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: Richard Allsop in The Australian
Aug 15, 2006
[Richard Allsop is a research fellow of the Institute of Public Affairs in Melbourne.]
... Among all the positives the summit will produce, however, there is still some cause for concern. Speaking on ABC radio recently, Education Minister Julie Bishop said: ''Australian history should be a critical part of the school curriculum, it should at least be a stand-alone subject, and compulsory to say Year 10. I think we should have a great deal of pride in our nation's history, and to ens
Source: Michael Grunwald in the New Republic
Aug 14, 2006
... Katrina was not the Big One. To their credit, almost all the post-Katrina authors seem to recognize this, even if they do not dwell on it. Jed Horne, an editor at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, came up with the perfect title for his lucid and wrenching chronicle of the storm: Breach of Faith. Ivor van Heerden makes the same point in oversized type on the back cover of his memoir The Storm: "Properly designed and constructed levees would have protected the city. Instead, they collapsed.
Source: Email message from Nancy Toff, editorial director, Oxford University Press
Aug 14, 2006
I am very sad to report the death of one of our most esteemed
authors, Kermit Hall, in a swimming accident yesterday afternoon.
Kermit was the editor of The Oxford Companion to the Supreme Court,
The Oxford Companion to American Law, and The Judicial Branch in the
Institutions of American Democracy series, and author of The Magic
Mirror: Law in American History, among many other books. At his
death he was working with us on the final stages of The Pursuit of
Justice: Supreme Court
Source: Albany Times Union
Aug 14, 2006
ALBANY -- Kermit L. Hall, the University at Albany's genial and scholarly 17th president, died in a swimming accident Sunday while on vacation in Hilton Head, S.C. He was 61.
The Associated Press reported that beachgoers rescued Hall and his wife, Phyllis, around 2:20 p.m. Sunday about 100 yards from shore. Hall died at Hilton Head Regional Medical Center around 3 p.m.
Friends said late Sunday night that Phyllis Hall was uninjured but they were unsure of details.
Source: NYT
Aug 11, 2006
James Harvey Young, a social historian of American medicine who wrote engaging studies of fraud, dubious cures and health quackery and later chronicled the birth of federal food regulation, died July 29 in Atlanta. He was 90.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his family said.
Dr. Young, an emeritus professor of history at Emory University, wrote two volumes on the study of drugs and therapeutic devices of the sort once hawked at sideshows and through mail-order c
Source: OAH President Richard White in the OAH Newsletter
Aug 8, 2006
While preparing the OAH Strategic Plan in 2002, the OAH Executive Board recommended that future program committees “create sessions on scholarly controversies in which two or more distinguished historians take opposing positions.” It seemed a good idea at the time, and still seemed good when the committee met to plan the 2007 convention. This coming year is the one hundredth anniversary of the OAH, and if there were ever a time to show the diversity of views within the profession—and historians’
Source: Ralph Luker at HNN blog, Cliopatria
Aug 7, 2006
If you were David S. Brown, these would be heady days, indeed. His credentials, after all, are modest ones: 1995 Ph.D., University of Toledo; 1992 M.A., University of Akron; 1990 B.A., Wright State University; and he teaches at a modest institution: Elizabethtown College. Apparently free of overwhelming pressures to publish, Brown was able to devote ten yea
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Aug 7, 2006
[Michael Nelson is a professor of political science at Rhodes College. Most recently he edited, with Richard J. Ellis, Debating the Presidency: Conflicting Perspectives on the American Executive (CQ Press, 2006).]
... [Robert Caro's] The Path to Power and Means of Ascent, which together told the story of Johnson's life through his first election to the Senate, in 1948, sold extremely well, and each volume won a National Book Critics Circle Award. The response of academic historians,
Source: Lawrence Journal-World
Aug 7, 2006
Two-thirds of Kansas lies west of U.S. Highway 81, away from the state’s major population centers, distant from its biggest universities.
Western Kansas can be a harsh, often desolate place, where rain is scarce, livelihood uncertain and hard times common. But many believe it is where the true Kansas character was forged.
Its inhabitants — those who’ve lasted two, three and four generations — are a special breed.
“They’ve had to be psychologically strong an
Source: Weekly Standard
Aug 7, 2006
Shepherdstown, West Virginia
What is a quintessential third-generation New York Jewish intellectual--me--doing moving to a house located between Shepherdstown and Martinsburg, West Virginia?
When I left 93rd Street and Broadway in 1992 for the Maryland suburbs of Washington, my New York friends thought my wife and I were mad. One does not simply discard one's roots and leave the Big Apple; it is just not done! Now, my Washington friends are shocked ("You're going where?&
Source: Zaman.com
Aug 6, 2006
Ilan Pappe, an Israeli-born professor at Haifa University, who is well-known as a revisionist or "post-Zionist" Israeli historian. He has a BA from Hebrew University and a PhD from Oxford. He is a senior lecturer in the department of Political Science at Haifa University and the Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. He is also the Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva. Ilan Pappe is the author of many books on the Israeli-Pa
Source: Sam Tanenhaus in the NYT Book Review
Aug 6, 2006
At his death in 1970, Richard Hofstadter was probably this country’s most renowned historian, best known as the originator of the “consensus” school, whose measured siftings of the American past de-emphasized conflict — whether economic, regional or ideological — and highlighted instead the nation’s long tradition of shared ideas, principles and values.
This school had a limited shelf life, but Hofstadter’s work has outlived it, owing to the clarity and nuance of his thought and his
Source: NYT
Aug 6, 2006
Arlene Raven, a pioneering historian and advocate of women’s art, died Tuesday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 62.
The cause was cancer, said the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, which represents her companion, the artist Nancy Grossman.
In 1973 Ms. Raven was a founder, with the artist Judy Chicago and the graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, of the Feminist Studio Workshop. It was the educational component of the Woman’s Building, a pioneering center devoted to w
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Aug 4, 2006
Henry Louis Gates Jr. might never see eye to eye with Sgt. James Crowley over his highly publicized arrest last month, but the Harvard University professor has credited the Cambridge police officer for this much: inspiring him as a scholar.
In an interview with The Root, an online publication that he edits, Mr. Gates said he planned to draw upon his arrest as "a teaching experience," and he talked with PBS about producing a documentary about racial profiling.
Source: Press Release -- Washington College
Aug 4, 2006
Chestertown, MD, August 4, 2006 — On September 14 and 15, 2006, Washington College's C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience will host a celebration to honor Stacy Schiff, 2006 winner of the George Washington Book Prize—one of the nation's largest literary awards. This year's event not only honors Ms. Schiff's book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America, but also marks the 300th anniversary year of Benjamin Franklin's birth.
The centerp
Source: Times Online (UK)
Aug 3, 2006
THE LIFE of Robert Wokler embodied the political and intellectual tragedies and controversies of the later 20th century. A Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Europe, he was close to the leading intellectual historians of the prewar generation and lived to contest with postmodernism the identity of the Enlightenment and its supposed responsibility for the tragedy of the Holocaust into which he was born.
Born Robert Lucien Wochiler in 1942 in Auch, France, to Polish and Hungarian Jewish refu
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Aug 3, 2006
When he was 12, historian James Harvey Young watched a medicine show performer peddle a worthless concoction meant to relieve gullible audience members of their hard-earned cash, if not their aches and pains.
"He noticed a lot of unsophisticated people paying their dollar for a bottle, and that lodged in him," said his son Harvey Galen Young of Atlanta.
He wanted to debunk the nostrum purveyors and bring rationalism to health care decisions and give people the
Source: David White at Campus-Watch.org
Aug 3, 2006
[David White, a graduate of Yale University, is a writer in Washington. This article was written for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.]
Early last month, when it emerged that Yale University had decided to reject the appointment of University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, he blamed a" concerted press campaign by neoconservatives...[which] was inappro
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Aug 2, 2006
Lynn Downey lives for yesterday.
As the historian for Levi Strauss & Co. in San Francisco, she has spent 17 years retracing the company's past, which dates to 1853, when Bavarian immigrant Levi Strauss opened a wholesale dry-goods business, selling merchandise to general stores throughout the West.
It has been Downey's job to chronicle how the company got from there to here over 153 years. At Levi's, she oversees a vast collection of records, in the form of clothing
Source: NY Times
Aug 2, 2006
Anthony Cave Brown, a British journalist who wrote books about espionage, including a study of the role of intelligence in the invasion of Europe in World War II, died on July 14 in Warrenton, Va. He was 77.The cause was complications of pneumonia, Edward Russell, his former brother-in-law, said.
Mr. Cave Brown’s best-known book, “Bodyguard of Lies” (1975), told how Churchill directly ordered elaborate schemes of deception to confuse the Germans about Allied pla
