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: Jill Lepore in the New Yorker
Apr 24, 2006
Samuel Eliot Morison, the last Harvard historian to ride a horse to work, liked to canter to Cambridge on his gray gelding, tie it to a tree in the Yard, stuff his saddlebags with papers to grade, and trot back home to his four-story brick house at the foot of Beacon Hill. “Ours was the horsey end of town,” he wrote of the place where he was born, in 1887, and died, in 1976. Morison has been called the greatest American historian of the twentieth century. With that, as these things go, not every
Source: Informed Comment (blog)
Apr 24, 2006
John Fund of the Wall Street Journal editorial page has published a large number of falsehoods about me.
The most egregious is this:
' He calls Israel "the most dangerous regime in the Middle East." '
This a lie. I never said that. Try googling it. (All that comes up is the circular allegation I said it, never sourced. It never comes up on my site, because I did not say it, or say or imply anything like it.)
I did say that then-Israel
Source: Michael Rubin at frontpagemag.com
Apr 24, 2006
[Michael Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.]
In the coming week, the Yale Center for International and Area Studies will consider the candidacy of Juan Cole for a tenured position to study and teach the modern Middle East. The vacancy is palpable, but Cole should not be the man to fill it.
The international studies program has long struggled at Yale. In 1950, A.Whitney Griswold shut down the Yale Institute for International Affairs; he did not
Source: John Fund in the WSJ
Apr 24, 2006
In the next few days the university may hire Juan Cole, a history professor at the University of Michigan, to fill a new spot as a professor of contemporary Middle East studies.
Mr. Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts. First, his scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues. "He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary," says Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr.
Source: Rick Shenkman reporting for HNN
Apr 22, 2006
Pete Daniel, a curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, was named incoming president-elect of the Organization of American Historians on the final day of the group's annual meeting, which was held this year in Washington DC. He was elected by the council of the OAH. He is the first public historian to head the OAH in years.
Stanford's Richard White took over from Vicki Ruiz today as president of the OAH. He in turn will be succe
Source: National Coalition for History
Apr 21, 2006
After learning of the existence of yet another secret agreement just this
last week -- this one between NARA and the CIA -- Archivist of the United
States Allen Weinstein has released a redacted version of that agreement
and has pledged that the National Archives and Records Administration
(NARA) would no longer enter into secret agreements with government
agencies that would allow them to withdraw documents from the archives for
national-security reasons. The NARA/CIA agreement that
Source: Steve Plaut at frontpagemag.com
Apr 20, 2006
... Among the leading voices opposing any Israeli action at all aimed at stopping the massive firing by Palestinian terrorists of Qassam and other rockets at Israeli civilians is Aviad Kleinberg, the chairman of the Department of History at Tel Aviv University. How convenient for him that his campus is not (yet) within range of the Palestinian rockets and missiles.
Kleinberg claims to have some expertise in medieval history, as well as philosophy and religion. (His int
Source: Press Release -- Boston University
Apr 19, 2006
Historian Julian Zelizer was among four faculty members from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences selected as winners of fellowships from the prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which recently announced its 187 U.S. and Canadian awards.
BU recipients include Thomas Barfield, professor and chair of anthropology, for his project entitled “Political legitimacy in Afghanistan;” Frank J. Korom, associate professor of religion and anthropology, f
Source: NYT Editorial
Apr 19, 2006
Documents wind up missing from public archives for many reasons. Sometimes they're shelved or labeled incorrectly, or lost, and sometimes they're even stolen. But at the National Archives, documents have been disappearing since 1999 because intelligence officials have wanted them to. And under the terms of two disturbing agreements — with the C.I.A. and the Air Force — the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the publi
Source: Yale Daily News
Apr 18, 2006
Controversial University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole is a top candidate for a senior faculty position in modern Middle East studies, two members of the search committee said Monday.
Cole writes about contemporary politics on his blog, "Informed Comment," and has drawn criticism from conservatives for his opposition to the war in Iraq. But Frances Rosenbluth, a member of the search committee for the professorship, said the committee considered only his scholarly
Source: Guardian
Apr 18, 2006
Robert Carson, who has died aged 87, was keeper of the British Museum's department of coins and medals from 1978 until 1983, and the most widely admired and respected member of the international community of coin curators, scholars, collectors and dealers. An expert in Roman coinage, he was a stable force in the department during its postwar reconstruction.
Robert was even portrayed, under a pseudonym, in a numismatic roman à clef, The Coin Collectors (1997), by his friend and colleague t
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 18, 2006
Edmund S. Morgan, a professor emeritus of history at Yale University, will receive a special citation "for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian" over the past 50 years.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 18, 2006
Caroline Elkins, an associate professor of African studies at Harvard University, will receive the prize in general nonfiction for Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya (Henry Holt, 2005).
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 18, 2006
Kai Bird, a contributing editor to The Nation, and Martin J. Sherwin, a professor of history at Tufts University, will receive the prize in biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). (See an essay by Mr. Bird and Mr. Sherwin in The Chronicle Review, April 15, 2005.)
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Apr 18, 2006
David M. Oshinsky, a professor of American history at the University of Texas at Austin, will receive the prize in history for Polio: An American Story (Oxford University Press, 2005). (See an excerpt in The Chronicle Review, July 22, 2005.)
Source: Daniel Pipes at frontpagemag.com
Apr 17, 2006
What is the impact of Campus Watch, a project I founded that"reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them," in its four years of existence? It gets plenty of back-handed compliments (a favorite: Duke University's Miriam Cooke claims it threatens"to undermine the very foundations of American education"), but last week turned up the most eloquent, if u
Source: John Carlin, in a letter posted on Archives Listserve
Apr 17, 2006
[Mr. Carlin was appointed Archivist of the United States by Bill Clinton. He was replaced by Dr. Weinstein by President George W. Bush in 2005.]
Many individuals have asked me about the recent revelations regarding the reclassification efforts at the National Archives. Like the current Archivist, Dr. Weinstein, I first learned of a “secret” reclassification program in February from the New York Times. Because the Memorandum of Understanding was still classified, I had no idea what
Source: Robert KC Johnson at the HNN blog, Cliopatria
Apr 17, 2006
This week’s Chronicle published a piece by Dr. “Leah Bowman,” which demonstrates, among other things, the shortcomings of anonymous articles. Bowman is, in fact, Assistant Professor Laura Bier, an NYU Ph.D. newly hired in Georgia Tech’s History Department, where she is a social and cultural historian of post-colonial Egyptian history whose “research inte
Source: Eric Alterman in the Nation
Apr 17, 2006
George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq has proven so colossally counterproductive it almost beggars belief. This is finally, belatedly, reflected across a spectrum of opinion that includes virtually everyone who is not in the Bush inner circle or on the Washington Post editorial board or the Weekly Standard masthead. Speaking for the bedrock institutions of the establishment on The Charlie Rose Show recently, Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, admitted, "There's
Source: Seattle PI
Apr 16, 2006
LONDON -- A cup of coffee is just a drink. But a frappuccino is an experience.
So believes Bryant Simon, a historian who is searching for the meaning of modern life amid the round tables and comfy sofas of Starbucks coffee shops.
Simon, who teaches at Philadelphia's Temple University, thinks that by spending time at Starbucks - observing the teenage couples and solitary laptop-users, the hurried office workers and busy baristas - he can learn what it means to live and c
