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.
Sep 10, 2004
Hillel Italie, in the Concord
Monitor (Sept. 9, 2004):Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., 86 years old and never more liberal, stares calmly
from behind his large, clear-framed glasses and reviews the current stage of
what he has called the "cycles" of American politics. The historian has long theorized that the United States alternates between
Sep 10, 2004
Teresa K. Weaver, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
05 Sept. 2004"History is lived forward but is written in retrospect," wrote the late British historian C.V. Wedgwood."We know the end before we consider the beginning, and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only."
Good historians often cite the wisdom of Wedgwood. They know that all history is subjective --- human beings are involved, after all.
"Historians are prisoners of their own experience
Sep 3, 2004
Michael Powell, in the Washington Post (Aug. 29, 2004):-- Utter three words -- George Walker Bush -- and watch eminent author Kevin
Phillips, a longtime Republican, a former Nixon aide and past party theoretician,
pucker like he has inhaled a pickle. "I've never understood why we take Bush and his family seriously,"
he says. "They come from the investment-inherited-money wing of the Republican
Party. They display no real empathy for anyon
Sep 3, 2004
Ann Gerhart, in the Wash Post (Aug. 28, 2004):Nobody picked on his Rosa Parks biography. Who would pick on Rosa Parks? Or sneered at his works on Jimmy Carter or Henry Ford. But a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, historian Douglas Brinkley published his eighth book,"Tour of Duty," an exploration of how Vietnam shaped Sen. John Kerry. A vet named Jim Rassmann, a Repub
Aug 28, 2004
James Varney, in the New
Orleans Times Picayune (Aug. 27, 2004):In recent weeks, the University
of New Orleans scholar has emerged as a central figure in the highly partisan
debate about Democratic candidate John Kerry's actions in combat during the Vietnam
War. Brinkley's writings about Kerry -- in particular his biography "Tour
of Duty," which was made with Kerry's co
Aug 27, 2004
Curt Guyette, in Metro
Times (Detroit) (Aug. 25, 2004):Like the history that he teaches,
Juan Cole’s emergence as a 21st century media phenomenon is the product of
convergence. Geopolitics and technology and professional pursuits have combined
to transform a once-obscure university professor into an analyst hundreds of thousands
of people are turning to as an alternative source of information rega
Aug 22, 2004
Michael Dobbs, in a story about John Kerry's war record in the Wash Post (Aug. 22, 2004):
... March 13 would mark the culmination of Kerry's Vietnam War career. With three Purple Hearts, he became eligible for reassignment. Within three weeks, he was out of Vietnam and headed home after a truncated four-month combat tour.
As commander of PCF-94, Kerry was responsible fo
Aug 16, 2004
Jennifer Johnson, a graduate student assigned
by the University of Maryland to attend the hearing on Allen Weinstein as archivist
of the United States: It was encouraging to note that the Senate, as well as many archivists, has
questions on why Governor Carlin was asked to resign as Archivist of the United
States. Hopefully, the Senate Committee will follow through on Senator Levin’s
suggestion tha
Aug 13, 2004
Edward Tenner, in the Chronicle of Higher Education (subscribers only) (Aug. 13, 2004): [Edward Tenner is a senior research associate at the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History. He is the author of Our Own Devices: The Past and Future of Body Technology (Alfred A. Knopf, 2003) and Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Cons
Aug 13, 2004
Rennie Bruce, in the Press (Christchurch, New Zealand) (Aug. 11, 2004):
If David Irving had not decided to sue an obscure American academic and Penguin Books for allegedly defaming him, his reputation as a historian might, at least to the uninformed, have survived a little longer.He did not have the academic credentials now normally required of professional historians and he was not an academic, but he had over the years won the grudging respect of academics for the stamina a
Aug 12, 2004
Scott Morris, in the WSJ (Aug. 12, 2004):Arguably the most influential work of American history is Charles A. Beard's"An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States," published in 1913. Beard's thesis--that our country was born of base economic self-interest and not idealism--became Holy Writ for many historians and social thinkers, launching a quasi-Marxist critique of the entire American project
Aug 7, 2004
Susanna Rustin, in the Guardian
(July 31, 2004):On November 11 1944, Paul Fussell woke up surrounded by corp-ses. Drafted into
the American infantry 18 months before, he had been in France just a few weeks
and this was his first night in the line. "Until that moment," he
writes in his memoir Doing Battle (1996), "the only dead people I'd seen
had been
Aug 6, 2004
Charles Babington and Brian Faler, in the Wash Post (July 29, 2004):
Historian Robert Caro is most widely known for sharp critiques of politicians, especially President Lyndon B. Johnson.
So it was a little surprising when Caro appeared on the podium of the Democratic convention on Tuesday evening to give a gracious introduction of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
"His brother President John F. Kennedy wrote a famous book, 'Profiles in Courage
Jul 23, 2004
Stephen Howe, in openDemocracy.net (July 22, 2004):
[Stephen Howe is Tutor in Politics at Ruskin College, Oxford.]
The opening minutes of the Russell Crowe film Gladiator depict a dramatic confrontation between the armies of imperial Rome and the wild German tribes who resist them. The Germans reject the Roman demand for submission in fairly forthright style – by sending the emissary back to the legions’
Jul 14, 2004
P. David Hornik, a freelance writer and translator living in Jerusalem, in frontpagemag.com (July 14, 2004):
“Today there is no longer the slightest pretense by well-informed Israelis that the Arabs left in 1948 of their own free will or at the behest of foreign despots.” So states Tony Judt in “The Rootless Cosmopolitan,” an article in the July 19 issue of The Nation that is the Foreword to a new collection of Edward Said’s writings (From Oslo t
Jul 12, 2004
Asaf Romirowsky and Jonathan Calt Harris, in the Wash Times (July 9, 2004):
Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, has gained notice for his extremist views on Israel, including recent profiles in both the New York Times and The Washington Post. That extremism comes out when he calls Israel an "apartheid system in creation" and a "racist state"
Jul 9, 2004
From the Age (July 9 2004):
Viewed piecemeal, the individual fragments of a jigsaw puzzle don't mean a great deal. Only when painstakingly assembled to complete the picture do the tiny bits make sense.
In many ways, science is not unlike a jigsaw. Experiments yield detailed results but often they are so specific as to be of little or no general application or meaning.
The results
Jul 8, 2004
Anders G. Lewis, in Frontpagemag.com (July 8 2004):
Among the A-list of self-declared enemies of the American state, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn are the gold standard. But the historian Gabriel Kolko, though less popular than either, has been almost as influential. In the 1960s, Kolko introduced a strident and ideological form of history into the academic world. Writing from a Marxist perspective, he hel
Jul 6, 2004
Gregory Melleuish, in the Australian (July 6 2004):
At the end of his afterword to the new updated edition of The History Wars (Melbourne University Press), Stuart Macintyre writes that the"history wars are an ugly side of the Australian present and they debase public life".
This leaves one contemplating a paradox. If Macintyre so disapproves of the history wars, why did he launch this polemical book that he must have known would inflame passions and, having inflamed those pas
Jul 5, 2004
From the New York Times (July 4 2004):
In 1998, Ron Chernow, who had written successful biographies of J. P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller, told his publisher he planned to write his next book on Alexander Hamilton. He got a chilly reception.
"They said books on the founding fathers did not sell well," Mr. Chernow recalled in an interview last week."They
