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: NPR (audio)
Dec 21, 2006
The Congressionally-funded Iraq Study Group report was unveiled recently with pomp and ceremony. But quietly, inside the Pentagon, the ISG report is widely regarded as unrealistic. A rival plan from the American Enterprise Institute provides its own prescription for Iraq, and is gaining traction in the Bush administration.
[The report was written in part by former West Point historian Robert Kagan. It recommends changing the strategy of the US in Iraq. Instead of focusing on traini
Source: New Republic
Dec 20, 2006
very year someone asks me to compile a list of that year's best books, and every year (except one) I have refused. I don't read enough current books to offer an educated opinion. But there are books that I occasionally recommend to my friends and colleagues--sometimes to the point where they become exasperated with me. ("Not that Sklar book again," Jonathan Chait exclaims.) This year, I thought that, in lieu of continuing to harass them, I would list some of my favorites here--with an
Source: AP
Dec 19, 2006
Emory University is planning to translate a professor's Web site on Holocaust denial into Arabic, Farsi and other languages common to countries where anti-Semitic views are widespread.
Professor Deborah Lipstadt, who runs the site Holocaust Denial on Trial (www.hdot.org), said she hopes the translations will provide resources to people who have no historical accounts of the Holocaust in their native tongue.
"I'm convinced that the
Source: Mother Jones
Dec 19, 2006
Tom Engelhardt is that rare 62-year-old who can make people half his age feel old. And young. Old, because, well, if you've got the age advantage, how come he's the one with the all the vigor? Young, because his energy and enthusiasm and commitment are galvanizing—ask the hundreds of writers whose books he's edited over the years (Mike Davis, Adam Hochschild, Studs Terkel, Noam Chomsky; the list goes on and on); or the journalism students he's taught and inspired; or, for that matter, just drop
Source: UPI
Dec 19, 2006
Turkish author Ipek Calislar was acquitted for allegedly insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, considered the founder of modern Turkey.
The BBC reported that prosecutors claimed Calislar had insulted Ataturk in a biography of Ataturk's wife Latife, in which Calislar reportedly wrote that Ataturk had once fled disguised as a woman.
Calislar faced up to four years in prison for violating Turkey's law against denigrating "Turkishness."
Source: AP
Dec 19, 2006
More than 100 Civil War historians have signed a letter to Pennsylvania's gambling regulators asking them to deny a license to a slot-machine casino proposed near the historic battlefield.
Calling it the second battle of Gettysburg, the letter comes as the state Gaming Control Board is expected to vote on license applicants Wednesday.
The slots parlor would be a mile-and-a-half from the border of the 6,000-acre Gettysburg National Military Park in southcentral Pennsylva
Source: NYT
Dec 19, 2006
Last weekend's Book Review devoted most of its pages to recent books on war. To continue the discussion, NYTimes.com invited two foreign policy writers to join Barry Gewen, an editor at the Book Review, in a wide-ranging discussion of the challenges facing the U.S. in Iraq and beyond.
Max Boot, Dec. 19, 10:55 AM ET:
I should begin by expressing my skepticism about all arguments for historical inevitability. It is all too easy to argue that history could not have turned
Source: BBC
Dec 18, 2006
Queen's University professor Keith Jeffery will be given unprecedented access to the archives of the organisation, which was not even acknowledged to exist until just over a decade ago.
Earlier this year, the Secret Intelligence Service - popularly known as MI6 - launched its first public recruitment campaign and now even has its own website.
Last month, two serving agents gave their first ever media interviews to the BBC in an attempt to attract younger recruits to the
Source: Informed Comment (Blog)
Dec 18, 2006
Steve Clemons of the New America Foundation carries the story of how Elliot Abrams and others at the National Security Council in Bush's White House have intervened to stop the publication of an op-ed in the New York Times by Flynt Leverett. Leverett himself served in the National Security Council until not so long ago.For Leverett's criticism of Bush admi
Source: Deseret News
Dec 17, 2006
The first time he saw it, when he was 20, Howard Bloch was overwhelmed. The Bayeux Tapestry — perhaps the most famous textile in the world — is an exquisite 230-foot embroidered panorama dramatizing in words and images the events leading up to the Battle of Hastings between England and France, better known as the Norman Conquest of 1066. (During that time the Anglo-Saxon King Harold was killed by William the Conqueror of Normandy.)
Bloch, now a noted professor of French at Yale U
Source: Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the NYT
Dec 17, 2006
In his celebrated book “Of Paradise and Power,” Robert Kagan took issue with “the mistaken idea that the American founding generation was utopian, that it genuinely considered power politics ‘alien and repulsive’ and was simply unable to comprehend the importance of the power factor in foreign relations.” Those words might stand as one epigraph for his provocative and deeply absorbing new book. Another could be what a South African historian once said about a book of his own: although its pages
Source: Robert Sullivan in the NYT in a review of James McPherson's From Reconstruction to the Final Days of the American Frontier
Dec 17, 2006
Something else they don’t tell you in school is that life can be a lot like a textbook. It’s a slog mostly, and it’s tough to tell the difference between what’s important and what’s the Warren G. Harding administration. Currently, the teaching of the past for people in the middle school years relies heavily on the use of terms like “Shays’ Rebellion” and “checks and balances,” terms you memorize and explain. It’s history as checklist — which is what makes James M. McPherson’s “Into the West” see
Source: NYT
Dec 17, 2006
Samuel Devons, a physicist and historian of science at Columbia University who combined research in nuclear physics with a career-long effort to make science accessible to general audiences, died on Dec. 6 in Manhattan. He was 92 and lived in Irvington, N.Y.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.
In the 1960s, while he was chairman of Columbia’s physics department, Dr. Devons and others conducted experiments that shed light on the nature of the atom’s
Source: NYT Book Review
Dec 17, 2006
... NIALL FERGUSON, professor of history at Harvard and author of “The War of the World.”
Vasily Grossman, “Life and Fate: A Novel” (1980). World War II’s “War and Peace.” Written (mainly) from the vantage point of a Soviet Jew, this masterpiece was judged far too ambivalent in its treatment of the “Great Patriotic War” to be published in the author’s lifetime.
Gert Ledig, “Payback” (1956). This harrowing journey to the end of the Third Reich’s night is a kind of antith
Source: NYT
Dec 17, 2006
The Sidney Awards, named for Sidney Hook, are a nice way to honor the best magazine essays of the year and to pass along a few nutritious holiday reading recommendations. But if you spend a few weeks poring over the highlights from a year’s worth of magazines, you also get a window on the spirit of the times.
And 2006, let it be said, felt to many like the year of losing ground. There was a general sense that the forces of moderation in the Middle East were losing ground to the forc
Source: http://www.theday.com
Dec 16, 2006
Documenting the crimes of the Soviet Union has been a project that Jonathan Brent has been preparing for all his life. Since 1995, Brent, associate director and editorial director of the Yale University Press, has headed an effort producing 20 books documenting mass murder, espionage, imprisonment of dissidents and other atrocities engineered by the Kremlin.
Anti-Communists during the Cold War, trying to rally the West against Moscow, long accused the Soviets of such outrages. But
Source: http://www.bwog.net
Dec 15, 2006
Lieutenant Colonel Isaiah "Ike" Wilson, a visiting professor at SIPA on loan from West Point, has a more than academic understanding of the Iraq War, having studied it from both an historian's and a commissioned officer's perspective. Bwog editor Sara Vogel caught up with Wilson before class to talk about bad planning, doing better, and--of course--Fox News. Forget Baker-Hamilton--it's all here!
[Q.]What is your course here [Limited War and Low Intensity Conflict] about?
Source: White House website
Dec 15, 2006
THE PRESIDENT: Please be seated. Thank you all for coming. Welcome. Mr. Vice President, members of my Cabinet, Laura and I are please you could join us on this special occasion. We're delighted to welcome our distinguished honorees, as well as their families and friends to the White House. Thanks for coming.
The Presidential Medal of Freedom is our nation's highest civil honor. The Medal recognizes high achievement in public service, science, the arts, education, athletics, and othe
Source: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
Dec 15, 2006
As regular readers of this publication are aware, we rarely
post vacancy announcements. Once in a great while, however, an
announcement of such importance comes to our attention that we break our
own rule. This is one such occasion.Since the retirement over a year ago of Dwight Pitcaithley, Chief
Historian of the National Park Service (NPS), this key history position
has remained vacant. Upper level management at the NPS redescribed the
position several times in an effo
Source: WaPo
Dec 15, 2006
He led the United States into war and saw his popularity plummet, yet some 60 years later his reputation has never been higher: It's small wonder Harry S. Truman seems to hold a special fascination for President Bush these days....
"I know that President Bush admires Harry Truman -- we have talked about that," [David] McCullough said, though he was cautious about offering any snap assessments of the Bush presidency. "About 50 years has to go by before you can appraise
