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: LAT
Jul 23, 2006
By now, Waskar Ari should be preparing his lectures for the fall semester at the University of Nebraska, a year's professorship already under his belt. The Bolivian historian and political scientist, an Aymara Indian with a doctorate in history from Georgetown University, was offered a tenure-track post in Lincoln teaching Latin American history more than a year ago.
But Ari has yet to obtain a U.S. visa. He hears rumors that he has been accused of "terrorist" connections,
Source: NYT
Jul 22, 2006
The PBS documentarian Ken Burns has been working for six years on “The War,” a soldier’s-eye view of World War II, and those who have seen parts of the 14-plus hours say they are replete with salty language appropriate to discussions of the horrors of war.
What viewers will see and hear when the series is broadcast in September 2007 is an open question.
A new Public Broadcasting Service policy that went into effect immediately when it was issued on May 31 requires produ
Source: Mark Mayerson (blog)
Jul 21, 2006
[I've worked as an animator, writer, producer and director in TV animation for 29 years. I created the cgi series Monster By Mistake. Currently, I'm working towards a Masters degree at York University in Film Studies and teaching animation at Sheridan College.]
Paul Johnson is no lightweight. He's authored books such as The Birth of the Modern, Intellectuals, and A History of the English People. That's why it's so disappointing that his latest book, Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picass
Source: Kevin Matthews in the UCLA International Institute
Jul 21, 2006
As one of eight American universities offering a PhD in Women's Studies, and one of two in North America offering a PhD in Islamic Studies, UCLA is a logical place to seek fresh contributors for a journal focusing on women in a very broadly defined Middle East. Previously edited by University of Michigan Middle East studies director Marcia C. Inhorn, the two-year-old Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (JMEWS), published three times a year, is moving to a new editorial shop in the UCLA Center
Source: Press Release -- Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History
Jul 21, 2006
NEW HAVEN, CT (JULY 21, 2006) – Yale University’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition, sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, has announced the finalists for the Eighth Annual Frederick Douglass Book Prize, one of the most coveted awards for the study of the African-American experience.
The finalists are: Steven Deyle for “Carry Me Back: The Domestic Slave Trade in American Life” (Oxford University Press); Richard Follett
Source: Alice M. Sohn in a Letter to the Editor of the NYT
Jul 17, 2006
[The writer is a former executive editor in the textbook divisions of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and Holt, Rinehart & Winston.]
To the Editor:
Re “Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality” (front page, July 13):
Similarities between two history texts are not, as Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for the textbook publisher Pearson Prentice Hall, maintains, “absolutely an aberration” — as a more extensive examination of texts in any field would verify.
Source: chronicle of Higher Ed
Jul 17, 2006
It was only a year ago that I told my story in these pages, describing how I had returned to graduate school at age 55 to finish my Ph.D. in history and how, as a result, I had earned the sobriquet from my students at Brown University as the Oldest Living TA.
After spending 30 years as a public historian for various historical agencies and ultimately for the U.S. Department of State, I decided to go back to Brown to finish what I had started so long ago. But when my essay was publis
Source: Christopher Silvester: Review of LETTERS FROM OXFORD: Hugh Trevor-Roper to Bernard Berenson; in Times Online (UK)
Jul 16, 2006
These letters were never intended for publication. Indeed, when asked late in the correspondence whether he would want them returned, Hugh Trevor-Roper even contemplated burning them. For apart from being wonderfully wise and witty, they are vicious about Oxford colleagues, and at least one of them contained such a heinous libel (of the royal physician attending George VI, see panel, below right) that it might have cost Trevor-Roper dear if it had fallen into the wrong hands. Although their cont
Source: Editors of the NYT Bk Rev: "Up Front"
Jul 16, 2006
Henry Ward Beecher, the subject of a new biography reviewed on this week's cover by Michael Kazin, had a lot in common with William Jennings Bryan, the subject of Kazin's own recent biography, "A Godly Hero." In an e-mail message Kazin points out that both were skilled orators deeply concerned with religious and political issues. As a college student, Bryan once attended a lecture by the aging Beecher, Kazin writes, and his own sentimental theology was influenced by Beecher's "gos
Source: Press Release -- Harvard W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research
Jul 14, 2006
Cambridge, MA. – Henry Louis Gates, Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) on July 10 at the society's 116th annual convention, held in Addison, Texas.
Gates learned of the Revolutionary War veteran in his lineage while filming his PBS documentary, "African American Lives," a program
Source: Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian
Jul 13, 2006
It's taken me nearly a week to read all 353 comments posted on the Guardian blog in response to my column last week about cheese-eating surrender monkeys and fire-eating war junkies. I'm still reeling. Take this post from KCharlesSimmonds: "The west is at war. The enemy has two faces, personified by Mohammad Atta and Timothy Garton Ash. TGA strums away on his keyboard, congratulating himself and us on our complacency and irresolution. Go on, roll over, fall asleep, lie back and take it.&quo
Source: Daniel Pipes's blog
Jul 13, 2006
In an echo of the Mearsheimer-Walt critique of strong U.S. ties with Israel, Michael Massing has a lengthy article in the New York Review of Books,"The Storm over the Israel Lobby." In it, he devotes three paragraphs to the Middle East Forum, Campus Watch, and myself. I wrote a letter to the editor pointing out a mistake and asked Massing a question. The Review published my letter and Massing's attempt at a rebuttal under the t
Source: NYT
Jul 12, 2006
... Just how similar passages showed up in two books is a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers. And while it is rare that the same language is used in different books, it is common for noted scholars to give their names to elementary and high school texts, lending prestige and marketing power, while lesser known writers h
Source: NYT
Jul 12, 2006
One of the most frequently used high school history texts is “Holt the American Nation,” first published in 1950 as “Rise of the American Nation” and written by Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti. For each edition, the book appeared with new material, long after one author had died and the other was in a nursing home. Eventually, the text was reissued as the work of another historian, Paul S. Boyer.
Professor Boyer, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin at Madis
Source: David Thompson at Butterfliesandwheels.com (blog)
Jul 11, 2006
Karen Armstrong has been described as “one of the world's most provocative and inclusive thinkers on the role of religion in the modern world”. Armstrong’s efforts to be “inclusive” are certainly “provocative”, though generally for reasons that are less than edifying. In 1999, the Muslim Public Affairs Council of Los Angeles gave Armstrong an award for media “fairness”. What follows might cast light on how warranted that recognition is, an
Source: Mike Leonard in the Herald Times (Indiana)
Jul 11, 2006
With the announcement that Honda would build a major automobile
manufacturing plant near Greensburg, national attention was focused on the
southern Indiana town.
Nearly all of it was positive. A reporter for"All Things Considered" on
National Public Radio even said Greensburg" could be a movie set for an
ideal American small town." Honda labeled the Decatur County seat an"outstanding community of people."
Sociologist James W. Loewen would edit that statement slightly. Writing on
Source: Donna L. Cole in The Capital
Jul 10, 2006
One was a 19th century slave, the other a 21st century college student.
An abolitionist and a scholar of history, whose destinies, though so very different from one another, brought them to the same place. And now the path of the student and that of the slave have met in New York City.
Tim Shenk, of Annapolis, went to New York by way of Columbia University. A 2003 graduate of the Severn School, Mr. Shenk is a history major entering his junior year at Columbia.
Fr
Source: Sean Wilentz in the New Republic
Jul 10, 2006
In March 1965, a delegation of historians joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s fifty-four-mile march from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama. Weeks earlier, Alabama state troopers had brutally broken up a voting rights march in Selma with nightsticks and tear gas, and King aimed to finish what the protesters had started. The historians, who included the renowned Richard Hofstadter, went south to take a stand. That the normally circumspect Hofstadter struck his tasks at Columbia University and made t
Source: California Aggie
Jul 10, 2006
Beginning Summer Session II, Keith David Watenpaugh, associate professor of modern Islam, human rights and peace in the department of religious studies, will teach Middle East/South Asia Studies 180, "The Question of Iraq." The class will focus on the historical, cultural and ethical components of mass violence, sectarian conflict, neocolonialism, terrorism and torture.
As one of the only scholars to have studied in Iraq both before and after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Wa
Source: "History Matters" in the Guardian
Jul 9, 2006
[Take part - It's your heritage
History Matters - pass it on is a campaign to raise public awareness of the huge contribution that history, heritage and the built environment make to our quality of life. It unites the whole heritage sector, led by the National Trust, English Heritage, the Historic Houses Association and the Heritage Lottery Fund, and events will be held over the next six months at hundreds of historic locations across England and Wales. Supporters include David Star
