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.
Jul 2, 2004
Levon Sevunts, in the Montreal Gazette (June 26, 2004): It's sometimes hard to explain to non-Armenian friends the need to recognize the 1915 Armenian genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Turkish government.
"Why don't you let it go?" I often hear. "Get on with your life. It happened 90 years ago, for God's sake."
But for Turkish historian Taner Akcam, the need to recognize and learn from the Armenian genocide is as acut
Jul 2, 2004
Jason Burke, in the Guardian (June 27, 2004):IN THE SUMMER of 1989 a young American academic announced, in a relatively obscure conservative foreign policy journal, that history had ended. Or at least soon would. At the time, few had heard of Francis Fukuyama, then working in the US State Department. But then few people thought that the Berlin Wall would be hauled down within years, let alone months. Fukuyama, a modest, quietly spoken man who at 37 appeared to have correctly
Jul 2, 2004
Alexander Rose, in National Review (July 1, 2004): The most mammoth footnote ever recorded appears, if memory serves, in a volume of John Hodgson's 19th-century magnum opus, A History of Northumberland, a copy of which I once happened to own. Hodgson, a country vicar and amateur antiquary, knew more about that tumultuo
Jun 29, 2004
Sholto Byrnes, in the Independent (June 28, 2004): [Headline:] Arrange to meet Britain's highest-profile historian and you never quite know who'll turn up, says Sholto Byrnes. Will it be the charming, erudite David Starkey, or his terrifying, hypercritical alter ego?
"I bet you've been here for some scandalous liaisons," says a hopeful David Starkey, as
Jun 20, 2004
From the Sunday Telegraph-London (June 20 2004):
THE NEW History Phenomenon - the flourishing of history in the media since the late Nineties - now has its own history. Professor David Cannadine of the Institute of Historical Research has collected a group of 11 historians and media folk who - with one signal exception - have written interesting and illuminating essays on diverse aspects of this recent cultural and intellectual revolution.
In a thoughtful introduction, Cannadi
Jun 18, 2004
Benjamin Wallace-Wells, in the Washington
Monthly (June 2004):In early May, Niall Ferguson, the celebrity Scottish historian, looked out
at a packed house seething with antagonism. He had come to Washington to deliver
a talk at the Council on Foreign Relations defending his idea that the war in
Iraq had not only been the right thing to do, but also ought to be the first
ste
Jun 18, 2004
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney, in the Financial Times (London) (June 12, 2004): Antony Beevor has taken a break from military history to publish his first biography, The Mystery of Olga Chekhova. "It was an absolute holiday to write - a family story that conveys a huge sweep of history but doesn't have the cumulative horrors of Stalingrad and Berlin," he says, referring to his previous books about the siege of Stalingrad and fall of Hitler. "Frankly, at the end of Ber
Jun 18, 2004
Jacob Heilbrunn, an editorial writer for the Los Angeles Times, in the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
(June 14, 2004): It's no secret that the Bush administration has a fetish for secrecy. Whether it's keeping the records of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force concealed or denying the 9-11 commission key documents, the administration regularly displays disdain for open government.
But does that contempt extend even to the office of the national ar
Jun 18, 2004
Ian Buruma, in the New Yorker (June 14-21, 2004): In the course of a distinguished academic career at the University of London and at Princeton, Bernard Lewis has never been afraid to dip his scholarly hands in the muck of current affairs. A mentor to Henry (Scoop) Jackson in the early nineteen-seventies, and a friend to several Israeli Prime Ministers, Lewis has been especia
Jun 17, 2004
Jeff Guinn, in
fortwayne.com (June 16, 2004):Anyone who doesn't believe we lost one of our finest historians when 82-year-old
William Manchester died June 1 should check out the 34-page preamble in 1988's
"Winston Spencer Churchill, Alone: 1932-1940," the second volume of
Manchester's justly lauded "Last Lion" series on the life of the world
leader.
Jun 13, 2004
HNN blogger Tom Bruscino (June 8, 2004): With Memorial Day and the 60th Anniversary of D-Day over the last two weekends, attention has once again turned toward military history. The rush of book reviews of World War II has once again brought to the fore an issue that deserves closer scrutiny: the ongoing and offhand evisceration of the work of Stephen Ambrose by some professional book review
Jun 13, 2004
Derek Catsam, reviewing a blog posting by Andrew Sullivan:
Once again Andrew Sullivan shows his occasional tendencies toward intellectual sloppiness. To use his own self important phrase, let's"fisk" this piece (with a heading titled"Always Wrong" that should give you a hint of what foll
Jun 5, 2004
Dale McCartney, in Left Hook (May 2004): On Thursday the 25th of March, the first of the 4-day annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians, Howard Zinn was honoured with an evening spot as a plenary speaker. He spoke on “The Uses of History,” clearly a topic that he is uniquely positioned to discuss. There is an irony in a professional association of historians inviting a speaker who has
Jun 3, 2004
Steven Zeitchik, in the WSJ
(June 3, 2004):When William Manchester died earlier this week at age 82, the literary community
mourned the death of a great biographer. Best known for his controversial portrayal
of the Kennedys, he had later in his career earned fame for a different subject.
In the first two volumes of "The Last Lion," his acclaimed series
on Wins
May 27, 2004
Steve Russ, Eleanor Robson, Rona Epstein, and David Epstein in the London
Independent (May 24, 2004):AS THE first Manager of the Mathematics Research Centre at Warwick University,
from 1967, David Fowler played an important part in establishing, through the
research symposia organised at the centre, the outstanding international reputation
that Warwick now enjoys in many branches of mathematics. As a distinguished
scholar of the history of mathematics he h
May 25, 2004
Ernie Suggs, in the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution (May 23, 2004):Few people alive know the intricacies surrounding the work and process that
led to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision as well as John Hope Franklin.
And it is not because he is one of America's foremost historians, who penned
the classic reader "From Slavery to Freedom."It was because h
May 22, 2004
John Crace, in the Gardian (May 18, 2004):The room looks exactly as you might expect. Books of campaigns are piled floor
to ceiling and there are battered helmets, rusty shell cases, rolled-up maps
and regimental memorabilia occupying every spare surface. It seems perfectly
to sum up the part-scholar, part-man of action in the field that makes up the
somewhat old-fashioned on-screen persona of military historian Richard Holmes.
Which makes it a shoo-in pho
May 21, 2004
Philip Kennicott, in the Washington Post (May 13, 2004):It's only 8:30 a.m. on the East Coast, so some of the angry Americans dialing
into the glass-walled C-SPAN studio with the perfect view of the Capitol are
very early risers. In the "Washington Journal" hot seat, for 45 minutes,
is Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University
and author of a new book about colonialism, memory and U.S. policy in the Middle
May 18, 2004
Sam Hodges, in the Charlotte Observer (May 18, 2004): After Fidel Castro took control of Cuba, thousands of middle- and upper-class parents in that country sent their children to the United States. The mass migration became known as Operation
May 14, 2004
Glenn Garvin, author of Everybody Had His Own Gringo: The CIA and the Contras, in Reason
magazine, in the course of an article prompted by the book, In Denial, to which Eric Foner (below) responded (April 2004):In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays
from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in
a book titled After Brezhn
