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: USA Today
June 4, 2007
The immigration debate in the Senate has at times been intensely personal, with senators taking the floor to tell stories of their own immigrant roots. Children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Italy, Ireland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Cuba rose to describe how their families became American.
"Immigration always has been an issue that goes to the root of what America is all about," said Betty Koed, a Senate historian who wrote her dissertation on the passage of the 1965 im
Source: NYT
June 5, 2007
Given all the sobering things that have happened since the turn of the millennium — from the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to the war in Iraq to the Bush administration’s efforts to expand executive power and curtail civil liberties — the sex and real estate follies of the Clinton White House now feel as if they belong to an era long ago and far, far away. Indeed, Carl Bernstein’s new biography of Hillary Rodham Clinton often feels like a very long, very slow acid flashback to the 1990s, rehashing a
Source: NYT
June 4, 2007
HONG KONG — A candlelight vigil here this evening to mark the 18th anniversary of the military crackdown on the Tiananmen Square demonstrations drew an unusually large crowd, apparently in response to the recent assertion by the leader of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing party that no massacre took place in 1989.
By contrast, Tiananmen Square itself, in Beijing, remained quiet under tight security through a humid, sunny day, with the usual tour groups and pedestrians milling about. State sec
Source: Telegraph (UK)
June 4, 2007
One of the greatest tapestries made in Elizabethan England has been rediscovered in America after it disappeared almost a century ago following a blunder by a prominent British art historian.
The giant hanging, measuring 15 ft by 6ft and made in the 1580s, with an idealised image of country life shows that wealthy Tudors had much the same aspirations to own a beautiful part of the countryside as their counterparts today.... The London dealer Simon Franses has id
Source: Independent (UK)
June 4, 2007
Frogs' legs, a delicacy most closely associated with the French, is in fact, a Czech dish, according to archaeologists. Although the edible amphibians are closely associated with Gallic cuisine - so much so that English people refer to the French by the derogatory nickname "the frogs" - ancient Czechs were eating them more than 5,000 years ago.
New research by archaeologists has uncovered the kitchen remains of hundreds of frogs' legs in a hill fort east of Prague. Most of
Source: http://www.news-record.com (Greensboro, NC)
June 3, 2007
Blackbeard didn’t leave any fingerprints. No DNA. No signed confession.
Just a shipwreck. And a mystery.
The wreck, if found, likely would contain a mound of cannons, hand grenades, lead shot, trade beads, slave shackles, a syringe for treating syphilis and some flakes of gold.
As for the mystery, that’s been playing out for 10 years, far longer than anyone expected.
For the past decade, scores of historians, scientists and archaeologists have sifted
Source: BBC
June 3, 2007
A former Transport and Heritage minister is calling for Stonehenge to be removed from the list of World Heritage sites.
Salisbury's Conservative MP Robert Key says a failure to deliver long overdue improvements means Stonehenge no longer deserves the listing.
He claims money for improvements is being diverted to the Olympics.
He is writing to the UNESCO committee asking for the British government to be called to account.
Source: AP
June 3, 2007
BOGOTA, Colombia - The Spanish galleon San Jose was trying to outrun a fleet of British warships off Colombia's coast on June 8, 1708, when a mysterious explosion sent it to the bottom of the sea with gold, silver and emeralds now valued at more than $2 billion.
Three centuries later, a bitter legal and political dispute over the San Jose is still raging, with the Colombian Supreme Court expected to rule this week on rival claims by the government and a group of U.S. investors to wh
Source: BBC
June 4, 2007
Two very different finds, dug up close to each other by Trafalgar Square, shine new light on the greatest puzzle of London archaeology - the "silent" centuries after Roman rule.
Plenty happened in London in the 450 years following the end of Roman rule in 410. It became the seat of an English bishopric. Bede in the 730s called it "a mart of many nations".
The Anglo-Saxon town (Lundenwic) was west of the Roman Londinium
So why could archa
Source: http://www.fredericknewspost.com (Frederick, Maryland)
June 4, 2007
Teresa Felton Barrett laughed as she shared a tip someone gave her years ago, when she started exploring her family history.
"Don't totally discredit rumors, even if they seem far-fetched," the Middletown resident said.
Growing up in Florida, Barrett heard whispered stories about a man who killed his boss in a rage and then terrorized neighboring plantations. These out to be tales about a distant ancestor on her father's side, she said.
In July, Barrett
Source: Reuters
June 4, 2007
The elegant Baltic seaside resort of Heiligendamm has seen the best and the worst of German history since it was founded in 1793 as an exclusive summer spa for European nobility.
Proud to be Germany's first seaside resort, Heiligendamm -- this week hosting a summit of the Group of Eight (G8) industrialised nations -- is less happy about of its Nazi past.
In 1932 it became the first town in Germany to name a street after Adolf Hitler and to make its infamous summer visit
Source: Seattle Times
June 4, 2007
Let's get on with The Show.
The curtain is raised at 7:30 in the morning, revealing the Manzo Brothers produce stall, which has been a top performer for half of Pike Place Market's 100-year history.
The choreography begins — green beans lined up individually in an interconnected pattern, creating the visual effect of a blanket woven on a loom.
A small fake lizard guards a sign placed on top of the beans: "Don't even think about disturbing the display,&
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
June 4, 2007
A university class from the Midwest passed through Philadelphia yesterday on a two-week tour of historic sites in the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender equal-rights movement.
When their red-and-white bus, adorned with the University of Wisconsin badger mascot, pulled up in front of Independence Hall, Mark Segal, publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News, had a surprise for them.
He passed out hand-drawn picket signs, and asked the class to reenact the nation's first
Source: NYT
June 3, 2007
PERHAPS no fact is more revealing about Iraq’s history than this: The Iraqis have a word that means to utterly defeat and humiliate someone by dragging his corpse through the streets.
The word is “sahel,” and it helps explain much of what I have seen in three and a half years of covering the war.
It is a word unique to Iraq, my friend Razzaq explained over tea one afternoon on my final tour. Throughout Iraq’s history, he said, power has changed hands only through extrem
Source: NYT
June 3, 2007
HOW did the United States, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, come to adopt interrogation techniques copied from the Soviet Union and other cold war adversaries?
Investigators for the Senate Armed Services Committee are examining how the methods, long used to train Americans for what they may face as prisoners of war, became the basis for American interrogations.
Source: NYT
June 2, 2007
When Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien, or Jewish Community Vienna, decided to sell a vacant building in the summer of 2000, two employees were sent to look for any archival material that might have been left behind.
What they found exceeded any historian’s dream: Stacked floor to ceiling in two rooms of one apartment sat some 800 dusty boxes containing, among other things, about half a million pages of detailed records of the community during the Holocaust — archives not known to h
Source: http://www.courierlife.net
June 2, 2007
A key [Brooklyn] city historian offered his views last week on the Duffield Street abolitionist houses and appears to have landed on the side of preservationists.
Christopher Moore, a curator at Harlem’s Schomburg Center, and regarded as one of the city’s foremost African-American historians, is also a member of the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC).
His name reportedly came up at the May 1 City Council hearing regarding the city’s plans to condemn and de
Source: Salem Statesman Journal
June 1, 2007
The Statesman Journal's three-part series, "Beyond Barbed Wire: Japanese Internment through Salem Eyes," follows Japanese immigrants through a riveting period in Northwest and U.S. history.
Japanese immigrants had established themselves in Oregon communities, but the tenor of the times changed dramatically with the bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to send families of Japanese heritage to internment camps.
Source: http://www.dailypress.com
June 3, 2007
JAMESTOWN -- Alexander Hamilton remembered the pesky part of his long-ago fourth-grade class trip to Jamestown. But until recently, he didn't necessarily remember all the history.
He suspects that it was the same for many African-American families who came to Jamestown Settlement on Saturday for African Imprint Day, created to highlight the role of Africans in Virginia's early history.
"They remembered the flies," Hamilton joked about what memories remained of
Source: http://www.signonsandiego.com
June 3, 2007
There's a reason why reports of a rare strain of tuberculosis attracted worldwide attention: a history perhaps as deadly as the plague.
More than 4,000 years ago, tuberculosis killed an Egyptian whose mummified remains were dug up; the case was first described in 1910. Hippocrates called it consumption in 460 B.C.
Pathologist Thomas Dormandy of London, author of “The White Death: The History of Tuberculosis,” said TB may have killed more than the plague. Outbreaks of th
