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: http://www.bradenton.com
September 25, 2007
At one point this year, Manatee County officials were considering a purchase of Pillsbury Temple Mound to ensure the site's preservation.
Now they're trying to save the site, by just agreeing to trim the lawn at the ancient burial ground.
Conservation Lands Management Department Director Charlie Hunsicker in recent months has worked to protect the 1-acre site northwest of Bradenton from development.
Hunsicker's department had designs on purchasing and preserving
Source: http://www.homesworldwide.co.uk
September 30, 2007
A recently discovered cave, in Tasmania's remote south-west World Heritage Area, yields clues to early human occupation.
In the early 1980s, Australia was embroiled in a bitter environmental battle, centered on the Franklin River valley, an ancient rainforest wilderness that was due to be dammed in a massive hydro-electric scheme. The issue attracted worldwide attention, divided families and ultimately brought down the Federal government.
For a long time everyone though
Source: Tehran Times
September 26, 2007
A team of archaeologists has recently identified 100 ancient sites at the Seimareh Dam reservoir in western Iran’s Ilam Province.
The sites have been identified as belonging to a whole array of historical eras including Neolithic, Bronze Age, Copper Age, Stone Age, Parthian, Sassanid, and early Islamic, team director Rasul Seyyedin Borujeni told the Persian service of CHN on Tuesday.
“The sites spread over a vast area. Thus we need a large team of archaeologists in or
Source: LAT
September 27, 2007
Stone Age Chinese began cultivating rice more than 7,700 years ago by burning trees in coastal marshes and building dams to hold back seawater, converting the marshes to rice paddies that would support growth of the high-yield cereal grain, researchers plan to report today.
New analysis of sediments from the site of Kuahuqiao at the mouth of the Yangtze River near Hangzhou provides the earliest evidence in China of such large-scale environmental manipulation, experts said.
Source: AP
September 29, 2007
LEVITTOWN, N.Y. - In 1951, 7-year-old Louise Cassano couldn't imagine a better life than the one here, where she rode her bicycle past rows of cookie-cutter houses, kids held backyard campouts in makeshift tents and nobody locked their front doors.
"It was an absolute ideal community," said Cassano, whose love affair with Levittown never waned — she still lives in the Long Island town dubbed by some as America's first suburb.
Cassano is among the organizers of
Source: CNN
September 29, 2007
With darkness settling over the battlefield and soldiers bedding down for the night, the familiar lyrics rose -- music and voices blending from both Union and Confederate camps.
"'Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam,
"Be it ever so humble there's no place like home!"
On more than one occasion during the Civil War, those words -- from the prewar hit "Home, Sweet Home" -- brought the two sides together, an impromptu and peacef
Source: Spiegel
September 28, 2007
The Berlin Wall was built in 1961. A new study shows that West Germany new about the plans before it went up.
It's a well-known fact that East Germany had agents crawling all over West Germany during the Cold War. Up to 6,000 of them, some in high places, were regularly passing information eastwards across the wall.
According to a new study published on Friday, though, when it came to recruiting spooks, the West Germans were even better. Fully 10,000 citizens of Germany's communis
Source: AP
September 27, 2007
In an age of al-Qaida, sleeper cells and the threat of nuclear terrorism, Huntsville is dusting off its Cold War manual to create the nation's most ambitious fallout-shelter plan, featuring an abandoned mine big enough for 20,000 people to take cover underground.
Others would hunker down in college dorms, churches, libraries and research halls that planners hope will bring the community's shelter capacity to 300,000, or space for every man, woman and child in Huntsville and the sur
Source: NYT
September 28, 2007
Patrick Henry and Francis Scott Key are out, but Susan B. Anthony and Nancy Pelosi are in. The White House was cut, but New York and Sept. 11 made the list.
Federal immigration authorities yesterday unveiled 100 new questions immigrants will have to study to pass a civics test to become naturalized American citizens.
The redesign of the test, the first since it was created in 1986 as a standardized examination, follows years of criticism in which conservatives said the
Source: Inside Higher Ed
September 28, 2007
It’s fair to say that Columbia University has heard more than an earful over its decision to offer a speaking platform this week to Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Reaction ranged widely, with many condemning the university for inviting the controversial leader, others praising Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, for sternly rebuking the Iranian president while he looked on, and some doing both. Opinions flowed freely.
On Wednesday, one vehement critic, with a prominent p
Source: Economist
September 6, 2007
Computing: The German Democratic Republic bequeathed a 600m-piece puzzle to the reunified country. It is about to be solved using software.
WHEN the shredding machines failed and the mob was at the gates, the spooks at East Germany's State Security Service, better known as the Stasi, tried turning their files into mush by dunking them in water. But the number of bathtubs in their headquarters in Normannenstrasse was as unequal to the task as the machines had been. In the end, they r
Source: Laray Polk in the Dallas Morning News
September 28, 2007
[Laray Polk is an artist and activist who lives in Dallas. Her e-mail address is laraypolk@earthlink.net.]
There is much concern over SB 866, the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007. Librarians, historians and archivists from around the country have issued position statements regarding the bill and have worked diligently to keep it moving.
SB 866 would rescind President Bush's Executive Order 13233, an order that ren
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 27, 2007
Three men have been arrested and charged with vandalising the graves of British soldiers who died in the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
Graves in the New Delhi satellite town of Ghaziabad were smashed and burned following a wave of protests against British tourists currently visiting historical "Mutiny" sites.
A gang of 25 youths attacked the graves following several days of inflammatory anti-British rhetoric by local politicians and Hindi-language newspapers.
Source: Newsletter of the New York American Revolution Round Table
September 28, 2007
This is a call to arms for the NY Round Table and other RT’s around the country as well as to all lovers of American History. The Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, one of the supposedly most venerated scholarly organiza5ions on the globe, is about to obtain permission to building housing on 22 acres of the Princeton Battlefield on which as many as 75% of Washington’s troops fought and died. The IAS is ignoring its own survey report, in which an archaeologist found dozens of musket balls,
Source: Newsletter of the New York American Revolution Round Table
September 28, 2007
On June 12, the Common Sense Society of Fort Lee met and elected a slate of officers. Their goal is to erect a statue of Tom Paine in Fort Lee’s Monument Park. They have commissioned sculptor David Frech of New York to create the statue. It will be only the sixth statue of Tom in the world and the fourth in America. For many years, Fort Lee has celebrated the American retreat from Fort Lee in 1776 and the withdrawal across New Jersey as a "retreat to victory." They point to the near mi
Source: Newsletter of the New York American Revolution Round Table
September 28, 2007
Using ground penetrating radar, Connecticut’s state archeologist, Nicholas Bellantoni, recently began searching for the mass grave of 46 prisoners of war who had been captured in the fighting in New York in 1776 and shipped back to Connecticut in 1777. They numbered about 200 and were all in various stages of smallpox. The sickest were put into a temporary hospital in Milford’s Town Hall, where 46 died. The rest apparently struggled to get home. Many died enroute. Mr. Bellantoni says sending the
Source: AP
September 26, 2007
Would you like your Civil War history seasoned with baseball trivia? Spritzed up with a winery tour? Do you long to dissect the Battle of Antietam with a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian?
Hire a guide.
As the 150th anniversary of the war between the states approaches, starting with John Brown's 1859 prewar raid at Harpers Ferry, W.Va., customized tours for people fascinated by the conflict are multiplying.
Source: AP
September 28, 2007
There is a "high degree of probability" that bones found recently near the Russian city of Yekaterinburg are those of a daughter and son of the last czar, an official said Friday, citing preliminary forensic work.
If confirmed, the latest find would fill in a missing chapter in the story of the doomed Romanovs, who were killed after the violent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution ushered in more than 70 years of Communist Party rule.
The bones were found by archaeologis
Source: http://www.nwipp-newspapers.com
September 28, 2007
There is strong evidence to suggest that the first kings of Ireland came from Donegal, a leading archaeologist has claimed.
Brian Lacey, Chief Executive of the Discovery Programme, will explore his theory in detail when he speaks at the upcoming Beltany Heritage Conference in Raphoe.
Dr Lacey is one of two leading archaeologists who will speak at the conference.
Source: CNN
September 26, 2007
IBM and the Smithsonian Institution today announced the virtual opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian's 19th and newest museum. This online presence marks the first time a major museum has opened its doors on the Web prior to the construction of its building.
While the physical museum will be built on the National Mall in Washington in 2015, it is opening online now to serve as a place of collaboration among scholars and the general
