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: New York Sun
Nov 16, 2006
A group of Barnard College alumnae is attempting to stop their alma mater from giving tenure to an assistant professor who minimizes Jews' historical connection to Israel.
In her 2001 book, "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society," published by the University of Chicago, the professor of anthropology, Nadia Abu El-Haj says Israeli archaeology manipulates evidence to justify a modern Jewish state in the region.
Source: Bruce Craig in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Nov 16, 2006
During a private awards ceremony held on 9 November in the Oval Office of the White House President George Bush presented the 2006 National Humanities Medals and National Medals of the Arts. Ten of the 20 winners were academics, of which several are historians.
The academics who were awarded humanities medals are: Fouad Ajami, professor and director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University, James M. Buchanan, a professor emeritus of Economics at George Mason Un
Source: Bruce Craig in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Nov 16, 2006
The Executive Committee of the National Coalition for History is pleased to announce that an "enthusiastic and unanimous agreement" has been reached in the selection of a new Executive Director for the National Coalition for History to replace R. Bruce Craig who is moving to Canada at the end of the year. He is Leland J. White, currently Director of Government Relations for the National Society of Professional Engineers.
Mr. White is an attorney with nearly twenty years ex
Source: Ethics Daily
Nov 16, 2006
Religion historian Mark Noll has been honored with the National Humanities Medal at a White House ceremony.
A prominent scholar in American religious and cultural history, Noll became a history professor at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana this fall. Noll, who previously taught at Wheaton College in Illinois, is the co-author of The Search for Christian America and the author of other books, including The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, The Rise of Evangelicalism and The Civil War as
Source: NY Review of Books
Nov 16, 2006
A letter protesting the cancellation of a talk by Tony Judt to the Polish Consulate has been signed by more than a hundred people including:
Peter Beinart, Thomas Bender, Ian Buruma, Lizbeth Cohen, Franklin Foer, Timothy Garton Ash, Todd Gitlin, Michael Kazin, Richard Sennett, Jim Sleeper, Fritz Stern, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Tomasky, Leon Wieseltier, Alan Wolfe, and Marilyn Young.
Source: http://www.demaz.org
Nov 15, 2006
While protest actions against the adoption of a draft bill concerning the punishment for denial "Armenian genocide" adopted by the Lower Chamber of the French Parliament are ongoing, the Armenians living in Turkey decided to join to the process. According to the Armenians, distinguishing with their more moderate approach to the 1915 events rather than the Armenian diaspora, political speculations developing around the so called "Armenian genocide" complicates the process of i
Source: Scott Jaschik at the website of Inside Higher Ed
Nov 15, 2006
The University of Tennessee Press has suspended all sales and recalled all stock of Captain Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison: A Reappraisal, which was published this fall, after the author acknowledged “grave oversights” in crediting another author for material.
R. Fred Ruhlman, the author of the book that is being pulled, teaches history as an adjunct at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. University officials said they were awaiting a full investigation by the press bef
Source: Email to HNN by William L. Ramsey, assistant professor of history at the University of Idaho
Nov 15, 2006
Fundamentalist Pastor Douglas Wilson of Moscow, Idaho, may have fallen short in his first attempt to overturn the last fifty years of academic scholarship on slavery, which he has described variously as “abolitionist propaganda” and “civil rights propaganda,” but he intends to win the war. A supportive comment from Eugene Genovese on the back cover of Wilson’s new self-published book on slavery, Black and Tan, appears to be the center- piece of the new battle plan.
The “blurb” has
Source: Email circulating on the Internet
Nov 15, 2006
The Democracy Caucus is a group within the new SDS/Movement for a Democratic
Society. Our name itself suggests that something is deeply wrong. MDS Inc.
(no kidding!), a corporation overseen by former Weatherperson Bruce
Rubenstein, has
substituted itself for an actual MDS and is governed, as corporations are,
from the top down, without member input: indeed there are no members. Its
function is to raise money and to surrender all critical s
Source: NYT
Nov 15, 2006
Two historians, John Hope Franklin and Yu Ying-shih, will share this year’s $1 million John W. Kluge Prize for the Study of Humanity.
It’s the prize that Alfred Nobel forgot. In 2000 Mr. Kluge, the billionaire, gave $73 million to the Library of Congress for a scholarly center and other projects, which now include the million-dollar prize. The award was specifically intended for areas that the Nobel Prizes do not cover, like history, political science, sociology, philosophy, anthro
Source: NYT
Nov 14, 2006
S. Lane Faison Jr., an art historian who cut his teeth cataloging Hitler’s collection of plundered paintings, then, as a Williams College professor, inspired students who went on to head many of America’s leading art institutions, died on Saturday at his home in Williamstown, Mass. He was 98.
Morton Owen Schapiro, the president of Williams, who announced the death, said his “legacy will forever be spread far and wide through the countless students he turned on to art.”
Source: Announcement from the Cold War International History Project/Woodrow Wilson Center about an upcoming lecture by Chris Tudda, author of The Truth is Our Weapon: The Rhetorical Diplomacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles. The lecture will take
Nov 14, 2006
President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, deployed a tactic Chris Tudda calls "rhetorical diplomacy"-sounding a belligerent note of anti-Communism in speeches, addresses, press conferences, and private meetings with allies and with Moscow. Yet all the while, Tudda discloses, the two were confidentially committed to a contradictory course-the establishment of a strong system of collective security in Western Europe, peaceful accommodation of the Sovi
Source: New America Media
Nov 13, 2006
Waskar Ari Chachaki is an ill-fated victim of the War on Terror. Born in the remote Andean highlands of Bolivia, by age 42 he had earned a Ph.D. from prestigious Georgetown University. Ari, the first member of the pre-Incan Aymara tribe with a doctorate in history from the United States, also helped establish eight indigenous organizations in Bolivia and Peru. He's an expert in indigenous history, culture and political movements.
But American students may never benefit from his sin
Source: Chattanooga Times Free Press
Nov 13, 2006
A New Hampshire author is alleging a University of Tennessee at Chattanooga adjunct instructor used plagiarized material in his recently published book.
William Marvel, an author of several Civil War books, said Fred Ruhlman’s book, “Captain Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison,” contains several instances of unattributed material from his 1994 book, “Andersonville: The Last Depot.”
The University of Tennessee Press has suspended all sales of Dr. Ruhlman’s book because o
Source: Middle East Studies Aassociation
Nov 13, 2006
Honorable Nouri Kamal al-Maliki
Prime Minister of the Republic of Iraq
c/o The Embassy of Iraq
1801 P Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20036 USA
Fax: (202) 462-5066 Dear Prime Minister al-Maliki: We write to you on behalf of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) and the American
Association of University (AAUP) to express our grave concern over the killing of two of Iraq's
most prominent academics: Isam al-Rawi, a pr
Source: Letters to the Editor of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
Nov 12, 2006
Sir, -
Neve Gordon's "Anti-Israeli? You just don't like what I say" (November 8) was a cut-and-paste of an earlier letter he wrote to the National Catholic Reporter. It was full of lies, as was his op-ed.
Instead of answering why he seeks to stifle the free speech of Prof. Steven Plaut, Gordon turns around again - as he always does - and says I tried to stifle Norman Finkelstein's free speech. I didn't, and, as I
explained in my original op-ed, I've r
Source: http://www.eveningsun.com
Nov 12, 2006
The crowd gathered and waited for the tall, bearded figure to appear.
Town dignitaries clustered near the platform, anxious to hear what President Abraham Lincoln might have to say that November day in 1863.
A cheer went up for the president as he prepared to speak.
"I suppose you have all seen me and according to my past experience, you have not seen as much as you expected to see," Lincoln began.
The joke about his personal appearan
Source: WaPo
Nov 11, 2006
The Greek capital hardly springs immediately to mind as the home for a shrine to the 19th-century Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel.
But letters from Victor Hugo, Russian oil-field maps and explosives-factory share certificates will be among the items going on display next year in Athens in a new museum dedicated to Nobel, the museum's founder announced this week.
Greek historian Giorgos Marcou's family donated the funds for the project, and boug
Source: Reuters
Nov 11, 2006
Top U.S. military leaders have begun a broad review of strategy in Iraq and other crisis areas in the Bush administration's campaign against terrorism, The New York Times reported in Saturday editions.
Citing Pentagon officials, the Times reported that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Peter Pace had assembled a team of what it called some of the military's brightest and most innovative officers and charged them with taking a fresh look at Iraq, Afghanistan and other flashpoints.
Source: Dr. History (blog)
Nov 11, 2006
[I am an associate professor of history at a small liberal arts college in the South. I teach both sections of U.S. Survey and upper division level courses in post-Civil War American history, women's history, and American foreign policy. I have two young children and I just got tenure.]
I was pretty shocked by the news that Donald Rumsfeld is resigning as Secretary of Defense, but that doesn't come close to matching my shock that his replacement could be current Texas A&M president and
