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: National Geographic
November 1, 2011
...The Staffordshire Hoard, as it was quickly dubbed, electrified the general public and Anglo-Saxon scholars alike. Spectacular discoveries, such as the royal finds at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, had been made in Anglo-Saxon burial sites. But the treasure pulled from Fred Johnson’s field was novel—a cache of gold, silver, and garnet objects from early Anglo-Saxon times and from one of the most important kingdoms of the era. Moreover, the quality and style of the intricate filigree and cloisonné decorating the objects were extraordinary, inviting heady comparisons to such legendary treasures as the Lindisfarne Gospels of the Book of Kells.
Source: Live Science
October 31, 2011
Once laid to rest, the remains of many who died in medieval Europe were not left in peace. As much as 40 percent of graves from the mid-fifth to mid-eighth centuries appear to have been disturbed after burial.Grave robbers, searching for wealth buried along with the dead, have frequently born the blame from archaeologists."This sort of behavior has always been described as grave robbery," said Edeltraud Aspöck, a postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. "It has always been thought that it was criminal gangs and foreigners that have been plundering, and it was all about material gain."...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 1, 2011
Researchers have found that people in East Asia share genetic material with Denisovans, who got the name from the cave in Siberia where they were first found.The new study covers a larger part of the world than earlier research, and it is clear that it is not as simple as previously thought.Professor Mattias Jakobsson, of Uppsala University in Sweden who conducted the study together with graduate student Pontus Skoglund, said hybridisation took place at several points in evolution and the genetic traces of this can be found in several places in the world.He said: "We'll probably be uncovering more events like these."Previous studies have found two separate hybridisation events between so-called archaic humans - different from modern humans in both genetics and morphology - and the ancestors of modern humans after their emergence from Africa....
Source: National Park Service Press Release
November 2, 2011
The National Park Service has recognized the historic significance of gay rights activist Dr. Franklin E. Kameny, by listing his home in the National Register of Historic Places. "Dr. Kameny led a newly militant activism in the fledgling gay civil rights of the 1960s," said NPS Director Jonathan B. Jarvis. "He was a landmark figure in articulating and achieving gay civil rights in federal employment and security clearance cases, and in reversing the medical community’s view on homosexuality as a mental disorder." Kameny’s efforts in the civil rights movement, modeled in part on African American civil rights strategies and tactics, significantly altered the rights, perceptions, and role of gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgendered people in American society.
Source: Boston Globe
November 1, 2011
Dewey Square and South Station in 1901, as a bustling center of transportation and industry, and in 2011, where even the 5 p.m. commuters can’t compare to the activity of 110 years earlier. The Occupy Boston tent city is just past the Fiduciary Trust Building at the left edge of the frame.By Jeremy C. Fox, Town CorrespondentLong before Dewey Square became the site of Occupy Boston, it was a transportation hub surrounded by warehouses and light industry, a small park of limited usefulness, and the site of some of the most complex construction Boston has ever seen. The square alongside Atlantic Avenue was named for one of the great heroes of the Pacific, George Dewey, a commodore in the US Navy who led the American Asiatic Squadron to victory in the first major battle of the Spanish-American War. Dewey later became the only person in US history to reach the rank Admiral of the Navy, the most senior rank in the US Navy....
Source: BBC
November 1, 2011
We are likely to see many of their names and faces every day, but how much do we know about the historical characters on our banknotes?As of 2 November, Matthew Boulton and James Watt have joined the range of people from the past whose portraits are found on the pound.Following a long process of selection, design and manufacture, the new £50 banknote is in circulation, with the industrialist and engineer as the first dual portrait produced on a Bank of England note.In time they will replace Sir John Houblon, the first governor of the Bank of England, as the faces of the £50 note....
Source: BBC
November 1, 2011
Nelson Mandela's biography The Long Walk to Freedom became an international bestseller and is being made into a film. But the famous book may never have seen the light of day if it wasn't for the bravery and persistence of another Robben Island inmate."We were housed in individual cells, each cell had a window looking out into the corridor. Warders patrolled day and night, lights were on 24 hours a day."Mac Maharaj was one of four long-term prisoners on Robben Island secretly collaborating on the first draft of the autobiography of Nelson Mandela - along with other Africa National Congress activists Ahmed Kathrada and Walter Sisulu."Mandela had to write every night. He wrote on average 10-15 pages with very little reference material - he wrote by discussion and recollection," says the 76-year-old....
Source: Press Release
November 3, 2011
WASHINGTON, D.C./PROVO, Utah, November 3, 2011 – The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com announced that material from four Museum collections containing information on more than 30,000 victims of Nazi persecution is now available online at Ancestry.com and can be searched at no cost. The collections contain information on thousands of individuals including displaced Jewish orphans; Czech Jews deported to the Terezin concentration camp and camps in occupied Poland; and French victims of Nazi persecution.
Source: National Geographic
November 1, 2011
Under a former Native American village in Georgia, deep inside what's now the U.S., archaeologists say they've found 16th-century jewelry and other Spanish artifacts.The discovery suggests an expedition led by conquistador Hernando de Soto ventured far off its presumed course—which took the men from Florida to Missouri—and engaged in ceremonies in a thatched, pyramid-like temple.
Source: West Virginia Gazette
November 2, 2011
CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Friends of Blair Mountain held a rally Tuesday at the Culture Center and submitted a petition to the State Historical Preservation Office signed by more than 26,000 people supporting preservation of the historic site on the Boone-Logan county border.Brandon Nida, a West Virginia native and doctoral student in archaeology at the University of California-Berkeley, said, "The largest labor battle in U.S. history took place on Blair Mountain back in 1921. We need to preserve it, develop it and promote the economy."Joe Stanley, a retired miner born and raised in Mingo County, said, "I am not anti-mining or anti-coal. I am anti-mountaintop-removal mining. The Battle of Blair Mountain helped start the middle class."Stanley said the SHPO is supposed "to protect historic structures, objects and sites."...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
November 2, 2011
The ancient race are believed to have to discovered North America hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus.Now experiments have shown that a crystal, called an Iceland spar, could detect the sun with an accuracy within a degree – allowing the legendary seafarers to navigate thousands of miles on cloudy days and during short Nordic nights.Dr Guy Ropars, of the University of Rennes, and colleagues said "a precision of a few degrees could be reached" even when the sun was below the horizon....
Source: CBS News
November 2, 2011
"I think you had to prove yourself first and let them know this is our country - we're loyal," George Iwasaki tells CBS News correspondent Ben Tracy. Iwasaki never lost faith in America, even when America had no faith in him. After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, the U.S. government ordered 120,000 Japanese, more than half of them American citizens, to internment camps."I didn't believe it," Iwasaki said. "I was an American - I thought."...The 442nd became one of the most decorated units in U.S. military history. On Wednesday they received one of America's highest civilian honors, the Congressional Gold Medal.
Source: CIA
October 31, 2011
The Central Intelligence Agency, in partnership with the National Declassification Center, hosted a symposium on 27 October 2011 at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to discuss the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the subsequent construction of the Berlin Wall. In conjunction with the event, more than 370 declassified documents – totaling more than 4800 pages of material about this crucial time period – were released from the records of multiple U.S. Government agencies. This collection marks the first time so many government entities have compiled their declassified documents on a single historic event in one place.“Eleven U.S. Government organizations contributed to the material being presented today – from intelligence reports to contingency plans to photographs to maps – all of these revealing the tremendous challenges U.S. analysts faced in predicting Nikita Khrushchev’s intentions and actions during the Berlin Crisis,” said Joseph Lambert, CIA’s Director of Information Management Services (IMS). “These documents also afford a glimpse of the many differing opinions held by Kennedy Administration advisors and various military leaders about which tactics and strategies offered the most effective U.S. response.”
Source: UCLA
November 1, 2011
In Africa 140 years ago, David Livingstone, the Victorian explorer, met Henry M. Stanley of the New York Herald and gave him a harrowing account of a massacre he witnessed, in which slave traders slaughtered 400 innocent people. Stanley's press reports prompted the British government to close the East African slave trade, secured Livingstone's place in history and launched Stanley's own career as an imperialist in Africa. Today, an international team of scholars and scientists led by Dr. Adrian Wisnicki of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, publishes the results of an 18-month project to recover Livingstone's original account of the massacre. The story, found in a diary that was illegible until it was restored with advanced digital imaging, offers a unique insight into Livingstone's mind during the greatest crisis of his last expedition, on which he would die in 1873. Livingstone's 1871 Field Diary is a free online public resource published by the UCLA Digital Library Program in Los Angeles (http://livingstone.library.ucla.edu/1871diary/).
Source: Vancouver Sun
November 1, 2011
A 340-year-old coin from China has been unearthed by archeologists near a planned Yukon gold mine, shedding fresh light on historic trade links between 17th-century Chinese merchants, Russian fur traders and first nations in the northwest corner of North America.The coin is etched with traditional Chinese characters indicating it was minted during the Qing Dynasty reign of Emperor Kangxi, who ruled China from 1662 to 1722. But other information stamped on the money piece - which has a large central hole and four smaller ones - shows it was minted in China's Zhili province between 1667 and 1671.The coin was discovered during a dig near Western Copper and Gold Corp.'s proposed Casino mine site about 300 kilometres northwest of Whitehorse. A heritage impact assessment for the Vancouver mining company was being conducted by Ecofor Consulting Ltd., based in B.C. and Yukon, when the find was made....
Source: NYT
November 1, 2011
By nature, a marathon promotes melodrama. Weary minds make bad decisions. Overused muscles malfunction. Logistical challenges create unexpected mishaps. A zoned-in runner misreads the course and stumbles in midstride or falls. The latter happened to Bill Rodgers in the 1980 New York City Marathon when he fell over Dick Beardsley, who had tripped in a pothole, and finished fifth. Rodgers had won New York the four previous years.A lot of memorable moments have happened over the course of the New York City Marathon’s 42 years. There have been close races, tumbles by top runners, wrong turns, a short course and even a dust cloud that obscured the top men as they neared the finish.Perceived social injustice prompted a sit-in at the 1972 race. The Amateur Athletic Union, then the governing body for marathoning in the United States, thought that women should not run more than 10 miles. The A.A.U. also thought that women should start at a different place or time from the men in a marathon. In New York in 1972, that was to be 10 minutes before the men.
Source: LiveScience
October 28, 2011
Some 5,200 years ago, in the mountains of western Iran, people may have used takeout windows to get food and weapons, newly presented research suggests.But rather than the greasy hamburgers and fries, it appears the inhabitants of the site ordered up goat, grain and even bullets, among other items.The find was made at Godin Tepe, an archaeological site that was excavated in the 1960s and 1970s by a team led by T. Cuyler Young Jr., a curator at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, who died in 2006....
Source: CBS News
October 20, 2011
It's like something out of "The Da Vinci Code": Hundreds of thousands of fragments from medieval religious scrolls are scattered across the globe. How will scholars put them back together?The answer, according to scientists at Tel Aviv University, is to use computer software based on facial recognition technology. But instead of recognizing faces, this software recognizes fragments thought to be part of the same work. Then, the program virtually "glues" the pieces back together. This enables researchers to digitally join a collection of more than 200,000 fragmentary Jewish texts, called the Cairo Genizah, found in the late 1800s in the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo. The Cairo Genizah texts date from the ninth to the 19th centuries, and they're dispersed amongst more than 70 libraries worldwide. Researchers will report on their progress in digitally reuniting the Cairo Genizah during the second week in November at the 2011 IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision in Barcelona....
Source: N-YHS Press Release
October 26, 2011
NEW YORK, NY, October 26, 2011 – Rare and centuries-old liturgical objects, manuscripts, maps and other historic artifacts—including a Torah scroll rescued from the hands of British troops during the American Revolution—will be on loan to the New-York Historical Society beginning November 11, 2011, for the installations The Resilient City and Treasures of Shearith Israel. The presentations of Treasures of Shearith Israel and The Resilient City at the renovated and transformed New-York Historical highlight the history of religious freedom in New York City and honor the first Jewish congregation to have been established in North America—a congregation that remains vibrant and active today, and is a neighbor of New-York Historical.
Source: San Diego News
October 30, 2011
Jack-o'-Lanterns, those carved up, hollowed out pumpkins, often with candles inside of them, have been the face of Halloween for centuries. But when it comes to the history of the venerable o'-Lantern, most people don't know, well, jack. Jack-o'-Lanterns first surfaced in Ireland, where Halloween originated.The tradition came out of an Irish myth about a man called "Stingy Jack.'' The tale says that Stingy Jack invited the Devil to have a drink with him, and when Jack decided he didn't want to pay for his libation, he coaxed the Devil to turn himself into a coin. Jack claimed he would use the coin to pay for the drinks. That turned out to be a falsehood, the story goes. Once the Devil became a coin, Jack elected to keep the money and put it in his pocket next to a cross, precluding the Devil from reverting to his original self....
