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 1, 2007
SINCE 1954, liberal and conservative justices have disagreed about the central meaning of Brown v. Board of Education. Was the purpose of Brown to achieve a colorblind society or an integrated one? Last week, in its 5-to-4 decision declaring that public schools in Louisville and Seattle can’t take explicit account of race to achieve integration, the Supreme Court came down firmly on the side of colorblindness. Despite some important qualifications by Justice Anthony Kennedy, at least four conser
Source: NYT
July 1, 2007
HELP WANTED: Chief executive of the Smithsonian who won’t use its funds to clean his chandelier, heat his pool, install French doors or pay his chauffeur; who will take fewer than 70 vacation days a year; who won’t keep crucial information from the general counsel, inspector general and chief financial officer; and who won’t decorate his office with a stuffed Bengal tiger from the Natural History Museum.
If the Smithsonian Institution knows what it does not want in its next secretar
Source: Adam Goodheart in the NYT
July 1, 2007
Recently, it has seemed that ancient Rome is everywhere — and especially comparisons of modern America to the ancient empire. Moreover, it is one of the few things on which all segments of the political spectrum — left and right, Christian fundamentalists and Islamic radicals, Ivy League professors and renegade bloggers — seem to agree.
Most recently, a book by Cullen Murphy, titled, plainly enough, “Are We Rome?” begins with an extended comparison of President Bush to the emperor
Source: HNN Staff
June 30, 2007
Egil"Bud" Krogh, one of the Watergate Plumbers, in an op ed in the NYT, claims the break-in of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist office was the real start of Watergate. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers. From the op ed:
THE Watergate break-in, described by Ron Ziegler, then the White House press secretary, as a “third-rate burglary,” passes its 35th anniversary this month. The common public perception is that Watergate was the principal cause of President
Source: Newsweek
July 9, 2007
We are hoping to start a conversation about what we are calling Global Literacy—facts and insights about the world (some objective, some subjective) that we think are worth knowing. We are not saying this is all you need to know; just that what you are about to read amounts to a good start. Our perspective is that of an American publication, but our interests are global, and we invite you to write us with your own thoughts and suggestions; we will be returning to the subject in the coming months
Source: Letter to the editor of the NYT Book Review signed by Norman Mailer et al.
June 17, 2007
Bryan Burrough's laudatory review of Vincent Bugliosi's book on the Kennedy assassination (May 20) is superficial and gratuitously insulting. ''Conspiracy theorists'' -- blithe generalization -- should according to Burroughs be ''ridiculed, even shunned ... marginalized the way we've marginalized smokers.'' Let's see now. The following people to one degree or another suspected that President Kennedy was killed as the result of a conspiracy, and said so either publicly or privately: Presidents Ly
Source: Newsweek
June 25, 2007
Fred Thompson has a gift for knowing just what to say to anyone, in any situation. In 1998, when Thompson was a Republican senator and a single man about town, New York socialite Georgette Mosbacher invited him to accompany her on an overseas trip. Thompson couldn't go, and summoned the full measure of his Tennessee charm in letting her down. "I am sitting here with a long face and broken heart as I contemplate sunsets on the Mediterranean, which I will not see," he wrote to Mosbacher
Source: Globe & Mail (Canada)
June 29, 2007
A new poll by the Dominion Institute shows that Canadians are faring dramatically worse today than they did in 1997 in a test of their knowledge of history, politics, culture and geography.
About 60 per cent would fail today a test similar to the one that immigrants take to become Canadian citizens. A decade ago, when the institute began quizzing Canadians, just 45 per cent were unable to score a passing grade by answering 12 out of 21 questions correctly.
Just as strik
Source: Christian Science Monitor
June 29, 2007
The Pentagon held a screening in 2003 of "The Battle of Algiers," a movie about French troops winning control of the Algerian capital. President Bush says that he recently read Alistair Horne's authoritative history on the war, "A Savage War of Peace." And last fall, Christopher Harmon, who teaches a course on the Algerian war at the Marine Corps University (MCU) in Washington, lectured marines in Iraq about the Algerian model.
Here in Algeria, some of those who
Source: http://www.dominicantoday.com
June 29, 2007
SANTO DOMINGO.- During the United States intervention of Dominican Republic in April ,1965 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had the world’s second largest station in this country, only after Saigon, Vietnam, said the historian Bernard Vega yesterday.
He said that’s one of the reasons for the CIA’s many reports on Dominican Republic.Dominican Republic’s ex- ambassador in Washington said that during the 1965 Revolution, after World War II the Fede
Source: AP
June 29, 2007
Executive privilege. Words famously seared into history when Richard M. Nixon struggled to keep the Watergate tapes private in a criminal investigation.
In a political drama that held the nation in suspense, Nixon took his case to the Supreme Court in 1974, arguing that he had an absolute right of executive privilege to withhold information. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against him and ordered him to turn over the tapes. Nixon resigned two weeks later.
Throughout
Source: Sydney Morning Herald
June 29, 2007
THERE was never any suggestion that a national history curriculum should omit the study of Gallipoli, the historians who helped to draft it and the federal Education Minister said yesterday.
The president of the History Teachers Association of Australia, Nick Ewbank, who helped draft the curriculum, said Gallipoli was among the milestones for compulsory study. His fellow working party member, John Gascoigne, from the school of history and philosophy at the University of NSW, said Ga
Source: http://www.philly.com
June 26, 2007
Amid the kind of steaminess that plagued soldiers on Sept. 11, 1777, federal, state, and local officials reversed history Tuesday, turning the Battle of the Brandywine into an American victory - for preservationists.
On a scenic hillside in Chester County, the Brandywine Conservancy announced the purchase of the 100-acre Skirmish Hill Farm from the Odell family for $8 million last month. The sale completes a two-decade struggle to save this site and others nearby, where some of the
Source: Yorkshire Post
June 28, 2007
The Americans will be taking to the high seas off the Yorkshire coast this summer in search of their nautical "Holy Grail". Martin Hickes reports on an expensive obsession.
THIS August, a flotilla of American scientists will mount a £175,000 expedition off Flamborough Head in search of a wreck, more than 200 years after it sank.
Two US teams will plunge into the North Sea in search of the flagship of a Scottish captain, known to the Brits as little more than
Source: LAT
June 29, 2007
South Americans were raising crops at least 10,000 years ago, about 5,000 years earlier than previously thought and nearly contemporary with the emergence of agriculture in the Old World, based on new ages obtained for agricultural samples excavated from the Andes 20 years ago.
"We always thought there was a gap of several thousand years before agriculture began in the New World," said archeologist Jack Rossen of Ithaca College in New York, one of the authors of the report
Source: BBC
June 28, 2007
On Sunday, 65 men and women will embark on one of the most ambitious, dangerous and important experimental archaeology projects ever undertaken.
They will attempt to sail a reconstructed Viking warship from Roskilde, Denmark, to Dublin, across some of the roughest seas in the world.
The ship, The Sea Stallion from Glendalough, is the most authentic Viking warship built in nine centuries. It's based on the largest of five ships that were excavated from the bottom of Rosk
Source: NYT
June 29, 2007
The five opinions that made up yesterday’s decision limiting the use of race in assigning students to public schools referred to Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 school desegregation case, some 90 times. The justices went so far as to quote from the original briefs in the case and from the oral argument in 1952.
All of the justices on both sides of yesterday’s 5-to-4 decision claimed to be, in Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s phrase, “faithful to the heritage of
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 29, 2007
Government disarray over a jury's decision that Lady Chatterley's Lover was not obscene is revealed today in files released by the National Archives.
Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, the Attorney General, and his deputy were involved in the 1960 prosecution at the Old Bailey, despite protestations at the time that it was not politically inspired.
Once Sir Reginald had read the first four chapters, he wrote to Sir Theobald Matthew, the director of public prosecutions: &qu
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 29, 2007
The Queen has appealed to ministers for an extra £1 million a year to help with urgent repairs after being told that Buckingham Palace is falling apart, it emerged yesterday.
One huge chunk of stone has already fallen from the East Wing facade into the quadrangle missing the Princess Royal's parked car by a few inches, her aides revealed.
Another chunk fell on the same day that hundreds of guests visited the palace to attend a science reception - though not when the vis
Source: BBC
June 28, 2007
The Sydney Opera House in Australia and the Red Fort in India have been added to a list of the world's most valuable cultural treasures.
A silver mine in Japan and an ancient fortress in Turkmenistan are also now on the Unesco World Heritage list.
Archaeological remains in Iraqi city of Samarra were inscribed and immediately registered as being in danger.
The organisation also agreed to change the official name of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland.
