 18, 2007
"It looks like college used to look in the movies," Pulitzer Prize-winning author, historian and television host David McCullough said of his first visit to the campus of DePauw University. "It sort of looks like the college I dreamed I would go to someday," the author of John Adams and Harry Truman added as he wrapped up his day at DePauw, which he called a "rare and very welcome experience," with a Timothy and Sharon Ubben Lecture entitled "First Principles.&
Source: NYT
Mar 18, 2007
oor Nigel Hamilton; he’s having a bad run of luck with big biographical projects. After publishing a respected three-volume biography of the British field marshal Bernard Montgomery, he embarked on the first book of a projected three-volume work on John F. Kennedy. “JFK: Reckless Youth” (1992) was a salacious but well-researched and insightful book about Kennedy’s early years. The experience of writing it, however, was so harrowing for Hamilton (he felt hazed by the “toadies” of the Kennedy fami
Source: Hankyoreh (South Korea)
Mar 17, 2007
"It is bizarre that Prime Minister Abe only speaks of whether or not the ‘comfort women’ were taken forcefully by the Japanese military. Wasn’t the very system of ‘comfort women’ one based upon sexual slavery?"
"Abe said that there were no violent abductions of women, but in fact there were. The 1994 report released by the Netherlands found such actions took place in at least eight separate locations."
An authority on the issue of the comfort women,
Source: http://www.isi.org/books
Mar 17, 2007
[Maxwell Goss is the editor of Right Reason,
the weblog for philosophical conservatism. He interviewed Mr. Nash in comnjunction with the 30th anniversary of the publication of Nash's The Conservative Intellectual
Movement in America Since 1945, which has been updated and re-issued.]
MG: Why did you choose to begin your history of American conservatism in
1945?
GN: My book was originally a doctoral dissertation in History at Harvard
University. While searching for a di
Source: http://www.cwnews.com
Mar 16, 2007
A noted Italian Church historian has denounced the opposition of the Catholic Church to the legal recognition of civil unions, and blasted Pope Benedict XVI (bio - news), saying that the current Pontiff is “worse than Pius XII.”
Giusepp Alberigo told the newspaper Corriere della Sera that Pope Benedict is afraid of modernity, “like a child who during the night is afraid of a ghost-- when in reality there is no ghost, but only a shadow.”
In an article summarizing reactio
Source: AP
Mar 16, 2007
Darrin McMahon still cannot define happiness after spending six years researching and writing a book about it.
While that has been a frustration, the Florida State University history professor said it is also what gives happiness its power and allure.
His book, "Happiness: A History," was recently named by The New York Times as one of the 100 notable books of 2006.
It traces what the great thinkers of Western philosophy have thought about happiness. Th
Source: Lee White in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Mar 16, 2007
On March 15, 2007, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein testified
on the fiscal year (FY) 2008 budget for the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA) before the House Appropriations’ Subcommittee on
Financial Services and General Government.In his prepared testimony, Dr. Weinstein said that under the President’s FY
2008 request, NARA would receive $312.8 million for operating expenses, an
increase of $33.5 million over FY 2007. The Elec
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 16, 2007
A glance at the current issue of The American Interest: "The American Dream Extreme"
The "American dream" today is much different than it was in 1931, when the historian James Truslow Adams coined the term, writes Paul Knox, a professor of urban affairs and planning at Virginia Tech. As the term's meaning has evolved, he says, "suburbia" has transformed into "vulgaria."
The original American dream stressed "individual freedom
Source: Jerome Weeks at ArtsJournal
Mar 15, 2007
The interview this morning on The Diane Rehm Show on NPR with Elliot Jaspin, author of Buried in the Bitter Waters: The History of Racial Cleansing in America was a little startling because of the general attitude of Mr. Jaspin and guest host Katty Kay of the BBC that the material they were discussing was completely unknown, had been widely and deliberately overlooked.
Mr. Jaspin's book examines the wave of mass extraditions, forced evictions of entire black communities by whites, w
Source: Newswise
Mar 15, 2007
Today’s war on drugs is not the first battle America has fought against addiction. In her new book, University of Missouri-Rolla historian Dr. Diana Ahmad examines the opium-smoking epidemic of the mid-19th century and finds that Chinese immigrants weren’t the problem, as is commonly believed.
The book, “The Opium Debate and Chinese Exclusion Laws,” was published this month by the University of Nevada Press.
Ahmad, who is associate professor of history and UMR’s archivi
