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: Letter to the Editor of the NYT
Mar 4, 2007
In “A Push for Citizenship for Anne Frank” (news article, Feb. 26), I am quoted as contending that granting honorary citizenship to Anne Frank would be a “pointless” gesture.
During the late 1930s and early ’40s, European Jewish refugees, among them the Frank family, who lived in terribly precarious circumstances, found that there were “paper walls” around America’s shores.
They faced horrendous bureaucratic obstacles, some of which were put in place by our government w
Source: NYT
Mar 4, 2007
[Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.]
With the death last week of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., at 89, America lost its last great public historian. The notion may sound strange, given the appetite, as voracious as at any time in recent memory, for serious works of history, and in particular the vogue for lengthy, often massively detailed biographies of the founders and of presidents.
But Mr. Schlesinger performed a different function. He stood at the forefront
Source: Poughkeepsie Journal
Mar 3, 2007
While he is most closely associated with the Kennedys, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died Wednesday, was also a Roosevelt insider who served in the Office of War Information and Office of Strategic Services and chronicled the life of the Hyde Park president.
"Arthur Schlesinger is kind of unique," said David Woolner, a professor of U.S. history at Marist College in Poughkeepsie and executive director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute.
"He's
Source: Britannica Blog
Mar 2, 2007
Arthur Schlesinger was truly the country’s premier American historian. I considered him a friend of mine for almost all of my forty-six years in Columbia’s history department. I recall with pleasure correspondence with him when he was in the White House. It was glorious of him that he showed respect for and deep interest in other historians he admired who did not have his origins and opportunities in pursuing their careers. I felt flattered and honored by Arthur when he invited me to do a bi
Source: National Review
Mar 2, 2007
I always regretted that we didn’t become friends, because the thousands who succeeded in doing so found friendship with Arthur Schlesinger very rewarding. For one thing, to behold him — listen to him, observe him, read him — was to co-exist with a miracle of sorts. It is an awful pity, as one reflects on it, that nature is given to endowing the wrong men with extraordinary productivity. If you laid out the published works of John Kenneth Galbraith and of Arthur Meier Schlesinger Jr., the line of
Source: WaPo
Mar 2, 2007
... To a nation, he was a compass point. Adore him or disagree with him, he spoke with a historian's worldview. The architects of the war in Iraq, he told C-SPAN in an interview that will be aired on Saturday, "do not know enough history, and they duplicated the stupidity of the Vietnam War."
At lunch, he said he was planning to write the second volume of his autobiography. Yesterday, a spokesman for the publisher of the first part, Houghton Mifflin, said that as far as sh
Source: Vernon Horn at the AHA blog
Mar 2, 2007
Arthur M. Schlesinger jr., one of the most distinguished historians of the 20th and 21st centuries and a life member of the AHA, died of a heart attack last night in Manhattan. He was 89. During his academic career, Schlesinger taught at Harvard University and the City University of New York. He also worked extensively outside of the academy. During World War II he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, a forerunner to the CIA, and later on, he served as an advisor and speechwriter to Pres
Source: Jonathan Zimmerman in the Chicago Tribune
Mar 2, 2007
I met Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once, about 10 years ago, at his
apartment on the East Side of Manhattan. I knocked on the door and
Schlesinger opened it, dressed simply in a shirt and slacks.
"Dr. Schlesinger, you're not wearing your bow tie!" I exclaimed.
Schlesinger laughed. The tie was a central part of this great
historian's public persona: On television or in the newspaper, he never
appeared without it. Look at any obituary for Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,
who died of a hear
Source: Robert B. Semple, Jr. in a signed editorial in the NYT
Mar 2, 2007
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. could be blunt. The worst he would say about George W. Bush in the early going was that he was “an amiable mediocrity.” But it did not take long for President Bush to fall close to the very bottom of Mr. Schlesinger’s not inconsiderable list of bad presidents — in large part because he had committed the one mistake that a great historian could not abide, which was to wantonly ignore the experience of history.
Mr. Schlesinger died on Wednesday night at the age
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 2, 2007
An associate professor of history at Kent State University who wrote an article three years ago that some people saw as glorifying a suicide bomber is again at the center of controversy, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported. The professor, Julio Pino, and the university have received hate mail and threats after an article that linked Mr. Pino to an extremist Islamic Web site began circulating on the blogosphere. A university spokesman said that Mr. Pino had no connection to the extremist site. He
Source: Lee White in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Mar 2, 2007
On March 1, 2007, in a ceremony held in the U.S. Capitol, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) received the Organization of American Historian’s prestigious “Friend of History” Award from OAH Executive Director Lee Formwalt. Senator Byrd has a long record of supporting history and one of his most lasting contributions has been his sponsorship of the “Teaching American History” grants program awarded by the U.S. Department of Education. The goal of this program for school districts and institutions with
Source: Lee White in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Mar 2, 2007
On March 1, 2007, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee’s
Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and the National Archives held
a hearing to consider presidential records, specifically the impact
Executive Order (E.O.) 13233 has had on the disposition of those
materials. The E.O. was issued in November 2001 by President George W.
Bush, and gives not only current and former presidents, but also vice
presidents and a former president's family, t
Source: Daniel Johnson at the blog Contentions (Commentary Mag.)
Mar 2, 2007
No myth about George W. Bush has been cultivated more sedulously by his enemies than the idea that he has never read anything—that he is too ignorant to be the leader of the West. Of course, the same myth was created about Reagan, but the Teflon president had the natural ebullience to remain indifferent and undamaged in public esteem. Bush is more vulnerable.
Yet the accusation is even less warranted in his case than it was in Reagan’s. Last Wednesday the British historian Andrew Ro
Source: Elizabeth Redden at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Mar 2, 2007
Legislation introduced in Congress Thursday would nullify an executive order signed by President Bush in 2001 limiting public access to presidential documents and greatly expanding the scope of executive privilege. Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) announced the bipartisan bill during a House of Representatives subcommittee hearing that featured widespread condemnation of the president’s action, not only for its perceived effect of restricting research and freezing the flow of public information,
Source: Maureen Ogle at the website of Historically Speaking (March/April)
Mar 1, 2007
The historian reads an email, and then leaps out of her chair, whooping and hollering. According to the message, her new book has:
(A) won the Bancroft prize
(B) been chosen as book-of-the-month by Hustler magazine
(C) been shortlisted for the Pulitzer.
Correct answer: B. In October 2006 I learned that Hustler magazine had selected my new book, Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer, as its book-of-the-month for April 2007.
At this point,
Source: Juliana Geron Pilon at the website of the National Interest Online
Mar 1, 2007
IF MORAL clarity graced our times, the publication of Paul Hollander’s comprehensive compilation of first-hand accounts by former communist victims, From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, would elicit a collective shudder of horror and sorrow.
“Systematic evil at work: evil without conscience.” So does Harvard University professor Harvey Mansfield describe the grotesque crimes the selections illustrate. The book provides “an indispensable experience for the understanding of our times
Source: Gary J. Kornblith and Carol Lasser in the Journal of American History
Mar 1, 2007
In 2001, in our first endeavor as editors of the "Textbooks and Teaching" section, we focused on the foundational course in our field, the American history survey. In a "virtual round table," scholars from all over the United States, representing different generations and situated at a wide array of institutions, discussed the pedagogical strategies they used and themes they emphasized in the course.1 As they grappled with the place of political, social, economic, and cultura
Source: Sean Wilentz in the Guardian
Mar 1, 2007
I knew that one day I'd be reading in the paper about Arthur's death, but never really believed it. He was too intensely, happily alive - too energetic. The consummate New Yorker, he was a man about town even as he began to fail physically in the final months. Those of us who were lucky enough to share his incandescence are sad today, but also bewildered. We truly will not ever see his likes again.
He was an extraordinary historian both as narrator and interpreter. A scholar is cons
Source: Slate
Mar 1, 2007
[David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers, has two new books out:Presidential DoodlesandCalvin Coolidge.]
The first meeting I ever attended of
Source: Commentary
Mar 1, 2007
Norman Podhoretz
There are three things to say about the work of Arthur Schlesinger, who has just died at the age of eighty-nine: (1) He was an exceptionally good writer, commanding a lucid, vivid, and often elegant prose style. (2) He was an exceptionally bad historian: incapable of doing justice to any idea with which he disagreed, and so tendentious that he invariably denigrated and/or vilified anyone who had ever espoused any such idea. Like the so-called “Whig interpretation of h
