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: New Orleans Times-Picayune
Dec 28, 2005
... President Bush and some members of Congress are pushing the limits of disaster aid ... by talking of a major rebuilding effort across the Gulf Coast, inviting comparisons to the Marshall Plan, said Stephen Slivinski, budget analyst for the Cato Institute, a Washington think tank that pushes for restraint in spending.
"It creates the expectation that any future disasters are going to receive the same kind of treatment, and creates a dangerous precedent," he said. "
Source: Boston Magazine interview with Boston University Chancellor Emeritus John Silber
Dec 28, 2005
Q: I'd guess that some of that reputation for conservatism also stems from your record here at the university, where you've upheld certain classical traditions. You have been very distrustful of the theorists, the Frankfurt School, things like that, which have a sharply left-wing tinge.
A: We've got plenty of left-wingers. We've had plenty of left-wing professors at Boston University. And contrary to the statement that has been repeated in the newspapers ad nauseam, I never fired a
Source: Deutsche Welle
Dec 27, 2005
The German government responded critically to news that Susanne Osthoff, recently freed from hostage in Iraq, was planning to return to the country regardless of Berlin's warnings.
In her first public appearance since she was freed by her Iraqi kidnappers on Dec. 18, German archaeologist Susanne Osthoff said her kidnappers were not criminals. A picture has emerged of Osthoff in the German press as a dedicated humanitarian and historian who was well aware of the risks of life in Iraq
Source: Montreal Gazette
Dec 27, 2005
Selma Jeanne Cohen, a historian, editor and teacher who devoted her career to proclaiming dance an art worthy of the same scholarly respect traditionally awarded to painting, music and literature, died on Friday at her home in Manhattan. She was 85.
The cause was complications from Alzheimer's disease, said Leslie Steinau, her lawyer and a longtime friend.
Cohen waged a tireless campaign against scholars who maintained dance was inherently frivolous. Instead, she belie
Source: Star Tribune
Dec 27, 2005
Lucy Simler an independent historian who helped launch the University of Minnesota's Center for Early Modern History and who wrote about colonial Pennsylvania, died in Edina on Dec. 20 of complications from a fall last spring.The St. Paul resident was 79.
"How extraordinary it was for her to carve out a career as a private scholar. She didn't have an academic appointment. She created her own intellectual agenda," said Ted Farmer, a professo
Source: NYT
Dec 24, 2005
Charles F. Cummings, the official historian of Newark, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the city and its environs took in everything from the name of the first municipal commissioner of shade trees to the fact that a mayonnaise factory once graced the shores of the Passaic River, died in the city on Wednesday. He was 68 and made his home in Newark.
Mr. Cummings died at a Newark hospital after heart surgery, said James Osbourn, the principal librarian of the Newark Public Library and
Source: NYT
Dec 24, 2005
David Patterson, a scholar of Jewish life in Europe who established a center for Hebrew and Jewish studies at Oxford University to help revive a discipline that had been virtually destroyed during the Holocaust, died at a hospital in Oxford on Dec. 10. He was 83.
The cause was prostate cancer, according to Jackie Finlay, his personal assistant.
Dr. Patterson, an expert in the Hebrew literature of Europe, envisioned the center shortly after joining Oxford's faculty in 1
Source: Independent (London)
Dec 23, 2005
Gordon A. Craig was a rare teacher, scholar, and public intellectual who, through his spoken lectures and printed words, could reach many different audiences, including students, specialists, political leaders and policy makers, the news media, and a general reading public interested to know how history impacted their lives and their world. A prolific and insightful writer, he became internationally renowned as an historian of diplomacy and of modern Germany.
His career was spent at
Source: David Carr in the NYT
Dec 23, 2005
AT the crest of a hill in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn one day in early December, a gust of wind makes the just-below-freezing temperatures seem just above tolerable. A voice - three parts honey, two parts gravitas with a grain or two of gravel thrown in - rises to be heard above the wind. It is the voice of God, only friendlier.
"It was like the parting of the seas," said David McCullough, the historian and familiar narrator of television epics, as we looked out on Br
Source: Australian
Dec 23, 2005
... The celebrated historian Niall Ferguson, a rigorous and imaginative thinker, wrote a crushing critique of Pinter's argument that such was the hegemony of the US in the 20th century that its evils -- from supporting right-wing dictatorships in Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Greece, Haiti and more, to Vietnam and the current excursion in Iraq -- were barely recognised or discussed in the Western world.
Ferguson took issue with that and, expectedly, made a bravura argument against
Source: Guardian
Dec 22, 2005
In 1945, the young warden of an adult education centre in Rugby was making a plan of the visible traces of medieval fields at Bittesby, in Leicestershire. He came to an area of irregular grass-covered mounds and hollows and, after initial puzzlement, realised he was looking at the remains of streets and houses from the village of Bittesby, abandoned for 450 years. This discovery, followed by the recognition of hundreds of other deserted villages, began the academic career of Maurice Beresford, w
Source: Donald Ritchie, in a email to HNN
Dec 22, 2005
In the spring of 2005, Charles Bertram, a photographer for the Lexington Herald-Leader, asked Kentucky’s “historian laureate,” Dr. Thomas D. Clark for a list of ten places in Kentucky he thought every Kentuckian should visit. Clark, a former professor of history at the University of Kentucky, promised to produce a list but soon afterwards was hospitalized and died on June 28, 2005, ten days before his 102nd birthday. His widow found the list on his desk. He had been struggling to reduce his
Source: Baltimore Sun
Dec 21, 2005
William R. Hutchison, 75, a leading scholar of American religious history, died Friday at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. The cause of death was stomach cancer, according to his daughter, Elizabeth.
At the time of his death, Dr. Hutchison was Charles Warren research professor of American religious history at Harvard Divinity School.
Dr. Hutchison was `'the dean of American religious historians," David Hollinger, chairman of the history department at the Un
Source: Lawrence Journal-World
Dec 20, 2005
retired Kansas University professor says the federal government has been poking into the mail he receives from abroad.
Grant Goodman on Monday showed the Journal-World a recent letter he had received from a friend in the Philippines; it apparently had been opened, then re-closed with green tape bearing the seal of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and a message that it had been opened “by Border Protection.”
“Very uneasy. And very surprised,” Goodman, 81, a KU p
Source: New York Magazine
Dec 19, 2005
‘The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln,’ by Sean Wilentz. This barge of a book (992 pages) confirms Sean Wilentz as the Richard Hofstadter of our day—the supreme political historian. But where Hofstadter wrote history in dazzling generalities, Wilentz both expounds on massive themes and pillages the archives for little-known characters and forgotten movements. (Long live the Locofocos!) He tells a story that parallels George Packer’s book about Iraq—the sweaty, excruciating deli
Source: Wa Po
Dec 18, 2005
When he isn't fashioning gigantic biographies of American presidents, Edmund Morris has often written about music, including a brief but distinguished tenure as a reviewer for this newspaper. Morris has the ability to impart genuine aesthetic and technical information to his audience without devolving into jargon; he recognizes that while the effect music has on us may be mysterious, any description of its processes shouldn't be.
Moreover, as a historian, Morris knows how to set a
Source: NYT
Dec 18, 2005
Mary Aiken Littauer, whose love affair with horses began with a childhood pony, blossomed with her marriage to an officer in the cavalry of Czar Nicholas II, and flowered famously when she became a leading expert on horses of ancient times, died on Dec. 7 at her home in Syosset, N.Y. She was 93.
Mrs. Littauer's scholarly career did not begin until her mid-50's, when her husband's health would no longer permit him to maintain his standards of horsemanship. The standards were high ind
Source: New York Statesman
Dec 18, 2005
After being a fugitive for seven weeks, alleged New York Halloween sex attacker Peter Braunstein was captured in Memphis.
However, as police approached his makeshift campsite near the University of Memphis, Braunstein plunged a 3-inch knife into his neck and stabbed himself several times, police sources told the New York Daily News.
I am the man the world is looking for, Braunstein told police. My name is Peter Braunstein.
Braunstein allegedly bought a fire
Source: Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO)
Dec 16, 2005
If the usual surfeit of Christmas entertainment leaves you on the verge of a diabetic coma, Marx in Soho can provide a quick shock to the intellect.
The one-man play by historian Howard Zinn brings Karl Marx back from the dead, wandering into an audience and taking the opportunity to clear his name. Directed by Bob Buckley and starring Christopher Kendall, it's a rigorous, exciting evening more likely to radicalize liberals than to liberalize conservatives.
Kendall has
Source: Daily Telegraph (London)
Dec 16, 2005
JULIÁN MARÍAS, who died yesterday aged 91, was an historian of philosophy, a prolific writer and critic, and the foremost disciple of the Spanish literary theorist José Ortega y Gasset.
Marías was a familiar figure in America, holding a large number of professorships there until the 1970s, but was best-known in Spanish-speaking countries for his monumental History of Philosophy, published in 1941. It subsequently went through dozens of editions and was regarded by some as the best
