Breaking News

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.

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• 
• SOURCE: Informed Comment
  5/15/19
  

  Top Ten differences between the Iraq War and Trump’s Proposed Iran War

  by Juan Cole

  An informative look. 

• 
• SOURCE: Woodrow Wilson Foundation
  5/7/19
  

  Woodrow Wilson Foundation Releases Findings on Why Americans Don't Know History

  And how we can change it. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  5/16/19
  

  How will Obama be remembered? A massive new oral history project will help shape his legacy.

  Many of these oral history collections are housed in presidential libraries or academic institutions and provide biographers with richly detailed firsthand accounts from which to reconstruct Oval Office narratives.

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  5/13/19
  

  30 Years Later, Making Sense Of The MOVE Bombing

  City police had killed nearly a dozen people and, in the process, leveled an entire swath of a neighborhood full of middle-class black homeowners. 

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  5/13/19
  

  They Resisted Hitler. They Were Executed. At Last, They Lie at Rest.

  “With this, we can give back some of their dignity to those who were murdered.”

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/15/19
  

  How the War on Drugs Kept Black Men Out of College

  A new study finds that federal drug policy didn’t just send more black men to jail—it also locked them out of higher education.

• 
• SOURCE: Time
  5/9/19
  

  A Smackdown in the Kennedy Clan Summons Up the History of Presidents and Vaccines

  Three members of the Kennedy clan published a piece on Politico declaring that Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—son of Bobby Kennedy—has been “tragically wrong” in his years-long crusade against vaccines.

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  5/11/19
  

  When It Comes to Republican Defectors, Current Crisis Is No Watergate

  As history has shown with the Watergate and Iran-contra scandals, such investigations can gain legitimacy only when members of the president’s own party support them.

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  5/10/19
  

  The Problem With Ancestory.com

  by Adam H. Domby

  The search engine functions to hide both slave ownership and enslaved people from the eyes of contemporary genealogists.

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  5/10/19
  

  Retired Justice John Paul Stevens Talks History, His New Book And Ping-Pong

  "The world is changing much faster than I anticipated," he says.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  4/14/19
  

  Long considered a high honor, the valedictorian tradition faces an uncertain future

  by John R. Thelin

  Though the tradition goes back to colonial times, the validity of valedictorian honor is increasingly being called into question. 

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  5/9/19
  

  Now for Sale on Facebook: Looted Middle Eastern Antiquities

  Artifacts said to have been taken from the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria have been offered for sale on Facebook.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  5/10/19
  

  Truth, justice and declassification: Secret archives show US helped Argentine military wage ‘dirty war’ that killed 30,000

  by Rut Diamint

  The archives narrate the human rights abuses committed by Argentina’s military government, often with the assistance of the United States.

• 
• SOURCE: NY Times
  5/6/19
  

  A Reimagined Spy Museum in Washington Doesn’t Flinch From the Darker Side

  Built for $162 million, the museum features flashy interactive exhibits but also grapples with intelligence failures, out-of-control surveillance and torture.

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  5/8/19
  

  Abraham Lincoln’s $6 Million Hat

  It’s a relic of a beloved president. But did he ever wear it?

• 
• SOURCE: New Yorker
  5/8/19
  

  Brenda Wineapple, Author of a New Book About Andrew Johnson, on the Right Reasons to Impeach a President

  "To reduce the impeachment of Andrew Johnson to a mistaken incident in American history, a bad taste in the collective mouth, disagreeable and embarrassing, is to forget the extent to which slavery and thus the very fate of the nation lay behind Johnson’s impeachment.”

• 
• SOURCE: Washigton Post
  5/7/19
  

  A century-old feud between millionaires is now key to getting Trump’s tax returns

  The law at issue in the strife over Trump’s taxes arose from a bitter dispute between Mellon and Sen. James Couzens (R-Mich.), a deep-pocketed adversary on Capitol Hill, over the lawmaker’s investigation of the IRS.

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian.com
  5/7/19
  

  Relics of Rebel Slave Fort Unearthed by Hurricane Michael

  The site was recently listed as part of the NPS’ Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  5/8/19
  

  Will Trump’s use of executive privilege help him avoid congressional oversight? It didn’t help Richard Nixon

  by Ken Hughes

  “Why, we’ll just let it go to the (Supreme) Court. Fight it like hell,” Nixon said.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  5/9/19
  

  Misery and memory in Glendora, Mississippi: How poverty is reshaping the story of Emmett Till’s murder

  by Dave Tell

  As Till’s story has been passed down through the generations and taken up by a range of memorials, its plot has been shaped by forces like poverty as much as by fidelity to historical fact.