University Times

Recent "spurious" claims to the contrary, Jews were never a dominant force in the Atlantic slave trade, according to a statement co-authored by Pitt history professor Seymour Drescher and endorsed recently by the Council of the American Historical Association (AHA). Drescher and Yale historian David Brion Davis, experts on the history of slavery and anti-slavery […]

The international network of computer networks called the Internet has the potential to produce "the ultimate open society" — a world in which virtually everyone will have access to a computer and, therefore, the power to communicate almost instantaneously with anyone else regardless of geography and even language barriers, said the keynote speaker at Pitt's […]

Gov. Tom Ridge last week nominated Peter J. Jannetta, chairperson of Pitt medical school's neurological surgery department, to be state health secretary. The office of Secretary of Health is a cabinet-level position requiring state Senate confirmation. Jannetta, 62, would head Pennsylvania's Department of Health, an agency with more than 1,300 employees and a budget of […]

Professor of the history of art and architecture Alison Stones and graduate student Jane Vadnal were sitting around the office one day last year complaining about the problems they faced in teaching the history of art. Specifically, they were wondering how to give students a better feel for both the grandeur and detail of medieval […]

Countless historians have addressed the subject of slavery in America. Very few historians, however, have looked at what effect the type of work slaves did had on their social and cultural life, and the development of African-American culture. Among those who have tackled the subject is this year's E.P. Thompson Memorial lecturer Ira Berlin, professor […]

Love is not the only arena in which opposites might attract and actually work better as a team. By linking together super-computers of differing capabilities around the country, researchers at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center have found that computers actually can draw on each other's strong points and improve their performance. Ralph Roskies, scientific director of […]

A standing committee of faculty, staff, students and a representative of the Office of General Counsel has been charged by Senior Vice Chancellor for Business and Finance Ben Tuchi with determining which of the more than 10,000 news groups on the Internet will be carried on Pitt's computer network. The committee is part of a […]

The Internet has changed the way the world thinks, learns and solves problems, according to James Williams, chair of Pitt's Department of Information Science. Alluding to a recent Life article, Williams told the audience at the Founders Day Symposium that the cornerstone of the old paradigm of education was the classroom lecture, but that in […]

A keynote address by National Endowment for the Arts chairperson Jane Alexander and a tribute to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright August Wilson will be among the highlights of the 1995 annual conference of the Associated Writing Programs (AWP), March 9-11 at the Westin William Penn hotel, Downtown. Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University are co-hosting the conference, […]

Five centuries elapsed between the inventions of moveable type and the first desktop publishing software. Yet, according to Bruce Dobler of Pitt's English department, the leap from Gutenberg to desktop was technological chump-change compared to the windfall of the Internet's World Wide Web — at least in terms of giving individuals and institutions equal access […]