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: Martin Kramer at Sandbox (blog)
Jun 3, 2006
Professor Juan Cole has produced another offensive quote, which appears in an article about the academic boycott of Israel: "If Israelis want to be a state, they, both genders, should take the criticism like men and stop being crybabies about 'anti-Semitism.'"
Here is news for Cole: Israel has been a state for nearly sixty years. Its founders included victims of the worst antisemitism. But Israelis of both genders earned their statehood not by whining like crybabies, but b
Source: Jewish Week
Jun 2, 2006
Juan Cole, one of the country’s top Middle East scholars, was poised for the biggest step of his career.
A tenured professor at the University of Michigan, Cole was tapped earlier this year by a Yale University search committee to teach about the modern Middle East. In two separate votes in May, Cole was approved by both the sociology and history departments, the latter the university’s largest.
The only remaining hurdle was the senior appointments committee, also know
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, HNN Blog
Jun 2, 2006
Conservative siteson the net are enthusiastically reporting that Juan Cole of Informed Comment and the University of Michigan has been denied an appointment at Yale. The appointment would have been to Yale's Center for International and Area Studies, with affiliations in history and sociol
Source: Graphic Ghana
Jun 1, 2006
The Dean of Graduate Studies of the University of Cape Coast, Prof. Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, has stressed the need to further examine the physical and material evidence of the slave trade in order to tell a better story about that inhumane experience.
According to her, the story of the slave trade had hardly been told and re-addressing that history was relevant in giving power to Africans both at home and abroad.
“It is important to emphasise that, perhaps, some Afric
Source: Boston Magazine(June Issue)
Jun 1, 2006
Probably the first sign that Larry Summers was in more than his usual trouble was the standing ovation the faculty gave to Bill Kirby, the dean the Harvard president had just forced out.
It was late in the afternoon of Tuesday, February 7, and the Harvard faculty had gathered on the second floor of University Hall in Harvard Yard. Faculty meetings usually attract only a few dozen professors, but on this day the Faculty Room was packed.
Tension had been building on cam
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria, HNN Blog
May 31, 2006
There is, undoubtedly, much to admire and respect about our fellow historian, S. Frederick Starr. He's the author of nearly two dozen books, including Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917-1980 (1983); and Bamboula! The Life and Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1995). He's had a distinguished administrative career, as Vice President of Academic Affairs at Tulane (1980-81) and
Source: Martin Kramer at Sandbox (blog)
May 31, 2006
The late Edward Said, the Palestinian-American icon, described the role of the intellectual as"speaking truth to power." In that spirit, many Palestinian academics and thinkers broke with Yasir Arafat and Fatah, accusing them of corruption and compromise.These intellectuals are nearly all secularists, who've long insisted to the world that the cause of Palestine is also the cause of revolution, equality, and democracy. So now that Hamas rules, are these intellectuals speaking the same tr
Source: Bates College website
May 28, 2006
President Hansen, distinguished fellow honorees, Professor Garber, Dr. Ho, Mark Morris, accomplished faculty, proud parents and grandparents, friends and ladies and gentlemen of the graduating Class of 2006. The great Class of 2006 [applause]. And, I might say, after passing by you this morning, the great looking class of 2006 [laughter/applause].
I am tremendously pleased and complimented by this high honor and the privilege of taking part in your day of celebration, and in the tim
Source: Christopher Shea in the Boston Globe
May 28, 2006
RICHARD HOFSTADTER'S ``The American Political Tradition," originally published in 1948 when the author was 32, still sells 10,000 copies a year-an astonishing figure, especially for an essay collection lacking an overarching theme. Yet its sharp biographical sketches have struck generations of readers as revelatory: Hofstadter's Teddy Roosevelt is a bloodthirsty, sham progressive; his Abraham Lincoln a careful cultivator of his own legend as a self-made man. Hofstadter's revisionism is so a
Source: Berkeley Daily Planet
May 26, 2006
Willa Klug Baum, an internationally respected oral historian, passed away on May 18, 2006, following back surgery. Her pioneering work in oral history methodology and interview techniques served as the foundation for the establishment and growth of oral history as a unique academic discipline.
(found via) ....
Willa was also instrumental in establishing oral history as an accepted disc
Source: frontpagemag.com
May 25, 2006
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Larry Schweikart, the co-author of A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror. He is a professor of history at the University of Dayton and has written more than 20 books on national defense, business, and financial history. He is the author of the new book,
Source: Press Release -- Gilder Lehrman
May 24, 2006
The second annual George Washington Book Prize was awarded at Mount Vernon on May 23 to Stacy Schiff for her book, A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America. The $50,000 prize honors the most important new book about the founding era. Schiff, winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography, tells the story of the eight years Benjamin Franklin spent in France beginning in 1776.
“In this time of renewed interest in the founding period, it is especially gratify
Source: Wa Po
May 24, 2006
Biographer Stacy Schiff has won the second annual George Washington Book Prize for "A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America" -- walking away with $50,000 and proving once again that the Founding Father industry is alive and well.
Walter Isaacson, one of three prize judges and himself a Benjamin Franklin biographer, praised Schiff's book yesterday as an unusual combination of "great spadework" and "literate narrative." Franklin
Source: Nation
May 22, 2006
Eric Foner has begun a one year term as president of SAH.
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
May 21, 2006
Georgia's expulsion of the Cherokees was executed with swift, military precision. In three short weeks in the late spring of 1838, members of the Georgia Militia arrested several thousand men, women and children, evicted them from their homes in North Georgia, and marched them to military camps in Tennessee for resettlement.
The removal of the Cherokees in Georgia — and later that summer in neighboring states — marked the start of what history now calls the Trail of Tears.
Source: David Horowitz at frontpagemag.com
May 19, 2006
Back in 2004, Joel Beinin, a professor of Middle East history at Stanford University, wrote a long and outraged article inveighing against what he called “intense policing to regulate what may be thought and said about the Middle East” in which he attacked critics of increasingly radicalized Middle Eastern Studies departments for daring to state their views. Now Beinin has become the policeman he once scorned.
In March, in a move clearly designed to obstruct opinions he didn’t like
Source: Bruce Craig in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
May 19, 2006
With his book "The House: The History of the House of Representatives" now off his desk and available in bookstores across the country, Historian of the House Robert Remini is turning his attention to building an historian's office that he hopes one day will mirror the Senate's in terms of recognition, staffing, and budget.
Remini, who was asked to take the position by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-IL), has now headed the House history office for about a year. Pri
Source: NYT
May 19, 2006
Peter Viereck, a noted historian, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a founder of the mid-20th-century American conservative movement who later denounced what he saw as its late-20th-century excesses, died on Saturday at his home in South Hadley, Mass. He was 89.
A specialist in Russian history, Professor Viereck was an emeritus professor at Mount Holyoke College, where he had taught since 1948. He received the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for his first collection of poems, "Terror an
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 16, 2006
[Scott Gac is a Ph.D. in American history who is in the final year of a postdoc at Yale University. His first book, Singing for Freedom: The Hutchinson Family Singers and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Reform, is due out in May 2007 from Yale University Press.]
... Hope had governed the early stages of my job search this year. Using my three years of experience on the market as a guide, I thought long and hard about how to present myself in the cover letters that would lead to my
Source: Michiko Kakutani in the NYT
May 16, 2006
The historian Douglas Brinkley's harrowing new book, "The Great Deluge," captures the human toll of Katrina as graphically as the most vivid newspaper and television accounts did, and by pulling together a huge, choral portrait of what happened during that first week of havoc and distress (from Saturday, Aug. 27, through Saturday, Sept. 3), he gives the reader a richly detailed timeline of disaster — a timeline in which the sheer cumulative power of details impresses upon us, again, ju
