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: NewScotsman
Jan 2, 2005
An expartriate Scottish historian provoked fury yesterday by calling for the land of his birth to be put into "liquidation" because it had become "the Belarus of the West". Professor Niall Ferguson said Scotland's glory days were long over, leaving it a "small, sparsely-populated appendage of England".
The Glasgow-born academic, who is now based at Harvard University in Massachusetts, said that Scotland's assets should be broken up, with the Scottish Pa
Jan 1, 2005
Alyssa
A. Lappen, at frontpagemag.com (12-21-04): He denounces American “imperialism” on Al-Jazeera Television. A former
Zionist, he refers to jihadist suicide bombers as “martyrs.” He praised
Mideast scholars for ignoring the issue of terrorism, and he regularly repeats
the most twisted and paranoid claims of Islamist regimes as though they were
historical fact. He is Stan
Dec 30, 2004
Virginia Heffernan, commenting in the NYT about the portrayal of historian Grace McCallister, the fake professor star of the WB show, "Jack and Bobby" (12-30-04):... Professor McCallister - the mother of the 51st president of the United States, in the show's conceit - is meant to be a great contrarian, but she's incongruously reverential about canonical writers. A professor of histor
Dec 24, 2004
Janet Tassel, in Harvard Magazine (Jan.-Feb. 2005):
Richard Pipes, Baird research professor of history, recounts in his recent book, Vixi, that when Daniel, his first child, was born in 1949, he felt as if he himself were being reborn. To mark the event he even quit smoking.And, in a sense, with the birth of Daniel, Richard Pipes was indeed reborn, perhaps even cloned. Daniel '71, Ph.D. '78 (early Islamic history), is what
Dec 14, 2004
Jonathan Dowd-Gailey, at frontpagemag.com (12-14-04): [Jonathan Dowd-Gailey is a writer for Campus Watch, lives in Washington State.]When White House officials briefly used the word"crusade" to express American resolve in the war on terror,
Dec 14, 2004
Thomas Bartlett
and Scott Smallwood, cin the Chronicle of Higher Ed (subscribrs only) (12-13-04):Editor's Note: In their article about plagiarism, Bartlett and Smallwood highlight four cases they came across in an investigation of "plagiarists you've never heard of." Two of the four involve historians: Benson Tong and Donald Cuccioletta. The others concern a geographer and a political scientist.
Dec 10, 2004
Juan Cole, at his blog (12-8-04):Yes, I'm aware that Daniel Pipes of the so-called Middle East Forum sent some puppy out to slime me over at David Horowitz's Frontpagerag. So this is the way it goes with the Likudniks. First they haras
Dec 10, 2004
Michael Kenney, The Boston Globe, 12/7/04
Consider better yet, sing"My country, 'tis of thee," and note two phrases in the first stanza:"sweet land of liberty" and"let freedom ring."
So familiar, but also, in the conjunction of"liberty" and"freedom," an example of what historian David Hackett Fischer identifies as the uniquely American pairing of those two political ideas.
For, Fischer writes, most Americans do not think of"liberty" and"freedom" as a
Dec 10, 2004
Editor's Note: Click here to read Juan Cole's response to this article.Jonathan Calt Harris, at frontpagemag.com (12-7-04):
[Jonathan Calt Harris, a writer for Campus Watch, lives in Illinois.]Professional organizations choose their leaders as much for their symbolism as for organizational ability. The Middle East Studies Association (MESA) is the foremost professional organization representing academics working
Dec 8, 2004
John Marshall, in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (12-7-04):
All seems forgiven, or mostly forgotten, for Joseph J. Ellis.Three years after he was ensnared in a national embarrassment of his own making, the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian is back near the top of the best-seller lists with his latest biographical look at one of the Founding Fathers. Ellis is also the beneficiary of a 20-city national book to
Dec 8, 2004
Johanna Neuman, in the LAT (12-4-04): President Bush plans to name a new chairman and vice chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission as early as Monday, a move that could end the tumultuous reign of its current chairwoman, Mary Frances Berry.
Berry, who has been a member of the commission for 24 of its 47 years, has been a bane to presidents who tried to fire her or dodge her. She has been targeted in repeated Government Accountability Office reports alleging mi
Dec 7, 2004
Scott Sherman, in the Nation (Dec. 6, 2004):Last year Kenneth Maxwell, a soft-spoken 63-year-old historian of Latin America, published a review of Peter Kornbluh's The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability in the November/December 2003 issue of Foreign Affairs, the influential journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. As The Nation reported in June [see Sherman, "The Ma
Dec 7, 2004
Juan Cole, at his blog (12-2-04):Daniel Pipes and Jonathan Schanzer <http://www.registerguard.com/news/2004/12/02/c1.cr.cardsuit.1202.html> settled a libel suit out of court with University of Oregon instructor Douglas Card. They had accused Card of bei
Source: Gerald Vouga in Culture Cult
Dec 1, 2004
Now about ninety, with his fangs seemingly drawn, the old man spends his days peacefully pottering in an English garden. But Basil Davidson represents the most willful single-handed effort to mythologise African history, and his numerous books have misled millions on a continental scale.
Barbaric kingdoms were romanticised, tyrants whitewashed, and cruel and bloodthirsty customs expunged (or simply ignored) in order to impress well-meaning western middle-classes who wanted to believ
Dec 1, 2004
Daniel Pipes, at frontpagemag.com (12-1-04):Others may have sympathized on learning that Hamid Dabashi, a professor of
Middle East studies at Columbia University, felt threatened by a graduate student
at his own university, but not me.The incident began late on Sept. 27, 2004, when Victor Luria, a Ph.D. candidate
in genetics and a former soldier in the Israel Defense Forces, wrote Dabashi
an e-mail taking strong exception to what Dabashi had written
Nov 29, 2004
Ariel Natan Pasko, at enterstageright.com (11-29-04):
Every once in a while, I read an op-ed piece and say to myself, "Wait a second, that's not true." I just read such a piece in the Jerusalem Post; "Neither rejoice, nor lament" by Michael B. Oren, the best-selling author of Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East, (OUP 2002). A longer versio
Nov 29, 2004
Piper Fogg and Robin Wilson, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed (11-29-04):
In 1970 The Chronicle published an article on the status of women in higher education. Female scholars, it reported, were "discontent," and were challenging both overt and subtle discrimination. Their salaries were lower than men's, and they were concentrated mostly in smaller colleges.
But there were bright spots, and The Chronicle also highlighted women who were succeeding in acade
Nov 27, 2004
C.K.Wolfson, in the Vineyard Gazette:Two days before people crowded into the Pease House in Edgartown to hear historian Mary Beth Norton discuss In The Devil's Snare (Alfred A. Knopf, $30), her new, much acclaimed book about the 1692 Salem witchcraft trials, the author relaxed with a visitor in her contemporary West Tisbury home.A distant relative of convicted witch Mistress Mary Bradbury, the Co
Nov 26, 2004
Martin
Kramer, at his blog (Nov. 21, 2004):This evening, the participants in the annual Middle East Studies Association
(MESA) conference in San Francisco will assemble in plenary session, to hear
an address by MESA's president, Laurie Brand. The title: "Scholarship in
the Shadow of Empire." (Presumably that's the American empire, not the
Abbasid.) When Brand delivers her a
Nov 19, 2004
Jonathan Pitts, The Baltimore Sun, 17 Nov. 2004
Chancellorsville, VA - It's a brisk fall morning, the sun battling to break its way through leaden clouds, as the man in the wraparound shades pops out of a thicket of trees. Thirty-five people trail in James McPherson's wake as he ambles down a brush-covered hillside toward a clearing below, but he casts nary a glance to the rear. The general's job is to keep his eyes on the battlefield, you see, to keep looking ahead. The troo
