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
April 23, 2008
An appeals court has ruled that the U.S. government should have authority for now over a Lake Michigan shipwreck that could be The Griffin, a 17th century vessel built by the French explorer La Salle.
A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati reversed a ruling by District Judge Robert Holmes Bell in a dispute between the state of Michigan and the private underwater exploration company that found the wreckage seven years ago.
Source: http://sundaygazettemail.com
March 20, 2008
West Virginia disability rights groups are fuming after the owners of a pre-Civil War mental hospital in Weston renamed the property the "Trans Allegheny Lunatic Asylum."
Several mental health organization leaders have fired off letters this week to the contractor who now owns the former Weston Hospital.
They say the new name - which was the name of the hospital in the 19th century - is discriminatory and promotes misunderstandings about mental illness.
Source: http://www.newsobserver.com
March 24, 2008
A copy of the Bill of Rights stolen from the state Capitol during the Civil War now officially belongs to the people of North Carolina, state Attorney General Roy Cooper said today.
Superior Court Judge Henry W. Hight Jr. issued an order today that ended all remaining claims to the document. Hight declared that North Carolina owns its original copy of the Bill of Rights, Cooper's office said in a news release.
The judgment ended a lengthy legal battle by the state for o
Source: http://www.wdbj7.com
March 24, 2008
The mission of the National Civil War Chaplains Museum in Lynchburg is to educate the public about the role of chaplains, priests, rabbis and religious organizations in the Civil War.
The museum helps preserve religious artifacts and shows the influence religion had on the lives of political and military personnel.
With a number of paintings and other period artifacts, the Civil War Chaplains Museum has a lot of great things to display just not enough space to display i
Source: http://www.zwire.com
April 7, 2008
Thomas Gourlay reached out and grasped the first thing he touched to cradle the head of a dying man.
The American flag, hastily yanked by the actor and part-time stage manager from a balustrade in a Washington, D.C., theater 143 years ago, would become a cherished family heirloom, passed from generation to generation.
Now the bloodstained relic hangs in a tall glass case tucked in a dim corner of an obscure museum in a tiny Pocono Mountains hamlet, little noted by the w
Source: AP
April 9, 2008
State lawmakers will consider a resolution that expresses regret for slavery, but doesn't issue an apology.
Members of a legislative committee struggled on Wednesday with the language of the resolution that they ultimately advanced to the full Legislature for consideration.
The Judiciary Committee finally decided that expressing "profound regret" for the state's role in slavery was more appropriate than issuing an apology.
Source: http://www.sunherald.com
April 8, 2008
BILOXI --Forty visitors showed up for the unannounced soft opening of the grounds of Beauvoir on Monday, and by 10 a.m. this morning there was another dozen waiting to take what the museum staff calls the "disaster tour."
Just the grounds, not the National Landmark 1850s Beauvoir House, is open to the public until the grand reopening of the restored house on the June 3 birthday of Jefferson Davis.
Source: Tampa Tribune
April 9, 2008
A Tampa woman is more than a century too late in her attempt to be repaid $22 million for a $300 loan her ancestors made to the city during the Civil War, Tampa officials say.
In its legal filings, the city says the delay by Joan Kennedy Biddle and her family in asking for the money is "completely unreasonable, inexcusable and unprecedented." The city filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss the lawsuit.
"We don't even know that the note hadn't been paid,"
Source: http://www.eveningsun.com
April 10, 2008
Look at the figures from one angle, and the majority of land - about 80 percent - within the 6,000-acre boundary of the Gettysburg National Military Park is owned, and therefore protected, by the federal government.
From a different perspective, however, that means one out of every five acres within those same boundaries is considered private property without conservation easements and therefore subject to potential development.
Given the conclusions of a report release
Source: http://www.thetimes-tribune.com
April 13, 2008
More than a century ago, thousands of Scrantonians gathered on Courthouse Square to dedicate the Soldiers and Sailors Monument, honoring those who lost their lives in the Civil War.
On Saturday, a crowd again gathered in front of the 104-foot-tall structure, this time for a rededication ceremony following $500,000 in restoration work.
Source: Mercury News
April 14, 2008
That's the controversial conclusion reached by Palo Alto physician and amateur historian John Sotos, who says that President Abraham Lincoln was suffering from a lethal genetic cancer syndrome when he was shot at Ford's Theatre 143 years ago today.
"Lincoln was a rare man with a rare disease," said Sotos. He has self-published a 300-page book and 400-page database to support his conclusion, based on an exhaustive analysis of Lincoln photographs and historical eyewitness de
Source: http://www.mpnnow.com
April 14, 2008
The town and the American Legion have formed committees to oversee the restoration of Naples’ pre-Civil War era cannon — each without the other knowing.
Part of the problem may be that it’s no longer clear who owns the historic ordnance.
It all started when Rochester resident Charles Baylis, the director of the American Civil War Artillery Association, approached the Town Board with an estimate for restoring the carriage. The town turned him down.
The town formed
Source: http://www.eveningsun.com
April 20, 2008
The Adams County Historical Society provided tourists in Gettysburg a great opportunity Saturday to tour the [ Lutheran Theological Seminary] cupola, which is closed save for two times of the year.
"Until recently, nobody was allowed to go into the cupola," said Tim Smith, research assistant with the historical society. "The stairway leading up to the cupola was not safe. Our liability was insane."
In fact, the cupola was closed from 1964 to about th
Source: BBC
April 18, 2008
An evil tyrant or the father of democracy?
That's the debate splitting opinion in Coleraine, after a row broke out between local councillors over the legacy of Oliver Cromwell.
During the meeting of the Council's Policy and Resources Committee on Tuesday, the DUP's Samuel Cole said Cromwell was a defender of democracy.
But Sinn Féin councillor Billy Leonard said Cromwell's record in Ireland made him "no father of democracy".
The English leader is
Source: Reuters
April 22, 2008
At the age of 7, Mercedes Wild waved excitedly at each U.S. plane that circled over her Berlin home and landed at Tempelhof airport, packed with supplies to feed Berliners during the Soviets' Cold War blockade.
Today, the 67-year-old Wild is fighting against city plans to shut down the giant airport site in the center of Berlin.
After years of debate, Berliners are to vote Sunday on the closing of the Nazi-built complex.
Source: Samuel G. Freedman in the NYT
April 23, 2008
In 1993, when Travis Hofmann was a freshman of 15, he had traveled little beyond the sand hills that surrounded his hometown, Alliance, Neb. He was the son of a railroad engineer, a trumpeter in the high school band, with a part-time job changing the marquee and running the projector at the local movie theater.
In Travis’s class in global geography at Alliance High School, however, the teacher introduced the outside world with the word and concept of genocide. The teacher, Tim Walz,
Source: AP
April 23, 2008
A Dutch school director preparing an exhibition on Anne Frank has found a holiday postcard signed by the Jewish teenage diarist, a museum said Wednesday.
The card, sent in 1937, was addressed to one of Frank's best friends, Samme Ledermann, and postmarked from just across the Dutch border in Aachen, Germany, said Maatje Mostard, of the Anne Frank Museum.
Decorated with a clover-covered bell atop a snowy field and wishing "good luck for the new year" in German,
Source: Times (UK)
April 23, 2008
In the public imagination, a “summit” is a meeting between the political leaders of two states, with those between the United States and the Soviet Union seen as the most important. Yet one of the most interesting conclusions of David Reynolds’s compellingly written book is that these “personal” summits do not succeed. In a work of great originality, Reynolds sets out an analytical structure, considers six important summit meetings between 1938 and 1985, and concludes that only one of them had t
Source: http://www.observer.com
April 23, 2008
“This is not your father’s Watergate,” said James Rosen.
Mr. Rosen, an on-air D.C.-based correspondent for Fox News was speaking to NYTV on Monday afternoon. Next month, Doubleday will publish Mr. Rosen’s first book—a revisionist history of Richard Nixon’s downfall, called The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.
As NYTV’s overcrowded bookshelf can attest, TV newsmen are constantly cranking out books that are heavy on the self-promotion and light on,
Source: Nixon Blog
April 22, 2008
If everyone knows that William Ayers and his comrades in the Weather Underground were planning to set bombs to murder innocent people, why didn’t they do time?
Because the investigation against them was muffed thanks to the illegal activities of the Washington Post’s favorite Watergate answer man himself, Mark Felt — aka Deep Throat.
In 1972-73, FBI official Felt and his colleague Edward S. Miller authorized nine illegal break-ins at the homes of Weather Underground mem
