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: CanWest News Service
September 10, 2007
It's the oldest object of its kind in Australia's history, but up until this past summer it was buried in the bowels of the Canada's national archives collection.On Tuesday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will bring it home, handing it to his Australian counterpart over lunch in the country's capital as he wraps up a week-long trip.The mysterious item is an old theatre program, 211 years old, and now recognized as the oldest printed document in Australia's history. But it onl
Source: Reuters
September 10, 2007
Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife.As a less gruesome alternative, the two women in the grass-covered Oseberg mound in south Norway might be a royal mother and daughter who died of the same disease and were buried together in 834.
"We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don't know of any Vikin
Source: Live Science
September 10, 2007
Under threat from Romans ransacking Jerusalem 2,000 years ago, many of the city's Jewish residents crowded into an underground drainage channel to hide and later flee the chaos through Jerusalem's southern end.The ancient tunnel was recently discovered buried beneath rubble, a monument to one of the great dramatic scenes of the destruction of the Second Temple in the year 70 A.D.
The channel was dug beneath what would become the main road of Jerusalem, the archa
Source: NYT
September 9, 2007
Already, the testimony about the status of Iraq that General Petraeus will deliver to Congress beginning Monday has become the most anticipated by an Army officer since April 29, 1967, when, under President Johnson, Gen. William C. Westmoreland traveled from Vietnam to address a joint meeting of Congress at a time of deep public doubts about a faraway war....
“Presidents galore have hidden behind the military and tried to use the military in war or national security situations in wh
Source: NYT
September 9, 2007
Across the country, shiny new history museums are pushing up like poppies on a battlefield, while the war horses struggle to scrape off their mold. Gone are shelves of crusty artifacts, yellowed text panels stuffed with dates and names and the “excitement” of a stale soda cracker behind glass that some historical figure may have sampled. In their place are Hollywood-produced movies, evocative oral histories and special-effect extravaganzas so spectacular that visitors could be forgiven for think
Source: NYT
September 9, 2007
The rise of Barack Obama includes one glaring episode of political miscalculation. Even friends told Mr. Obama it was a bad idea when he decided in 1999 to challenge an incumbent congressman and former Black Panther, Bobby L. Rush, whose stronghold on the South Side of Chicago was overwhelmingly black, Democratic and working class.
Mr. Obama was a 38-year-old state senator and University of Chicago lecturer, unknown in much of Mr. Rush’s Congressional district. He lived in its most
Source: NYT
September 7, 2007
ON a secluded bluff in Rhinebeck, N.Y., in one of the most beautiful spots overlooking the Hudson River, a 35-room Queen Anne mansion with a five-story turret is getting final touches on its first paint job since 1910. On one side, its rambling porch shines in bright maroon and green. On the other, where the painters and the grant money still haven’t penetrated, it looks like a crumbling wreck.
This is Wilderstein, a stepchild among the Hudson River mansions, one of the last to be r
Source: AP
September 7, 2007
Justice David Souter contemplated resigning from the Supreme Court because he was so upset by the decision that sealed the 2000 presidential election for George W. Bush, a new book says.
Souter, one of the four dissenting justices in the case, believed his five colleagues in the majority acted in a "crudely partisan" manner in siding with Bush to shut down the recount of votes in Florida in December 2000, author Jeffrey Toobin writes in "The Nine, Inside the Secret Wo
Source: http://www.eux.tv
September 6, 2007
Archaeologists digging at the place where an amazing Bronze Age disc was found in Germany have turned up a body and remains of a Stone Age building, adding to the riddle around one of the world's biggest archaeological sensations of the past decade.
Andreas Northe, giving the results of this summer's dig on the remote hill in eastern Germany, said, "We found a child's grave, a cache of stone tools and some remains from a long-house."
The dig was done at a sp
Source: Lee White at the website of the National Coalition for History (NCH)
September 6, 2007
The National Coalition for History (NCH) has learned that just prior to the Congressional adjournment last month, an anonymous hold was placed by a Republican senator on, the “Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007 (H.R. 1255).” Supporters had sought to have the bill considered under the Senate’s unanimous consent rule that allows non-controversial bills to be brought up on an expedited basis.
A previous hold on the bill by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) was lifted after concerns he
Source: Time
September 7, 2007
In a testy public exchange Friday with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, President Bush said the United States would formally end the Korean War only when North Korea halts its nuclear weapons program.
The two leaders met on the sidelines of a 21-nation Pacific Rim summit here, spending much of their roughly one-hour session discussing the international standoff over the communist North's pursuit of atomic arms.
They agreed there had been progress. But then they had a befo
Source: Houston Chronicle
September 6, 2007
Already tired of the 2008 presidential campaign? Remind yourself why it matters over the next 12 weeks.
Presidential Libraries: History Uncovered begins at 7 tonight on C-SPAN, offering what presidential historian Richard Norton Smith predicts will be "a kind of history that people don't get out of their textbooks."
There will be a bit of spontaneity — the series broadcasts live from one presidential library each week, starting with the Herbert Hoover Presiden
Source: Fox News
September 7, 2007
Two experts in historical documents say they doubt the authenticity of a Davy Crockett letter that the Texas Historical Commission bought this week for nearly half a million dollars. Both questioned the handwriting, and one said the grammar was just too good to belong to the Alamo defender.
"The letter has better grammar, better punctuation than Davy Crockett had ever used," said Kevin MacDonnell, a seller of antique books in Austin.
Everett Wilke, a private
Source: NYT
September 7, 2007
Fred D. Thompson had one central strategic goal as he formally began his presidential campaign on Thursday: to win over conservatives who are disheartened at their current choice of Republican candidates by positioning himself as the ideological and stylistic heir of Ronald Reagan....
Yet in some notable ways, Mr. Thompson is different from Reagan, and he has at times deviated from the orthodox conservatism that Reagan, after his death and nearly two decades removed from his preside
Source: AP
September 5, 2007
The earth shakes briefly in Berlin's Mittelheide city park, and a cloud of rain-soaked dirt rises in the woods. Police have just detonated a football-size antitank grenade from World War II.
More than 60 years after the war's end, removing unexploded bombs, grenades and artillery shells remains a full-time task for police and private companies across Germany.
It's an occurrence so common that police explosives experts Thomas Mehlhorn and Joerg Neumann can joke about the
Source: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com
September 5, 2007
Sippenhaft is an old Nazi policy under which family members of criminals were held equally responsible and punished. Now a Swiss political party is using a racist and xenophobic poster to revive the practice.
The poster shows three white sheep booting out a black sheep, with a caption that translates to "for more security." It's part of an effort to drum up support for a deportation policy in which entire immigrant families would be kicked out of Switzerland if their child
Source: http://www.wsls.com
September 5, 2007
Among the Civil War treasures in Appomattox could be more relics of the Confederate Army. The Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond wants to divide it's collection into three museums. Appomattox is at the top of the list as one of the proposed sites.
"Appomattox for example would have the uniform Robert E. Lee surrendered in, all of the flags that were surrendered at Appomattox," said Appomattox Director of Tourism Beckie Nix.
Nix said it just makes sense for
Source: ThinkSpain.com
September 4, 2007
A Roman boat in near-immaculate condition has been dredged up from the bay of Cartagena. Archaeologists say the find dates back to the first century B.C.
The team from Cartagena’s natoinal archaeological museum and underwater investigation centre (MNAM-CNIAS) reveals that this exciting discovery comes just after two boats and a number of anchors thought to be more than a hundred years old were found on the seabed.
The team worked in conjunction with the Aurora SP Trust,
Source: NYT
September 6, 2007
An Iraqi appeals court on Tuesday upheld a death sentence against one of Saddam Hussein’s main henchmen, known as Chemical Ali, for a genocidal campaign that killed as many as 180,000 Kurds in the 1980s.
The head of the nine-member Iraqi High Tribunal, Arif Abd al-Razaq, said the decision paved the way for the henchman, Ali Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of Mr. Hussein, to be executed within 30 days in accordance with Iraqi law.
Source: NYT
September 5, 2007
Finding a strange hair in a plate of spaghetti: bad. Finding a strand of George Washington’s hair in a pack of baseball cards: good.
Among cards picturing third basemen and center fielders, the Topps Company, the maker of baseball trading cards and Bazooka bubble gum, inserted three George Washington “relic” cards, each with a strand of hair from the first president. Topps obtained the strands from the world’s pre-eminent historical hair collector (yes, there is such a thing), John
