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: History Today
Jan 11, 2006
The annual Longman-History Today award for Book of the Year 2006 went to Matt Houlbrook for Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis 1918-57 (University of Chicago Press). History Today Editor Peter Furtado described it at the awards ceremony this week as “not a story of persecution, but a lucid, sane and fascinating account of how gay people negotiated space for themselves within a hostile cultural environment, dealing with policing, housing, geography, identity and politics.
Source: The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
Jan 11, 2006
Alethea Hayter, who died yesterday aged 94, was a critic and biographer who wrote mainly about literary society in 19th-century England; Julian Barnes called her "one of our finest non-academic literary historians'', and her study Opium and the Romantic Imagination (1968) is considered a definitive account of the contribution made by narcotics to literary creation.
Opium in its medicinal form of laudanum was widely used as a pain-killer from the late 18th century onwards, but w
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jan 11, 2006
[In two books, Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Harvard University Press, 1983) and The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Westview Press, 1999), anthropologist Derek Freeman claimed that Mead had been duped to believe that Somoans believed in free love and clamed that her own desire to vindicate her mentor's theories of human development led her astray. Now Freeman's the one who has been put on the couch.]
Source: Scott Jaschik in Inside Higher Education
Jan 10, 2006
[Conrad Crane is director of the U.S. Army Military History Institute. He appeared at a panel on military history at the AHA this past weekend.]
Crane’s work relates more directly to Iraq. A West Point graduate (with a Stanford University Ph.D.), Crane spent most of his career in the Army, including nine years teaching at his alma mater. When he left the Army, he said he had a hard time getting hired as a scholar by the Army War College because, he said, “they assumed a historian w
Source: NYT
Jan 9, 2006
Two months ago, Time magazine jumped at the chance to make a deal with Simon & Schuster for the exclusive serial rights to "At Canaan's Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68," the third volume in Taylor Branch's Pulitzer Prize-winning series on the civil rights movement that is to come out tomorrow.
"I moved quickly on it because I think it's a terrific book, it's long awaited, it's very dramatic," said Stephen J. Koepp, the deputy managing editor at Time.
Source: NYT
Jan 8, 2006
... Anyone who doubts the value of Shelby's criticisms of black cultural identity politics should read Nell Irvin Painter's textbook on African-American history, "Creating Black Americans." With the odd exception of the field of economics, writing textbooks is not an especially prestigious undertaking in the historical and social sciences. So the decision of a distinguished scholar like Painter to publish one is to be welcomed, especially by college students burdened with books churned
Source: Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer
Jan 8, 2006
Memo to scholarly critics of Ben Franklin: Go fly a kite. At noon today, in a nod to the 120th meeting of the American Historical Association, which has been raising Center City's tweed factor all week, the National Constitution Center will host three celebratory Ben Franklin biographers: Gordon Wood, Walter Isaacson and Stacy Schiff. [They will appear in a show hosted by PBS's Jim Lehrer.]
Philadelphia's own David Waldstreicher, Temple history professor and fellow Franklin biograph
Source: Baton Rouge Advocate
Jan 8, 2006
Historian Douglas Brinkley, who is writing a book about Hurricane Katrina, lived through the deadly storm and has been studying it ever since.
Among the unsung heroes, Brinkley said, are those anonymous boat operators -- dubbed the Cajun navy -- who navigated their private fishing boats and other vessels through flooded New Orleans to lend a hand after the hurricane hit.
The sight of it all made him rethink his view of some laborers.
"I saw guys cha
Source: Znet
Jan 7, 2006
1) Can you tell ZNet, please, what your new book with, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, is about? What is it trying to communicate?
The book assembles my most recent writings on a variety of subjects, from the war in Iraq to essays on Eugene Debs, Henry David Thoreau, and Sacco and Vanzetti. The central theme is probably best expressed in the final essay, "The Optimism of Uncertainty," in which I draw upon historical experience to suggest that the apparent power of go
Source: Brooklyn College
Jan 6, 2006
Barbara B. Heyman, a music historian who most recently was director of the Office of College Information and Publications at Brooklyn College, has been awarded a 2006 grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Founded in 1965, the NEH is an independent federal agency and is the largest funder of humanities projects undertaken by museums, archives, libraries, public television, and independent scholars.
Heyman receives a grant of $40,000 to support research for her book, A C
Source: Brandeis University
Jan 6, 2006
Historian David Hackett Fischer, who has played a pivotal role in reviving popular and academic interest in American history and its lessons for the present, has been selected to receive the American Enterprise Institute’s Irving Kristol Award for 2006. He will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at the Institute’s annual dinner on March 8, 2006, at the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C.Professor Fischer is a pioneer among historians who are com
Jan 6, 2006
Mark Carnes, professor of history at Barnard, has received the American Historical Association's award for the the best article on teaching history.
The article, entitled"Inciting Speech," can be read at the following link:
www.barnard.edu/reacting/commentary.htm.
The article describes an innovaative approach Mr. Carnes developed to help students understand the past:"Reacting to the Past."
"Reacting to the Past," pi
Source: BBC News
Jan 4, 2006
David Irving, the infamous British war historian, is today sitting in an Austrian jail, accused of denying the Nazi Holocaust. So why is an American Jewish academic who dramatically crushed Irving in the British courts saying he should be released?
When you ask Professor Deborah Lipstadt for her thoughts on David Irving's forthcoming trial, the very last thing you expect her to say is: "Let the guy go home. He has spent enough time in prison."
Lipstadt, the
Source: The New Zealand Herald
Jan 4, 2006
Massey University historian James Watson was awarded an "Ig-Nobel" in October for his investigation of why Hawera farmer Richard Buckley's trousers exploded in August 1931.
Before you laugh, the study wasn't obscure, nor was it lightweight - more on that in a moment.
And the Ig-Nobels themselves are not a complete mickey-take: the annual awards, say organisers, are given out to those whose work first makes you laugh, then makes you think.
Dr Watso
Source: New Yorker
Jan 2, 2006
On the train up from Philadelphia the other day, Bryant Simon, a professor of history at Temple University, overheard two conversations about Starbucks. When he reached Penn Station, he made a pit stop at the Starbucks at Thirty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue. Then he began walking toward Grand Central, to catch a Metro-North train uptown, and passed a group of kids on the street, also talking about Starbucks. (“I guess a lot of people like twelve-dollar coffee,” one said.) He was headed for th
Source: Newsday
Jan 1, 2006
Alison Weir has been fascinated by the British monarchy since she was 14, when she read what she unabashedly calls a "pretty trashy" novel about Katherine of Aragon. "It was the sex and the executions that got me into it," she says cheerfully. "I know it's terrible to admit it!"
There's plenty of sex and several very gruesome executions in Weir's latest foray into royal history, "Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England&q
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 31, 2005
In America, where fame and controversy are often sides of the same coin, Victor Davis Hanson is that near-oxymoron, a celebrity classicist. A scholar of great insight and originality, he has also cast himself as the modern Machiavelli, offering advice to his country's leaders that is drawn unabashedly from the ancient past.
Before September 11, 2001, Hanson launched charges against his fellow classicists for their failure "to explain the importance of Greek thought and values
Source: South Coast Today
Dec 30, 2005
The story of the UMass Dartmouth undergrad who lied about being questioned by agents for the Department of Homeland Security had everything.
It played directly into the split between Red and Blue states. It was made for the Internet and Fox television and talk radio.
And it was timed perfectly because of the firestorm that erupted two weeks ago when The New York Times broke the news that the Bush administration had authorized federal agents to monitor the telephone calls and e-
Source: NYT
Dec 30, 2005
William W. Howells, a leading physical anthropologist who focused on the origins of humans and the evolution of races, died on Dec. 20 at his home in Kittery Point, Me. He was 97.
The death was announced by his family.
Professor Howells, emeritus professor of anthropology at Harvard, made perhaps his most important contribution to the field through his statistical analyses of the physical variations among today's humans. His conclusion, based on skull measurements, was
Source: William Grimes in the NYT
Dec 30, 2005
Rodney Stark comes out swinging right from the bell in ''The Victory of Reason,'' his fiercely polemical account of the rise of capitalism. Mr. Stark, the author of ''The Rise of Christianity'' and ''One True God: Historical Consequences of Monotheism,'' is sick and tired of reading that religion impeded scientific progress and stunted human freedom. To those who say that capitalism and democracy developed only after secular-minded thinkers turned the light of reason on the obscurantism of the D
