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: graphic.pepperdine.edu
Nov 2, 2006
It’s not every day that Pepperdine University is granted the privilege of having a Pulitzer Prize winner in its presence. However, at the beginning of the 2006 school year Pepperdine University welcomed 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner, Dr. Edward Larson.
The Pulitzer Prize is regarded as the highest national honor the prizes are awarded in April of every year and are administered by Columbia University. There are 21 different categories and each winner receives a $10,000 cash reward.
Source: Economist
Nov 2, 2006
SO IS it to be 1967 or 1948? For watchers of the Middle East this question is shorthand for two different ways to think about the origins of, and solutions to, the long conflict between Israel and the Arabs of Palestine. In the eyes of the 1967 crowd, Israel was entitled to the borders it had before its abrupt expansion in the six-day war of that year. To make peace, the trick is therefore to create circumstances in which Israel will give up most or all of that land and allow an independent Pale
Source: FrontpageMag.com
Nov 2, 2006
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Robert Spencer, a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is the author of the new book, The Truth About Muhammad.
FP
Source: A Conversation with James Loewen by Mike Jetty at the website of Phi Delta Kappa
Nov 2, 2006
JAMES Loewen is an author, historian, and professor. Through Lies My Teacher Told Me, he has helped to reconstruct the way history is viewed and taught in public schools all across America. During a recent conversation, he shared his views on how American Indian topics and events are traditionally taught and offered his insights into what we can do to accommodate multiple perspectives in our examination of history. Below, I present his comments and insights as he told them to me.
My
Source: David Pryce-Jones in the Literary Review (UK)
Nov 1, 2006
Ilan Pappe is an Israeli academic who has made his name by hating Israel and everything it stands for. In his view, expressed with obsession and a degree of paranoia, Jewish nationalism, that is to say Zionism, has been from its outset a deliberate tool for dispossessing the Palestinians; and therefore it is to be condemned root and branch. He reserves the Palestinian term of Nakba, meaning catastrophe, for describing what to Israelis is their war of independence of 1948. To him, Israeli politic
Source: Bruce Craig in Perspectives, the newsmagazine of the AHA
Nov 1, 2006
In a meeting with representatives of the research community in September 2006, Archivist of the United States Allen Weinstein reported on the progress being made in the effort to implement the National Declassification Initiative (NDI), a new set of policies, declassification practices, procedures, and the organizational structure believed to be needed to create a more reliable executive branch-wide declassification program for federal records. The archivist said, "When we last met in April
Source: Linda Kerber, president of the AHA, in Perspectives
Nov 1, 2006
Embracing a recommendation of the recently formed Disability History Association, the AHA Council has added a new category to the checklist of specialties that is part of our membership form. Like African American history and women’s history, which were included in the membership taxonomy formulated in the 1970s, the history of disability is a rapidly growing field that has been embraced by a wide range of historians, including some who are themselves part of the subject they study.
Source: Lee Formwalt in the OAH Newsletter
Nov 1, 2006
Twenty-six years ago, at the behest of OAH President Gerda Lerner, the organization began a new and exciting Distinguished Lectureship program. Today it stands as one of the organization’s most engaging accomplishments, as it brings leading scholars to audiences across the country, both to impart a greater understanding of the American past and to raise money for the OAH. Gerda Lerner is widely recognized as a major force in the creation of Women’s History. She was only the second female preside
Source: OAH President Richard White in the OAH Newsletter
Nov 1, 2006
I have begun to worry that public history and public intellectuals are in danger of becoming oxymorons. Public history, to be sure, is alive and well in the states and, paradoxically, in private museums such as the Autry in Los Angeles, but its heartland is always going to be in Washington, D.C., and there it is not doing as well as it might. I taught a class in Washington, D.C. last year that involved dealing with many museums and many public historians, some of them people I have known for yea
Source: Thomas W. Zeiler in the OAH Newsletter
Nov 1, 2006
[Thomas Zeiler, professor of history at the University of Colorado, is executive editor of Diplomatic History and is a member of the advisory board of H-Diplo, an H-Net discussion list dedicated to the study of diplomatic and international history at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo.]
H-Diplo’s example of technological democracy in action raises comparisons with a far more well-known tool of the twenty-first century, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that encourages anyone to insert, revise, a
Source: NYT
Nov 1, 2006
Edward W. Said published his highly influential polemic “Orientalism” nearly 30 years ago, and Robert Irwin, a British specialist in the history and culture of the Middle East, has been fuming ever since. “Dangerous Knowledge” is his belated two-pronged response: a point-by-point rebuttal of Mr. Said, folded into a history of Western scholarship devoted to the Middle East.
Mr. Irwin delays his direct attack until the penultimate chapter but throws down the gauntlet early. “Orientali
Source: news.wisc.edu
Nov 1, 2006
As an historian, Susan Lee Johnson finds few subjects of American history more irresistible than the California Gold Rush, a movement that unfolded so fast and furiously that it must seem like watching history get shot from a cannon.
"Almost nothing draws people as quickly as the possibility of digging cash out of the earth," says Johnson, a professor of history and Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "The California Gold Rush was no
Source: Scott McLemee at the website, Insider Higher Ed
Nov 1, 2006
... A memory of that cringe-inducing moment on CSPAN [during which a noted historian disparaged the writing of history from below] flooded back to mind a few days ago, upon news of the death of Lawrence W. Levine, a professor of history emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley. (He also served as president of the Organization of American Historians and, after retiring from Berkeley, taught in the history and cultural studies programs at George Mason University.) The headline of
Source: Aljazeera
Nov 1, 2006
An Istanbul court judge on Wednesday said Muazzez Ilmiye Cig's writings had not insulted religious honour nor incited hatred and enmity as charged by the prosecution.
Turkey is an overwhelmingly Muslim, but officially secular, country and a candidate for European Union membership.
Dozens of intellectuals, notably the Nobel literature prize winner Orhan Pamuk, have been prosecuted over the past year for insulting concepts held dear by Turks, such as the ''Turkish identity'' or the
Source: Email from historian Mark Grimsley to John J. Miller of National Review. Posted at Cliopatria, the HNN blog
Oct 31, 2006
I've finally gotten the more or less definitive word on the background and status of the Ambrose-Hesseltine Chair at Wisconsin. According to the university's development office, quite a few parties have been involved in this fundraising drive since Stephen Ambrose kicked it off in 1997. He was, of course, the main donor to the Chair.
The files contain no formal document outlining an agreement between the other donors and the University of Wisconsin Foundation. But it seems fair to s
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Oct 31, 2006
Hours before the New York University historian Tony Judt was scheduled to give a talk at the Polish Consulate in New York on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," the event was called off. In an e-mail message to friends, colleagues, and the news media, Judt charged that "the talk was canceled because the Polish Consulate had been threatened by the Anti-Defamation League." For its part, the ADL, which has been critical of Judt's previous writings on Israel, acknowledged
Source: http://www.pestiside.hu
Oct 30, 2006
Sometime in the next few days or weeks, a lowly staffer or student on work-study at Central European University will likely perform a small and simple bit of administrative housekeeping that may have more meaning than some of the densest lines written by the George Soros-funded institution's most celebrated social scientists. They will erase or modify the page on the university's website currently found at www.ceu.hu/hist/antohi_cv.htm, which li
Source: Manan Ahmed at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Oct 30, 2006
William Montgomery Watt, Professor (Emeritus) of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the University of Edinburgh - unarguably one of the key historians of Islam in the West - died on October 24, 2006 at the age of 97. He was educated at the Universities of Edinburgh, Jena, and at Balliol College, Oxford. He held the post of Assistant Lecturer in Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh from 1934 to 1938, Lecturer in Ancient Philosophy 1946-1947, and successively Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in Arabic 194
Source: CBS Evening News
Oct 30, 2006
... "When Ronald Reagan was elected governor, he blew everybody's expectations of him losing out of the water," says historian Douglas Brinkley, a CBS News consultant.
Brinkley is writing a book based on Reagan's presidential diaries.
"That this Hollywood actor could ... win the biggest state in the country and use that as the springboard for the conservative movement has become the stuff of political lore," Brinkley says.
The lore an
Source: FrontpageMag.com
Oct 30, 2006
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is H. W. (Harry) Crocker III, who has worked as a journalist, a speechwriter for the governor California (Pete Wilson, in his first term and reelection campaign), and as Vice President and Executive Editor of Regnery Publishing. He is the author of Triumph: The Power and the Glory of the Catholic Church, A 2,000-Year History, and Robert E. Lee on Leadership: Executive Lessons in Character, Courage, and Vision, as well as the prize-winning comic novel The Old Li
