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: AP
February 21, 2007
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - After 81 years of war paint and feathered headdresses, the University of Illinois' controversial American Indian mascot is performing his last dance.
After that, Chief Illiniwek's image and regalia will continue to be a subject of negotiations.
The mascot, whose fate was decided by school officials last week, will take center stage at Assembly Hall for one last performance Wednesday night during the men's basketball game between Illinois and Michigan.
Source: Courier Mail (Australia)
February 21, 2007
The Australian and British governments today will be pitted against each other in a heavyweight court battle over whether scientists can conduct tests on Aboriginal remains.The Australian Government yesterday announced it would seek to join the legal fight to stop researchers at London's Natural History Museum testing the skulls and bones of 17 Tasmanian Aborigines.
It will apply to be part of a court battle beginning late today in the British High Court, when t
Source: LAT
February 21, 2007
In the fierce struggles of the 19th century to abolish slavery, Abraham Lincoln remains the mythic American champion. In Britain, however, that honor belongs to William Wilberforce, the Christian activist and member of Parliament who thundered against the slave trade for 20 years. Friday marks the 200th anniversary of his legislative triumph — a campaign rich with lessons for modern-day reformers.When Wilberforce first raised his voice in the House of Commons for the cause o
Source: Charleston Post and Courier
February 21, 2007
A group of South Carolina professors and historians are gathering oral histories to preserve a piece of the state's civil rights history. They have been traveling throughout the state to videotape leaders and grass-roots participants in the struggle for civil rights as they recount their experiences growing up and during the movement. Their research and documentaries are being carried out individually and for different projects, but they share a common goal of preserving the
Source: International Herald Tribune
February 21, 2007
For nearly a century, a large oval-shape linen tent where George Washington is believed to have slept during the Revolutionary War sat on display in Valley Forge, Pa., with a gaping hole in its roof. But now a combination of luck and forensic detective work has led to the discovery of the missing section of fabric — snipped out, historians believe, by a memorabilia seeker — and to the discovery that the tent was originally striped blue and white."It is the missing piece
Source: Independent (UK)
February 21, 2007
The hitherto unknown 8mm colour film of JFK's last motorcade, donated to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, does not cover the assassination itself. Instead its centrepiece is a radiant Jacqueline Kennedy, waving to the crowds lining the downtown pavement, a few blocks from Dealey Plaza where her husband John was assasinated.The sky is cloudless, Dallas' skyscrapers are bedecked with the national flag, and excited bystanders wave at the camera as they wait for the Kennedys. M
Source: Connecticut Post
February 21, 2007
Instead of the grim visage of George Washington staring out from the hard metal of the new $1 presidential coins, imagine the face of one-time cooper's apprentice — and Connecticut native — Samuel Huntington. That, according to historian Stanley Klos, is who should have been on the coin that entered circulation last week.Klos, a Florida resident, has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and threatened to file for an injunction to stop the further distribution
Source: AP
February 21, 2007
It may be that the world's most famously enigmatic woman has shed some of her mystery. An amateur historian believes he has found the final resting place of the Florentine Renaissance woman who inspired Leonardo da Vinci's most renowned painting: the Mona Lisa.Giuseppe Pallanti, a high school economics teacher from Florence who has written a book about the Mona Lisa, has unearthed a death certificate that shows the woman believed by some to have inspired the artist, Li
Source: Willie Drye in National Geographic News
February 20, 2007
Residents of a 15th-century New World mining colony founded by Christopher Columbus turned to desperate measures in the face of rapidly deteriorating conditions, a new study suggests.
According to researchers from the University of Arizona, the colony of La Isabela's situation was so dire that the miners tried to smelt their own supplies by extracting silver from lead ore they brought with them from Europe.
Archaeologists working at the site—located in what is now the Dominican Republic—in
Source: New York Times
February 21, 2007
When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.
He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it
Source: Washington Post
February 21, 2007
In a chandeliered room at the Justice Department, the longtime head of the counterespionage section, the chief of the public integrity unit, a deputy assistant attorney general, some trial lawyers and a few FBI agents all looked down at their pant legs and socks.
While waving his own leg in the air in illustration, Paul Brachfeld, inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration, asked the group rhetorically if "something white" could be easily mistake
Source: Times-Dispatch
February 20, 2007
The Museum of the Confederacy will likely drop the word "Confederacy" from its name when it moves its collection to a new home.
"One of our challenges is a gap between the public's perception of who we are and the role we play, and the reality of who we are and the role we play," Waite Rawls, the museum's president and CEO, said yesterday.
"The repositioning we have done over the past 30 years is to be more of a modern education institution and
Source: Press Release -- American Revolution Center
February 20, 2007
Today the American Revolution Center announced an extraordinary discovery surrounding the tent or "marquee" which George Washington used as his traveling "oval office" during the American Revolution. During the completion of the marquee's conservation process, a missing piece from the marquee ceiling was miraculously found. This announcement comes two days before the 275th birthday of the nation's first president.
Source: CNN
February 19, 2007
ZAGREB, Croatia (Reuters) -- Small packets of sugar bearing the likeness of Adolf Hitler and carrying Holocaust jokes have been found in some cafes in Croatia, prompting an investigation, the office of the state prosecutor said on Monday.
"The local district attorney in (the eastern town of) Pozega has opened an investigation and is currently looking at the matter," said Martina Mihordin.
The Novi List daily newspaper reported that officials at a small factory
Source: AP
February 18, 2007
A group of Virginia historians and an Army archaeologist say more research is needed before anyone can determine for sure that an early 17th-century settlement known as Henry Towne ever existed.
A Fort Eustis spokeswoman said Friday that Randy Amici, the Army's lead archaeologist for Fort Eustis on the Peninsula and Fort Story in Virginia Beach, has been at the center of the possible Henry Towne discovery and will continue to participate in that research.
"When I asked h
Source: Boston Globe
February 17, 2007
To the uninitiated, the dirty mix of mud, bone, and cow dung is a 350-year-old piece of trash. But to archeologists, the recent discovery at Boston's oldest house is a gleaming, golden nugget.
The brick-hard concoction, used in the mid-17th century for insulation and retrieved during restoration at the James Blake House in Dorchester, is giving archeologists their earliest glimpse of the everyday lives of the city's first European settlers.
The mix, called wattle and da
Source: National Geographic News
February 20, 2007
Residents of a 15th-century new world mining colony founded by Christopher Columbus turned to desperate measures in the face of rapidly deteriorating conditions, a new study suggests.
According to researchers from the University of Arizona, the colony of La Isabela's situation was so dire that the miners tried to smelt their own supplies by extracting silver from lead ore they brought with them from Europe.
Archaeologists working at the site—-located in what is now the
Source: AP
February 19, 2007
CAIRO -- A mud brick tomb dating back more than 4,000 years has been discovered near Egypt's most ancient pyramid in the Saqqara complex south of Cairo, antiquities official announced Monday. The tomb, which was found by an Egyptian-Australian mission, belonged to Ka-Hay, who kept divine records, and his wife, said Zahi Hawass, Egypt's antiquities chief.
Excavators found five wooden statues depicting the tomb's owner and his wife in a niche at the tomb's forefront. Among the wooden
Source: Reuters
February 20, 2007
SAKKARA, Egypt -- Egypt's chief archaeologist displayed on Tuesday the latest discoveries from the Sakkara cemetery south of Cairo and said many more treasures clearly lay hidden beneath the sands.
The new finds, outlined in statements over the past week, also show that Sakkara remained a necropolis, from the Greek "City of the Dead", for Egypt's elite long after the Old Kingdom period for which it is famous, said Zahi Hawass of the Supreme Antiquities Council.
Source: http://www.mlive.com
February 19, 2007
A University of Michigan museum exhibit showing how Native Americans lived hundreds of years ago was the target of a unique protest Sunday by students who say it's offensive and should be taken down.
A group of six art students, as part of a class project, placed translucent screens over the collection of dioramas that are prominently displayed on the fourth floor of the U-M Exhibit Museum of Natural History.
They handed out fliers asking why the museum won't remove wha
