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.
Apr 13, 2004
David Kipen, in the San
Francisco Chronicle (April 13, 2004):Sam Tanenhaus started work Monday. If this milestone somehow escaped your notice,
if the sun seemed to rise and set with its usual indifference, then you probably
don't toil in the vineyards of the publishing industry. For Tanenhaus didn't
spend his first day on the job filling out W-4 forms and peeing int
Apr 13, 2004
From the website
of the University of Pennsylvania (April 13, 2004):Dr. Steven Hahn, Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor of American History,
has been awarded the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for history for his book, A Nation
Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South From Slavery to
the Great Migration. He is following in the footsteps of his chair's namesake,
Dr. Roy Nichols, the
Apr 13, 2004
Eric Hoover, in the Chronicle
of Higher Education (subscribers only) (April 13, 2004):When boys in Texas go to bed, sleep gallops them off to defend the garrison
in San Antonio. At least that's where dreams took Stephen L. Hardin when he
was growing up in McKinney, just north of Dallas. Instead of reading books aloud
at night, his father made up stories, sound effects and all, about Davy
Apr 9, 2004
Harvey H. Jackson, in the Anniston Star (April 8, 2004): It has always been one of the hardest questions students ask. “I love history,” they begin, “but what can I do with a degree in it?”
“Well,” I tell them, “you could teach. Or go into government service. Or work in a museum. Or do a whole host of things.”
(At that point I pull out a chart prepared by t
Apr 9, 2004
Dan Eggen, in the Washington Post (April 8, 2004): When national security adviser Condoleezza Rice testifies this morning in front of the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a former colleague and longtime friend will be sitting on the other side of the witness table: Philip D. Zelikow, the panel's executive director. Zelikow worked for Rice on the National Security Council staff during the administration of George H.W. Bush, and went on to w
Apr 8, 2004
Mark Arsenault, in the Providence Journal (April 6, 2004): Devoted Abraham Lincoln scholar and state Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank J. Williams acknowledged last week that he"inadvertently" used the opening paragraphs of a 1957 Journal magazine story in an article he wrote on Lincoln in 1993. "I feel terrible, mortified, embarrassed," Williams said."I take full responsibility
Apr 7, 2004
Molly Petrilla, in the Daily
Pennsylvanian (April 7, 2004):On Monday afternoon, History professor Steven Hahn received a phone call. "It
was someone from The Associated Press," Hahn recalled. "She said,
'Well, I'm calling to talk to you about the Pulitzer Prize,' and I said, 'What
do you want to talk about?' and she said, 'Well, you won it.'" Tho
Apr 2, 2004
Tim Heald, in the London Independent (April 1, 2004):DEREK JARRETT was best known to the world at large for his definitive four-volume
edition of Horace Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of King George III, for a series
of rigorously researched comparative studies of 18th- century England and France,
and for his thoughtful and combative reviews in The New York Review of Books.
For a privileged few, however, he will be remembered as a mesmerising school
Mar 19, 2004
Jim Benning, in Alternet.org (March 15, 2004): Author Chalmers Johnson was asleep in his San Diego-area home on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, when the telephone rattled him awake. Metropolitan Books publicist Tracy Locke was on the line from her Manhattan office two miles from Ground Zero. The previous year, she had promoted Johnson's book, Blowback: The Costs and
Mar 15, 2004
Paige Williams, writing for the Financial Times (London) (March 13, 2004)One of Samantha Power's favourite lunch spots is a place off Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts called Casablanca. Decorated with 20ft murals of the movie, Bogart and Bergman gaze with melancholy at diners digging into their seared cod and mixed greens.The theme has echoes of Hitler and of Hollywood, which resonate because Power's seminal w
Mar 15, 2004
Memo to the staff of the New York Times from Bill Keller, executive editor (March 10, 2004): Colleagues,
I'm excited to report that we have a new editor for the Book Review. He is Sam Tanenhaus, a writer of distinction, a thinker of tremendous range and ambition, a passionate consumer of books, a kind of literary and intellectual fire-hose. He will begin April 1.
Sam's list of accomplishments
Mar 12, 2004
Bill Sammon, in the Washington Times (March 10, 2004):
An influential Democratic historian has credited President Bush with instituting one of only three"grand strategies" in the history of U.S. foreign policy by trading in the doctrine of containment for pre-emption.
John Lewis Gaddis of Yale said his fellow historians have not paid sufficient attention to th
Mar 12, 2004
Interview with Douglas Brinkley conducted by
Elizabeth Shelburne, in the Atlantic Monthly (March 10, 2004): Why did you choose John Kerry as your subject? I know you started the project in 2002 before Kerry had announced his candidacy for President. What drew you to him? I'm the director of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans, and we h
Mar 12, 2004
Max Boot, in the Weekly
Standard (March 15, 2004):In 1995, when I was a junior editor at the Wall Street Journal, I was handed
"The Daniel J. Boorstin Reader" to review. I had heard of the author
but had never read his work. As I dove into this 900-page compendium, I quickly
discovered that Boorstin had a discerning eye for detail, an ability to comp
Mar 10, 2004
Carlin Romano, in the Nation (March 5, 2004): Time magazine once diagnosed newspaper columnist, author, professor-at-large and Hugh Hefner sidekick Max Lerner (190292) as suffering from a" crush on America." Seven years after his death, Lerner's faint presence in repositories of print immortality suggests that the feeling in the other direction might have been characterized the same way, except the magic's gone. Despite 6,000 columns for the
Mar 10, 2004
Belinda Cooper, in the NYT (March 6, 2004):Taner Akcam doesn't seem like either a hero or a traitor, though he's been
called both. A slight, soft-spoken man who chooses his words with care, Mr.
Akcam, a Turkish sociologist and historian currently teaching at the University
of Minnesota, writes about events that happened nearly a century ago in an
empire that no longer exists: the mass killings of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire during World
Mar 9, 2004
Jonathan Calt Harris, managing editor of Campus Watch, in frontpagemag.com
(March 8, 2004):Central Connecticut State University, situated in New Briton and making up
one part of a four-campus state university system, has a pattern of acute
political bias when it comes to the Middle East. Campus Watch began posting articles on CCSU as early as June 2002, and added
a fu
Mar 5, 2004
David Greenberg, in the LAT
(March 2, 2004):By the end of his career, the Pulitzer Prize-wining historian Daniel Boorstin,
who died last weekend at 89, had come to be derided in some quarters as a
conservative. In an age that viewed national myths with skepticism, Boorstin
celebrated American exceptionalism and touted Weste
Mar 4, 2004
Bruce Craig, in the weekly newsletter of the National Coalition for History (March 4, 2004): This week, the 180,000-employee Department of Homeland Security celebrates its first anniversary as an institution. There to document the event is Priscilla Dale Jones, the department's recently hired historian. Her office is believed to be the only Congressionally sanctioned office of history in the federal government (see"Homeland Security History Office Authorized" in NCH WASHING
Mar 2, 2004
Roger Moore, in the Orlando Sentinel (Feb. 29, 2004): In a recent radio interview, noted historian Paul Fussell admitted that he wrote his new book, The Boys' Crusade, as a"response" to the works of Stephen Ambrose and Tom Brokaw. Fretting over rose-colored obituaries highlighting Bob Hope's USO shows ("Front-line troops
