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: NYT
July 30, 2007
There was something improbable about the new guy from Chicago via Honolulu and Jakarta, Indonesia, the one with the Harvard law degree and the job teaching constitutional law, turning up in Springfield, Ill., in January 1997 among the housewives, ex-mayors and occasional soybean farmer serving in the State Senate....
Mr. Obama did not bring revolution to Springfield in his eight years in the Senate, the longest chapter in his short public life. But he turned out to be practical and
Source: NYT
July 30, 2007
Now the story can be told: Vice President Dick Cheney, who ran the country for a brief two hours and five minutes earlier this month while President Bush was sedated during medical screening for colon cancer, did do a bit of official work as acting president.
He wrote a letter to his grandchildren.
“A souvenir for them to have down the road someday,’’ Mr. Cheney said today, during an interview with Mark Knoller of CBS Radio.
During the 14-minute interview i
Source: NYT
July 30, 2007
Asked which parent Chelsea Clinton most resembles, friends tick through the mother-daughter similarities. There is the habit of pre-empting questions by asking lots of them. The passionate interest in health care. The tendency to sound a bit scripted when talking about policy, even in private. The way both borrowed on family contacts to establish post-White House careers, but won over skeptical colleagues with their diligence and enthusiasm.
And if her mother, Senator Hillary Rodham
Source: Times (UK)
July 30, 2007
As Russia flexes its foreign policy muscles against the West and President Putin enjoys record approval ratings, the Kremlin is turning its attention to schools to instil a new sense of nationalism in children.
Two new manuals for teachers have been accused of glossing over the horrors of the Soviet Union and of including propaganda to promote Mr Putin’s vision of a strong state.
One, for social studies teachers, presents as fact Mr Putin’s view that the Soviet collapse
Source: BBC
July 30, 2007
The last known surviving British soldier to have fought in the trenches of World War I has revisited the site where he fought 90 years ago.
Harry Patch, 109, from Somerset, made the trip to Belgium to recall his part in the Battle of Passchendaele which claimed 250,000 British casualties.
He also went to pay homage to the tens of thousands of German soldiers who lost their lives.
Source: Boston Globe
July 29, 2007
THE CORPORATION for Public Broadcasting is chasing teenagers. But instead of courting them with content about sex, music, or MySpace, the corporation is investing $20 million to develop multimedia content -- from television shows to Web-based games -- about American history and civics....
Launched in 2005, this project asked public television managers to develop media projects that "measurably improve" how middle and high school students learn civics and history. Public te
Source: AP
July 29, 2007
Around here, history lives on with people's underwear.
Two artists are selling hot pink underwear screen-printed with the word "Ypsipanty" as part of an effort to keep alive the city's historical place in the underwear business.
Linette Lao and Mark Maynard have sold nearly 200 pair of Ypsipanties.
"We were just thinking about Ypsi-positive things that we could make," Maynard told The Ann Arbor News for Sunday editions. To them, he said,
Source: Guardian
July 29, 2007
It was designed by a friend of Pablo Picasso, adorned with mosaics depicting Oedipus and the Sphinx, and described as Art Deco at its Athenian best. But a row about the building that guidebooks describe as a 'must-see' on the boulevard linking the Greek capital's great classical sites is now threatening to eclipse the opening of Europe's most ambitious museum. All because the 1930s building blocks the view from a restaurant.
Culture Ministry officials say the four-storey architectur
Source: Seattle Times
July 28, 2007
Take a drive down Dock Street any time of day, and you'll see two large people looking back at you. A bushy-eyebrowed, hook-nosed ship's captain, and a serene Muckleshoot woman, side by side.
They're about 8 feet high, and they're staring out from the wall of the Working Waterfront Maritime Museum. The faces are part of a brand-new mural on the street side of the museum, the beginning of a multiyear, $28 million renovation. It's an 80-foot-long scene of turn-of-the-century Tacoma,
Source: Times (UK)
July 27, 2007
Seventy-four years ago this week, The Times started serialising the worst book ever written. Adolf Hitler had dictated Mein Kampf in Landsburg Prison in 1924, while incarcerated for his attempted putsch against the German Government. The book would not be published in Britain until October 1933, but this newspaper obtained the rights to run exclusive extracts four months earlier.
The Times explained that it was publishing this vile, anti-Semitic rant on the grounds that “readers wil
Source: NYT
July 29, 2007
They were high school friends from Park Ridge, Ill., both high achievers headed East to college. John Peavoy was a bookish film buff bound for Princeton, Hillary Rodham a driven, civic-minded Republican going off to Wellesley. They were not especially close, but they found each other smart and interesting and said they would try to keep in touch.
Which they did, prodigiously, exchanging dozens of letters between the late summer of 1965 and the spring of 1969. Ms. Rodham’s 30 dispatc
Source: NYT
July 28, 2007
It’s not an unfamiliar tableau these days: people gathered on a grassy expanse of the National Mall here, listening to someone deliver an impassioned antiwar speech with phrases like “aggressive, activist foreign policy,” “the war we are creating,” “vigorous governmental efforts to control information” and “distorted or downright dishonest documents.” At some point, the crowd breaks into applause and a young woman yells out, “That’s right!”...
The firebrand orator was Max Bunzel, a
Source: BlackFarmers.org
July 27, 2007
[HNN: On Friday the House of Representatives approved a new farm bill that includes a provision to pay millions of dollars to black farmers discriminated against by Agriculture Department bureaucrats in earlier dcades. The bill goes to the Senate in the fall.]
John Boyd, president of the National Black Farmers Association, said it is something that needs to
happen."At least the farmers will get their cases heard on their merits," said Boyd, who raises corn, soybeans and
chickens in so
Source: National Journal
July 27, 2007
The first lame ducks, those extraneous politicians christened as such, waddled into American history nearly 100 years ago, courtesy of the New York Evening Post. They made their appearance at the White House, but in refuge, not residence. It was there that Republican members of Congress who hadn't survived the 1910 midterm elections assembled in a hallway that the Evening Post dubbed "Lame Duck Alley." The defeated lawmakers were hoping for a presidential appointment from William Howar
Source: http://www.splcenter.org
June 1, 2007
California State University, Long Beach (CSULB), is a multicultural wonderland, with classrooms filled by Golden Staters whose ancestors came to this lively, diverse beach community from every corner of the world. Double-stocked with both an Office of Equity and Diversity and a Multicultural Center, CSULB openly proclaims its commitment to educating all of California’s students, regardless of income, race, creed or national origin.
Given its diverse student body, it would seem that
Source: Salt Lake Tribune
July 27, 2007
Each year the intention is the same: to arm Mormons with information so they can answer criticisms of their faith, doctrine and practices.
But the ninth annual conference of The Foundation for Apologetic Information & Research (FAIR), which begins Thursday in Sandy, is especially needed given recent high-profile anti-Mormon developments, the nonprofit organization's president, Scott Gordon, said.
Gordon, reached by phone in Redding, Calif., pointed to offe
Source: LAT editorial
July 27, 2007
When israel's education ministry announced that history textbooks for third-graders would now include a heretofore unmentionable truth -- that the creation of a homeland for Jews in 1948 resulted in the exile of 700,000 Palestinians -- it seemed an enlightened step.
"History is written by the victors," as Winston Churchill said, and for the last 59 years, Israeli elementary school textbooks have taught only the Jewish version of events: The outcome of the Arab-Israeli war
Source: Inside Higher Ed (Click on SOURCE for embedded links.)
July 27, 2007
“American success or failure in Iraq may well depend on whether the Iraqis like American soldiers or not.”
That’s not from a think tank primer prepared in 2003, but from a pamphlet prepared 60 years earlier and just published in book form by the University of Chicago Press. Instructions for American Serviceman in Iraq During World War II could be unusually successful for the press, at least as reprints of obscure government documents go. The press has shipped out 20,000 copies in th
Source: China Daily
July 26, 2007
Journalists ask questions and get answers. But answers to some questions are tough to come by as Yomiuri Shimbun's special project team found.
Why did Japan plunge into the quagmire of what the Japanese call the "Sino-Japanese War" and what actually was the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression?
Why did Japan wage war against the US despite lacking resources?
What caused the Japanese military to go on "kamikaze" attacks?
Source: Jerusalem Post
July 27, 2007
The Palestine Post and later The Jerusalem Post has been around since 1932, reporting the history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel for 75 years.
The following is the first in a new feature titled 'History Revisited', where we will show you images of those magnificent front pages - which you will be able to read (including the small text by using the zoom option - the plus sign - icon in Acrobat Reader) - from 1932 onwards....
