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: Mark Bourrie,in the Ottawa Citizen
Mar 6, 2006
[Mark Bourrie is an independent journalist and a PhD student in modern Canadian media and European history at the University of Ottawa.]
The Nazi party was in decline when it came to power in 1933. The party's membership numbers were stagnant and its popular vote was beginning to slip. But in the Weimar Republic's Reichstag, moderate centrist and leftist parties could not form a working coalition.
In sheer numbers, the Communists were the fastest-rising threat to the st
Source: Financial Times (UK)
Mar 6, 2006
Max Gallo, the waspish and prolific historian who has penned vivid portraits of ex-emperor Napoleon and former president Charles de Gaulle, has had enough of the country's "self-flagellation".
In a new polemic, entitled PROUD to be French (sic), Gallo glories in the virtues of France's republican model and the innate wisdom of its peoples.
As the son of an Italian immigrant, Gallo has a preference for pasta and parmesan over poulet. But he expresses immense p
Source: pennlive.com
Mar 6, 2006
LANCASTER - Stephan Williams taught history with wit and casual style, his students said, but his bosses weren't charmed.
Williams became noted at the Lancaster Campus of Harrisburg Area Community College for classroom discussions on Abraham Lincoln's sexuality. He used the occasional curse word. A student described him as "a guy you could almost see yourself sharing a beer with while talking about history."
Williams no longer teaches at the school in East L
Source: Susan Cooke Kittredge
Mar 6, 2006
Ten days before Christmas, I received a call from a detective with the Brooklyn district attorney's office. He wondered if I had heard anything about the office's investigation into the illegal sale of more than 1,000 bodies by several funeral homes in the area. I told him I had not. He went on to explain that the bodies were stolen and parts of them sold to several different processing plants. It sounded macabre, and I don't really remember much more after he said, "We have evidence that y
Source: Austin Statesman
Mar 3, 2006
As a scholar of early Greek culture and writing, Thomas Palaima knows well the story of the plague that the god Apollo visits upon the Greek army in Homer's "Iliad."
Greek king Agamemnon's insulting treatment of a priest is to blame, but nobody has the courage to explain this to Agamemnon. Only when the warrior Achilles promises to provide protection from Agamemnon does the prophet Calchas agree to speak up.
It's still true today: Most people are reluctant t
Source: Jacob Laksin at Frontpagemag.com
Mar 3, 2006
There were heated denunciations of the American government, angry pleas for the immediate arrest of American imperialism, and widespread support for more aggressive political activism to resist the injustices daily perpetrated by America abroad and at home. It was no run-of-the-mill anti-war hate fest but the first national conference of Historians Against the War (HAW), events more closely related than they may at first appear.
HAW, notwithstanding its claims to scholarly prestige, is an ac
Source: Frontpagemag.com
Mar 3, 2006
Frontpage Interview's guest today is Daniel Mandel, a Fellow in History at Melbourne University and Director of the ZOA Center for Middle East Policy. He is the author of the new book, H.V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist. FP: Daniel Mandel welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Mandel: Pleasure to be here, Jamie.FP: What inspired you to write this book?Mandel: I'm a historian with a long interest in the mak
Source: NYT
Mar 3, 2006
After complaints from historians, the National Archives directed intelligence agencies on Thursday to stop removing previously declassified historical documents from public access and urged them to return to the shelves as quickly as possible many of the records they had already pulled.
Allen Weinstein, the nation's chief archivist, announced what he called a "moratorium" on reclassification of documents until an audit can be completed to determine which records should be
Source: NYT
Mar 2, 2006
Arnold A. Rogow, an author and political scientist who trained as a psychoanalyst to gain insight into historical figures like Alexander Hamilton, died on Feb. 14 at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia hospital in Manhattan. He was 81.
The cause was complications of a stroke, his daughter Jeanne Rogow said.
Mr. Rogow, a professor at City College of New York, argued in his book "A Fatal Friendship: Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr" (Hill and Wang, 1998) that Hamilto
Source: Geoffrey Wheatcroft in the Prospect
Mar 1, 2006
... As the centenary of his birth arrives on 25th March, it may be that AJP Taylor needs some pale gleam to kindle past passions. He belongs to what has been called the most remote of ages, the day before yesterday, and my impression is that few people under 40 have any idea of how extraordinary Taylor's stature—or at least his fame—once was. Forty years ago he was the best known historian in this country. He was a don who taught generations of pupils and was the most popular lecturer of his tim
Source: Scott McLemee at Inside Higher Ed
Mar 1, 2006
Two images of William Jennings Bryan have settled into the public memory, neither of them flattering. One is the fundamentalist mountebank familiar to viewers of Inherit the Wind, with its fictionalized rendering of the Scopes trial. In it, the character based on Bryan proclaims himself “more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks.” He is, in short, a crowd-pleasing creationist numbskull, and nothing more.
The other portrait of Bryan is less cinematic, but darker. The
Source: Michiko Kakutani in the NYT
Feb 28, 2006
Toward the end of her freshman year at Yale, Molly Worthen, who was taking a history and politics seminar with Professor Charles Hill, wrote on the inside cover of her notebook: "Charles Hill is God."
She was not alone in her adulation. As Ms. Worthen, class of 2003, tells it, Mr. Hill was something of an icon on the Yale campus — revered as a wise man by his ardent disciples and reviled by others as a reactionary cult figure. "His pedagogy is Puritan, fashioned arou
Source: Haaretz
Feb 28, 2006
British historian David Irving, who began last week serving a three-year prison sentence in Austria for Holocaust denial, repeated Tuesday earlier claims that he does not believe Hitler systematically worked to annihilate European Jewry.In an attempt reduce his prison sentence, Irving claimed during his trial that he had changed his mind since comments he made in 1989 - for which he was convicted - and insisted he believes today that the Holocaust indeed took place and that
Source: Reuters
Feb 27, 2006
Author Dan Brown attended a London court on Monday at the start of a trial in which two historians are accusing him of copying their ideas in his best-selling religious thriller "The Da Vinci Code".Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent are suing Brown's British publisher, Random House, for lifting "the whole architecture" of the research that went into their 1982 non-fiction book "The Holy Blood, and the Holy Grail".
Brown's book has mo
Source: Harvard Crimson
Feb 24, 2006
Lawrence H. Summers, who began his presidency by tangling publicly with black studies scholar Cornel R. West ’74, is set to end his five-year term by approving tenure appointments for at least four Faculty members in the African and African-American Studies Department.
West was among the first of six professors from that department who left Harvard during the Summers years.
But now, with the Summers presidency nearing a close, the department is on the verge of making
Source: WSJ
Feb 24, 2006
... Press accounts usually describe Mr. Irving as a Holocaust "revisionist" or denier. That he is, as a British court found in 2000, when it ruled against him in a defamation suit that he had brought against American scholar Deborah Lipstadt. But Mr. Irving is something worse, partly because he is something better: A man of learning and a certain kind of intellectual brilliance, he made dishonest use of both qualities in an attempt to restore the reputation of the Nazis and blacken tho
Source: The Star (South Africa)
Feb 24, 2006
Unshaven, unrepentant and unbowed since he was sentenced on Monday to three years for denying the Holocaust, 67-year-old Irving said American Jews - like those in Nazi Germany of the 30's - held "disproportionate power" in business, media and the entertainment industry.
"They are a very clever people disproportionately represented with extreme opinions and in 20 to 30 years the problems they faced in Nazi Germany will face them in America, I sincerely believe this,&qu
Source: NYT
Feb 24, 2006
Paul Avrich, a historian of the anarchist movement that played a role in the Russian Revolution and flourished in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries, died on Feb. 16 at Mount Sinai Hospital. He was 74 and lived in Manhattan.The cause was complications from Alzheimer's disease, said his wife, Ina Avrich.
Named distinguished professor of history at Queens College in 1982, Dr. Avrich, whose field was Russian history, wrote 10 books, mainly about anarchism
Source: Martin Kramer at his blog, Sandbox
Feb 23, 2006
On Tuesday, Juan Cole posted this appeal on his website, Informed Comment:If among my loyal readers there are any attorneys with expertise in libel law, in the US or UK, who might be willing to consult on a possible series of lawsuits for reckless defamation of character resulting in professional harm--done on a contingency basis--I'd much appreciate hearing from you.
Source: WSJ
Feb 23, 2006
It is best not to mince words. The imprisonment of David Irving by the Austrian authorities is a disgrace. It is a state punishment for a crime -- that of expression and argument and publication -- that is not a legal offense in Mr. Irving's country of birth and that could not be an offense under the First Amendment. It is to be hoped, by all those who value the right to dissent, that his appeal against both sentence and conviction will be successful.
Strictly speaking, "contex
