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.
Source: AP
June 9, 2008
The Crawford Street home in which the Civil War defense of Vicksburg was planned has opened to the public but for the first time as a permanent asset of the National Park Service.
Pemberton's Headquarters, also known as the Willis-Cowan House, remains a work in progress - but will be open on Mondays from 9 a.m. until 4 p.m. in June and July.
The home, where Confederate Gen. John C. Pemberton also made the decision to surrender Vicksburg to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in July
Source: AP
June 9, 2008
First-century burial grounds near Rome's main
airport are yielding a rare look into how ancient
longshoremen and other manual workers did backbreaking
jobs, archaeologists said Monday.
The necropolis near the town of Ponte Galeria came to
light last year when customs police noticed a
clandestine dig by grave robbers seeking valuable
ancient artifacts, Rome's archaeology office said.
Most of the 300 skeletons unearthed were male
Source: Time.com
June 10, 2008
Sixty-three years after U.S. forces vanquished the Japanese and planted their flag on Iwo Jima's Mount Suribachi, the remote outpost in the Volcano Islands is the focus of another pitched battle. This time, acclaimed film directors Clint Eastwood and Spike Lee are engaging in verbal warfare over the verisimilitude of Eastwood's two films about the epic clash, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Lee has claimed that by soft-pedaling African-American contributions to the battle, Eastwo
Source: The Vicksburg Post
June 8, 2008
BILOXI - Bert Hayes-Davis stood on the porch at Beauvoir and phoned his wife, Carol, in Colorado Springs. Hurricane winds were picking up in the Gulf, and Hayes-Davis told his wife, "I hope a hurricane never hits it."
He was the last member of the Davis family to stand on that porch, the last of the descendants of President Jefferson Davis to leave the ancestral home on the Mississippi Coast before Hurricane Katrina hit on Aug. 29, 2005.
Last Tuesday, June 3,
Source: AP
June 9, 2008
There's no end in sight for the treasure dispute between U.S.-based deep-sea explorers and the Spanish government.
Odyssey Marine Exploration of Tampa, Fla., is battling Spain in federal court over the ownership of an estimated $500 million of coins and other artifacts. The treasure was rescued last year from what is believed to be a 19th-century Spanish shipwreck.
Attorneys for both sides told a federal magistrate judge Monday that they are still exchanging informatio
Source: AP
June 9, 2008
Archaeologists in Jordan say they have discovered a catacomb underneath one of the world's oldest churches that may be an even more ancient site of Christian worship.
Archaeologist Abdel-Qader Hussein, head of the Rihab Center for Archaeological Studies, says the catacombs were unearthed in the northern Jordanian city of Rihab after three months of excavation and show evidence of early Christian rituals.
Shortly after the death of Jesus Christ, disciples founded church
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 8, 2008
Former Second World War allies Germany and Italy are battling each other over compensation claims by former slave labourers.
The wrangling has been prompted by a ruling last week in Italy's top civilian court that Germany must pay compensation to Italian soldiers it forced into working for Hitler's regime.
In 1943, Italy declared a truce with the Allies and the Nazis seized an estimated 600,000 Italian soldiers.
But yesterday, Manfred Gentz, from the Rememb
Source: WaPo
June 9, 2008
Meet George W. Bush, time traveler.
He's in Poland in 1939 as Nazi tanks advance on Warsaw, then flying with his Navy-pilot father to battle imperial Japan. He's alongside Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, William McKinley on his deathbed and Franklin D. Roosevelt on D-Day. He lingers with Harry S. Truman, another U.S. president deeply unpopular in his time.
President Bush leaps forward as well, envisioning a distant future in which Iraq is a tranquil democracy, Pal
Source: WaPo
June 7, 2008
LOUISA, Va. -- Planted in the lawn at the courthouse on West Main Street here is a gray historical marker that draws little attention. It proudly proclaims that the country's first black elected official was native son John Mercer Langston, born in this central Virginia county, the son of a wealthy white planter and an emancipated slave of Indian and black ancestry.
History seems to whisper more often than it shouts. Langston was one of the most extraordinary men of the 19th century
Source: Guardian
June 7, 2008
It would have strained credulity to imagine during the orgy of terror unleashed by the US-backed coup on the other 9/11, in 1973. But 35 years after Richard Nixon gave the green light to the Chilean military to drown Salvador Allende's elected socialist government in blood, the net is finally closing on the man who personally machine-gunned to death one of the outstanding political songwriters of the 20th century.
This week, Judge Juan Eduardo Fuentes agreed to re-open the investig
Source: Dallas Morning News
July 8, 2008
State Fire Marshal Paul Maldonado said Sunday that investigators have evidence that an arsonist targeted the 152-year-old building. They have made no arrests, and don't have a suspect.
An official close to the investigation said agents determined the fire was a criminal act after reviewing footage from security cameras. A national response team from the U.S. Department of Justice arrives Monday to help dig through the wreckage for clues.
No one was injured in the four-a
Source: Ari Kelman, an associate professor of history at UC Davis, at the blog, Edge of the American West
June 7, 2008
To me, the image [above] looks an awful lot like an anthropomorphic chimpanzee (sorry for the lousy screen cap). But that’s silly, of course, because it’s Barack Obama! Brought to you by the New Yorker! Right on the magazine’s home page! Actually, the image is a tease for a
Source: LAT
June 8, 2008
BADLANDS NATIONAL PARK, S.D. -- The southern half of this swath of grasslands and chiseled pink spires looks untouched from a distance. Closer up, the scars of history are easy to see.
Unexploded bombs lie in ravines, a reminder of when the military confiscated the land from the Oglala Sioux tribe during World War II and turned it into an artillery range. Poachers who have stolen thousands of fossils over the years have left gouges in the landscape. On a plateau, a solitary makeshif
Source: NYT
June 8, 2008
How black is too black?
Millions of African-Americans celebrated Barack Obama’s historic victory, seeing in it a reflection — sudden and shocking — of their own expanded horizons. But whether Mr. Obama captures the White House in November will depend on how he is seen by white Americans. Indeed, some people argue that one of the reasons Mr. Obama was able to defeat Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton was that a large number of white voters saw him as “postracial.”
In other w
Source: NYT
June 7, 2008
No matter that Alexander Hamilton’s country home, the Grange, is 206 years old. Until now, it had been in a perfectly contemporary Manhattan real estate bind: not enough space.
What to do? Move, of course.
So on Saturday, the two-story, 298-ton wood-frame house will be rolled conspicuously — and slowly — from its cramped site on Convent Avenue to an appropriately verdant new location a block away in St. Nicholas Park, facing West 141st Street. That is as close as it can
Source: NYT
June 8, 2008
By the time the campaign tracked down the small-city Indiana mayor, Bill Clinton was in a lather. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton had lost the North Carolina primary that evening and was eager to offset it with a win in Indiana. But a vote-counting delay in one county threatened to rob her of a prime-time victory speech.
The Clinton campaign called a supporter for help. “I’ve got an angry president here and a candidate who wants to know whether or not she won,” a local campaign repre
Source: Bloomberg News
June 7, 2008
Barack Obama's political career boasts a long list of firsts. He is the first presumptive presidential nominee to be a native of Hawaii and the president of the Harvard Law Review. He's also the first candidate with more than 1 million contributors.
Obama, an Illinois senator, is the first presumptive presidential nominee in modern times to have a father who wasn't a U.S. citizen, the first to earn an undergraduate degree from Columbia University in New York and the first to have at
Source: The Standard
June 4, 2008
NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE — The small plot of graves is immediately distinguishable from the others in St. Vincent de Paul cemetery.
Surrounded by a small iron fence, the 25 graves bear the emblem of a white eagle, the symbol of a free Poland. The names — Michael Byszewski, Jozef Dolwa, Jan Siatkowski — also set them apart.
In these graves, Henry Radecki said, are some of the bravest men in Poland’s history.
The soldiers were newly emigrated Polish-Americans when
Source: http://wcco.com
June 4, 2008
Flying the Confederate flag has long been controversial in Southern states but now it's causing a heated debate at Kennedy High School in Bloomington, Minn. Three seniors who displayed the flag will not be allowed to attend their graduation ceremony Wednesday evening.
"It was sitting like that in the parking lot," said Justin Thompson, as he held a Confederate flag that was hanging from a pole inside a pick-up truck bed.
On Tuesday, three seniors, each with
Source: seattlepi.com
June 6, 2008
YAKIMA, Wash. -- A former Yakama Indian museum curator was given a nine-month sentence and her daughter a six-month prison term for stealing beaded bags and other artifacts from the museum.
At the Thursday federal court sentencing in Yakima, the 58-year-old woman, Marilyn Skahan-Malatare, and her 30-year-old daughter, Colette Julia Malatare, also were ordered to pay about $1,200 in restitution.
They were indicted in January and accused of embezzling and stealing artifac
