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: History Today
April 9, 2008
A man who lost his sight in the Blitz has had a successful operation to restore his vision. 87-year-old John Gray was blinded in his right eye during a Luftwaffe raid on Clydeside in March 1941. A firewatcher during air raids, he was the only survivor of a direct hit on the building he was in. He stated: ‘We just heard some glass shattering and that was the last thing I heard until I came too in the Victoria Infirmary with my leg stretched out in plaster and a big bandage on my head.’ Over six d
Source: AP
April 10, 2008
Friends of the last living American-born veteran of World War I have persuaded federal officials to allow the 107-year-old to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery when he dies.
Frank Woodruff Buckles, who met with President Bush in Washington, D.C., last month, had been eligible for cremation and placement in a columbarium at Arlington, but daughter Susannah Flanagan said Thursday that he preferred a burial.
To be buried underground, Buckles would have had to meet
Source: http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk
April 10, 2008
HE was many miles from home - a Roman soldier posted to Manchester, perhaps feeling cold and lonely, longing for loved ones left behind.
He was called Aelius Victor. And now after 2,000 years an altar he built to keep a promise to the goddesses he prayed to has been unearthed in the middle of the city.
The altar - described by experts as being in 'fantastic' condition - was discovered during an archaeological dig at a site on Greater Jackson Street earmarked for develop
Source: Baltimore Sun
March 24, 2008
Two days after the last shots of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War were fired here, a 16-year-old neighborhood boy named John H. Rosensteel walked onto the battlefield to help bury the dead.
There he found the body of a Confederate soldier, a boy about his own age, and picked up a rifle lying near him. The rifle was the first item in what would become the largest private collection of Gettysburg relics, as well as a family legacy.
Since that day in July 1863, Rosens
Source: http://fredericksburg.com
March 26, 2008
Central Stafford County needs a public park, historians and preservationists say, but not of the usual kind.
This one, set atop ridges overlooking Accokeek Creek, would feature the most significant remaining set of unprotected Civil War forts and camps in the northern part of Virginia.
That's what they recommended yesterday to area officials meeting at the University of Mary Washington's graduate-studies center in Hartwood.
County Administrator Anthony Roma
Source: Independent (UK)
April 10, 2008
The intensely private George Bush had another emotional moment yesterday when he discussed how he overcame his drinking problems through religion.
In his final year in office, the deeply unpopular President has been increasingly prone to public outbursts of emotion, something rarely seen in such a famously disciplined politician.
On Tuesday, he wept openly during a memorial service for a Navy Seal who died in Iraq, the tears streaming down his face as the moment overcam
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 10, 2008
Jerusalem, one of the country's best-loved hymns and the favourite of Prime Minister Gordon Brown, has been banned from services at one of Britain's foremost churches.
The verses, which were written by William Blake more than two centuries ago, cannot be sung by choirs or congregations at Southwark Cathedral because the words do not praise God and are too nationalistic, according to senior clergy.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 10, 2008
Britain's historic bridges, buildings and roads are under threat from drivers blithely following satellite navigation directions, a conservation society warned yesterday.
Among those which have been damaged by traffic driving down unsuitable roads is a 200-year-old bridge in Oxfordshire, a 300-year-old cottage in Greater Manchester and Pevensey Castle in East Sussex, according to the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings.
Phillip Venning, the society's secreta
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
April 10, 2008
The University of Oregon awarded honorary degrees on Sunday to 20 Japanese-Americans who were expelled during World War II. The university's president called the ceremony a step in redressing a "tragic legacy."
Source: PNN Online
November 21, 2006
Beginning today, The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List is available on its website. In its 150th year of publishing, the country's oldest continuously published magazine challenged 10 award winning historians and authors to determine who have been the 100 most influential figures in American history. Written and compiled by associate editor Ross Douthat, The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List engaged 10 panelists to consider influence based on a pers
Source: ABC News
April 9, 2008
In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.
The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -
Source: http://cbs4.com
April 8, 2008
South Florida archeologists are busy in Southwest Miami-Dade working to preserve ancient artifacts found in an area once inhabited by Tequesta Indians.
Robert Carr, Executive Director of the Archeological and Historical Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that specializes in preserving historically significant sites, told CBS4's Ileana Varela experts have known about the site for about three decades but the decision to excavate it and save the artifacts came when Miami-Dade Count
Source: BBC
April 9, 2008
Archaeologists carrying out an excavation at Stonehenge say they have broken through to a layer that may finally explain why the site was built.
The team has reached sockets that once held bluestones - smaller stones, most now missing or uprooted, which formed the site's original structure.
The researchers believe that the bluestones could reveal that Stonehenge was once a place of healing.
The dig is the first to take place at Stonehenge for more than 40 y
Source: NYT
April 9, 2008
When the government of Israel budgeted about $28 million to observe the 60th anniversary of the founding of the state, it was probably hoping that its fractious citizens would set aside their troubles and come together in an outpouring of national pride.
Instead, a month before Independence Day, Israelis are wrangling over how extravagantly the country should celebrate, and at what cost.
Many acknowledge the state’s outstanding achievements, pointing to the absorption o
Source: National Security Archive
April 9, 2008
Previously secret U.S. Air Force official histories of the Vietnam war published today by the National Security Archive disclose for the first time that Central Intelligence Agency contract employees had a direct role in combat air attacks when they flew Laotian government aircraft on strike missions and that the Air Force actively considered nuclear weapons options during the 1959 Laos crisis.The newly declassified histories, which were released through Freedom of Informati
Source: LAT
April 9, 2008
Five years ago this week, looters ransacked the Iraqi National Museum, stealing centuries-old artifacts that celebrated Iraq's role as the cradle of civilization. Some headlines at the time exaggerated the size of the damage, erroneously reporting 170,000 items missing. Investigators later discovered that some important artifacts, including gold jewelry from Nimrud, had been hidden at Iraq's Central Bank since the Persian Gulf War in 1991.
Today, investigators say that about 15,000
Source: http://www.thelocal.de
April 7, 2008
The people of Röcken are looking to late German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to save them. The eastern German town has for 108 years been the proud resting place of Nietzsche and it has now turned his grave into its strongest argument to halt a coal mining project that would wipe it off the map.
“Nietzsche is our only hope,” says Dorothee Berthold, who heads an association founded to spare the town of 600 people the fate of several others along a brown coal deposit stretching so
Source: http://www.thelocal.de
April 7, 2008
German state railway operator Deutsche Bahn has outraged Holocaust survivor groups by refusing to allow a traveling train exhibition into Berlin's main station.
The International Auschwitz Committee, founded by concentration camp survivors, expressed outrage at Deutsche Bahn's decision in a statement on Monday. Closing important stations to the exhibit is "incomprehensible and unacceptable."
Organizers of "Train of commemoration," which is supported
Source: http://www.thelocal.de
April 7, 2008
Construction workers have discovered a mass grave from the Thirty Years' War while laying a pipeline in the German state of Bavaria.
The 50 skeletons were probably French soldiers who died during a battle near Alerheim on August 3, 1645, the Bavarian State Office for Historical Preservation (BlfD) said on Monday in Munich.
Source: http://www.sciam.com
April 7, 2008
Few Germans know the global space race started on a remote and sandy island off the Baltic coast, an unremarkable place with wide open skies and a carpet of pine trees.
But it was at the Peenemuende testing site in 1942 that a team of engineers under Wernher von Braun laid the foundations for sending man to the moon and the Cold War missile race. They were testing the world's first long-range ballistic missiles for the Nazis.
Germans don't celebrate the site because of
