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
November 26, 2007
An extra £15m to restore the historic Cutty Sark is still needed, following a fire which wrecked the 19th-century tea clipper. The Cutty Sark Trust has raised £20m but still needed another £5m before the fire in a Greenwich dry dock six months ago. The timescale for reopening has been put back another year from November 2009.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 28, 2007
A macabre 17th century book about the execution of Gunpowder Plot conspirator Father Henry Garnet believed to be bound in the priest's own skin will go under the hammer this Sunday.
Perhaps most spooky of all, some claim to see an image of the priest's tortured face peering out of the anthropodermic binding of 'A True and Perfect Relation of the Whole Proceedings against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors, Garnet a Jesuit and his Confederats'.
Source: Wired.com
November 27, 2007
Hangovers rarely inspire scientific breakthroughs. But Billy Quinn's eureka moment occurred on just such a head-pounding morning in 2003. After a night spent carousing at a pub in Galway, Ireland, he and colleague Declan Moore were discussing their plans for the day over a traditional breakfast of bacon, eggs, sausages, black pudding, white pudding, beans, and fried potatoes. The two archaeologists were scheduled to excavate a nearby grassy mound known as a fulacht fiadh (pronounced "full-o
Source: AP
November 27, 2007
When Matthew Kuehne dives to the sandy bottom of Pensacola Bay, he reaches back 450 years to Spaniard Don Tristan de Luna's hurricane-doomed effort to form the first colony in the present-day United States.
Archaeologists say the buried hull of a ship from de Luna's fleet of 11 ships holds crucial clues to the 1559 expedition, which sailed from Mexico to Florida's Panhandle.
The ship's discovery was announced in October after lead sheeting and pottery from the wreck sit
Source: http://www.fresnobee.com
November 26, 2007
A high school history teacher has discovered the grave of a Fresno County pioneer who may have been the state's first black cattle rancher.
Teacher Bill Coate came upon Gabriel Moore's unmarked grave at Akers Cemetery last year while he was on a tour celebrating the county's 150th anniversary.
Coate had heard stories about Moore, who was born in Alabama in 1812 and sold into slavery in Arkansas. Moore traveled west to California, and by 1872, he had established his own
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
November 27, 2007
The young men and women toiling in jeans, bandannas and cargo pants to the side of Ga. 372 in Cherokee County look more like hikers or a Grateful Dead audience than road-builders. Their metal detectors and dirt sifters hanging from bamboo tripods look more like camping gear than the tools of transportation.
The workers are archaeologists, and under federal law, they are as critical to laying asphalt as the machines that make a roadbed or laborers who spread tar.
Georgia
Source: BBC
November 27, 2007
The union jack should be combined with the Welsh flag, according to an MP who wants the change to be made to reflect Wales' status within the UK.
In a Commons debate, Wrexham's Labour MP Ian Lucas said Wales' Red Dragon should be added to the union jack's red, white and blue pattern.
He said the union jack currently only represented the other three UK nations.
But Stewart Jackson, Conservative MP for Peterborough, said the plan was "eccentric" and
Source: LAT
November 26, 2007
Experts on Chinese American history say Chinatowns across the nation -- including in many California cities -- have always been rumored to have tunnels, but no proof exists that they were anything more than connected basements. They say the hype surrounding the legends revives misconceptions that fanned xenophobia in earlier times.
Oral histories and newspaper accounts from the early 20th century include clues that Los Angeles' original Chinatown (where Union Station now stands) wa
Source: NYT
November 27, 2007
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the most prominent surviving member of the Kennedy family, has agreed to sell his memoirs for an advance of more than $8 million, people with knowledge of the negotiations say.
After a six-day auction that concluded Nov. 19, Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, bought world rights for the autobiography. Before the deal can be completed, Mr. Kennedy must clear his publishing contract with the Senate Ethics Committee.
Jonathan Karp, p
Source: AFP
November 27, 2007
A US genetic study bolsters claims that Native Americans are descended from one migrant group that crossed a lost land link from modern Siberia to Alaska -- not waves of arrivals from Asia, as rival theories say.
The new study by the University of Michigan, published Monday, examined genes of indigenous people from North to South America and from two Siberian groups, the university said in a report introducing the research.
Analysis found one unique genetic variant wide
Source: NYT
November 27, 2007
Empowered by an oil boom that pushed the country’s trade surplus past $94 billion this year, Russia has been flexing its muscles abroad. At home, meanwhile, young and trendy Muscovites are in the throes of nostalgia for the staples of Soviet childhoods, relics of a time when the U.S.S.R. was at the height of superpower status.
That may explain why one of the most popular fashion designers this fall is Denis Simachev, who is selling overcoats fastened with hammer-and-sickle buttons,
Source: CanWest
November 25, 2007
As Canada seeks to assert its Arctic claims, the founder of a Quebec historical society says the time has never been better to honour an explorer who helped the country claim a huge chunk of the North.
In the late 1800s, Quebec-based captain Joseph-Elzear Bernier tried to persuade a young Canada of the importance of claiming sovereignty over the islands of the North. The British government had formally ceded the land in 1880 but the Canadian government had yet to exercise its jurisd
Source: AP
November 23, 2007
On Saturday [Nov. 24], Ukraine marks the 75th anniversary of the terrible famine of 1932-33, engineered by Soviet authorities to force peasants across the former U.S.S.R. to give up their privately held plots of land and join collective farms. Millions perished.
Now President Viktor Yushchenko is leading an effort to gain international recognition of Holodomor — or death by hunger, as it is known here — as a crime rather than merely a disaster, by labeling it an act of genocide.
Source: AP
November 25, 2007
In a small survey boat, maritime archaeologist J. Lee Cox Jr. was checking the bottom of the Delaware River at the Sunoco Logistics pier in South Philadelphia when he got a hit on the side-scan sonar. A pipe? A log? A hazard to the oil tankers docking nearby?
No one was sure until a diver was sent down weeks later and found a strange pointed object buried in the muck about 40 feet down.
Earlier this month, Cox identified it as the business end of a cheval-de-frise, an
Source: http://www.exduco.net
November 26, 2007
The grandson of a soldier who fought in one of history’s first major tank battles will see his grandfather’s First World War vehicle - unearthed from a French farmer’s field - take pride of place at a 90th anniversary memorial event.
Tim Heap, 55, a University of Derby lecturer from Winster, Derbyshire, will this weekend attend the unveiling of a memorial to all the soldiers who died at the Battle of Cambrai, northern France, in November 1917, in memory of his grandfather Frank Hea
Source: Reuters
November 24, 2007
A LEADING Italian archaeologist said that the grotto whose discovery was announced this week in Rome is not the sacred cave linked to the myth of the city's foundation by Romulus and Remus.
The Culture Ministry and experts who presented the find said they were “reasonably certain” the cavern is the Lupercale - a sanctuary worshipped for centuries by Romans because, according to legend, a wolf nursed the twin brothers there.
But Adriano La Regina, Rome's superintendent o
Source: AP
November 26, 2007
The Civil War resulted in many human narratives, each seemingly more heart-wrenching than the last. But few match that of Confederate Col. Isaac Erwin Avery in his final moments.
On July 2, 1863, the opening day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Avery's North Carolina unit was ordered to attack a heavily fortified Union position on East Cemetery Hill. Leading the charge on a white horse, the colonel was struck in the neck by a musket ball.
As he lay dying, a close friend, Ma
Source: WaPo
November 26, 2007
Abraham Lincoln was the rarest of men, and John G. Sotos believes that extended all the way to his chromosome 10.
A physician, connoisseur of rare ailments and amateur historian, Sotos believes Lincoln had a genetic syndrome called MEN 2B. He thinks the diagnosis not only accounts for Lincoln's great height, which has been the subject of most medical speculation over the years, but also for many of the president's other reported ailments and behaviors.
He also suspects
Source: AP
November 25, 2007
The gravestone of a young woman executed more than 60 years ago after being caught on a clandestine mission to save Hungarian Jews in the Holocaust has been moved to Israel, officials said Sunday.
Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jew who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Europe in 1944 to help rescue Jews, was honored on Nov. 7 as her gravestone was placed alongside her former home on a kibbutz farm next to the Mediterranean, Israel's Defense Ministry said. The ceremony marked the 63rd anniv
Source: AP
November 25, 2007
The U.S. Justice Department began trying to deport former Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk more than three decades ago, claiming that he was an armed guard at a Nazi death camp and helped murder Jewish prisoners in World War II.
Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel in 1986 and was under a death sentence until Israel's Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that Demjanjuk was not the sadistic guard at the Treblinka death camp in German-occupied Poland whom prisoners called "Ivan the Terrible.&
