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
September 12, 2011
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — The southern Utah site of a pioneer-era wagon train massacre is being dedicated as a national historic landmark.The 760-acre Mountain Meadows Massacre site becomes a monument on Sunday....
Source: Yahoo News
September 9, 2011
Early settlers called the Susquehanna River "a mile wide and a foot deep." It's just a folk saying, but it hints at the forces behind a river that is, in fact, exceptionally likely to flood.And flooding it is, with record or near-record levels recorded along its path from New York state to Chesapeake Bay after a wet summer that included storms Irene and now Lee."The Susquehanna is one of the most flood-prone rivers in America," said Chris Duffy, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Penn State University.It's an especially shallow river, Duffy said, and that means big rainfalls can create floods rapidly. But another issue is what's underneath the water....
Source: Huffington Post
September 9, 2011
Of all the filmmakers you might expect to make a film about Jewish hero Judah Maccabee, Mel Gibson is probably not at the top of the list. So consider this a Hannukah surprise.Deadline broke the news that Gibson and Warner Bros. are teaming on a film about the hero who led a small band of Jews against mighty Seleucid armies and, among other things, liberated Jerusalem. Gibson will produce the picture, and potentially direct, too.It would seem a curious choice for Gibson, who has a past checkered with accusations -- and admitted utterances -- of anti-semitic sentiment. His 2004 film, "The Passion of the Christ," was a blockbuster hit but proved wildly divisive, with Jewish audiences taking offense to the way Jews were portrayed.
Source: NYT
September 12, 2011
WASHINGTON — After helping President Lyndon B. Johnson pass his Great Society programs in the 1960s, Larry O’Brien gave his memoir a humble, and prescient, title: “No Final Victories.”Mr. O’Brien’s observation has come sharply into focus, in Washington and on the presidential campaign trail. The accelerating debates over taxes, spending and economic policy amount to the most fundamental challenge yet to the achievements of Johnson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt a generation earlier.President Obama’s speech last week demanding that Congress pass his $447 billion American Jobs Act touched off a narrower discussion. The plan adopts both Democratic and Republican strategies for near-term job creation and economic growth using tax cuts or direct government spending or both.But in the presentation that Mr. Obama plans next week, the two parties will play for larger stakes. That is when the president will spell out his solution to America’s long-term budget gap while, at the same time, trying to finance his jobs package....
Source: NYT
September 12, 2011
In the early days of the Cuban missile crisis, before the world knew that the cold war seemed to be sliding toward nuclear conflict, President John F. Kennedy telephoned his wife, Jacqueline, at their weekend house in Virginia. From his voice, she would say later, she could tell that something was wrong. Why don’t you come back to Washington? he asked, without explanation.“From then on, it seemed there was no waking or sleeping,” Mrs. Kennedy recalls in an oral history scheduled to be released Wednesday, 47 years after the interviews were conducted. When she learned that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba aimed at American cities, she begged her husband not to send her away. “If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you,” she says she told him in October 1962. “I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too — than live without you.”
Source: AP
September 10, 2011
RICHMOND, Va. -- A Civil War-era doll suspected of carrying medicines to wounded and malaria-stricken Confederate troops has been X-rayed, taken a trip to Virginia's crime lab and starred in a nationally televised investigation.Nina still isn't giving up her 150-year-old secrets.While X-rays revealed that her papier-mâché head was in fact hollow, technicians at the Richmond crime lab swabbed the inside of Nina's head and found no residue of either quinine, used to treat malaria, or morphine.The tests are inclusive, however, because the drugs could have been sealed tightly with paper, muslin or oilcloth before they were stuffed into Nina's head....
Source: NY Historical Society
September 9, 2011
NEW YORK, NY – The New-York Historical Society is pleased to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded it a grant of $400,000 to support a traveling program and educational initiatives surrounding its new exhibition Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn.Revolution! is the first museum exhibition to explore the revolutions in America, France and Haiti as a single grand narrative from 1763 to 1815, tracing their cumulative transformation of politics, society and culture across the Atlantic world. Itwill also be the first major history exhibition to be presented by the New-York Historical Society when it fully re-opens its galleries on November 11, 2011, after a three-year, $65 million renovation."The New-York Historical Society is deeply grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for this very generous endorsement of our mission, which is to engage the broadest possible public in the enjoyment of learning about history," said Louise Mirrer, President and CEO of the New-York Historical Society. "Through this grant, we will be able to extend the reach of Revolution! and make it accessible to a much wider audience."
Source: PoliticalWire
September 8, 2011
Jacqueline Kennedy recalled in a series of oral-history interviews recorded in 1964, but just released, that President Kennedy felt strongly that Lyndon Johnson shouldn't become president, ABC News reports. In the months just before his death in 1963 he has even begun talking to his brother, Robert Kennedy, "about ways to maneuver around Johnson in 1968."...
Source: Live Science
September 8, 2011
The bones spent close to a century in 35 small boxes meant to hold loose cigarettes and shotgun cartridges, each box big enough to hold the complete skeleton of one infant. Then Jill Eyers found them in a museum archive."It was quite heart-rending, really, to open all these little cigarette boxes and find babies inside," said Eyers, an archaeologist and director of Chiltern Archaeology in England. "But they kept very well over 100 years."These remains were already ancient by the time they were excavated from the English countryside in 1912 and put into boxes. Eyers estimates they are now about 1,800 years old, dating back to the time when England was part of the Roman Empire....
Source: BBC
September 8, 2011
A sacred stone not supposed to be seen by Aboriginal women has been withdrawn from a British auction following a public outcry in Australia.
The stone had been listed for sale at Canterbury Auction Galleries in Kent for up to £6,000 on Wednesday.
However on Tuesday night the Australian High Commission called the gallery to explain its significance.
It was withdrawn and efforts are being made to repatriate it to the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.
The stone, known as tjuringa, is used in the most profound ceremonies within Aboriginal culture and then secreted away, with only senior elders knowing how to retrieve it....
Source: BBC
September 8, 2011
Canadian explorers have drawn a blank in the latest hunt for the remains of Captain Sir John Franklin's fatal expedition, 160 years after he took his crew of 129 men deep into the Arctic.
But the men vanished into the frozen Arctic, leaving a few clues but no explanation as to what went wrong.
The first search party set off in 1848 and searches involving teams from Canada, the UK, and the US have continued ever since. Last week, representatives from Parks Canada announced the results from their search this summer, which proved unsuccessful.
Explorers have found rock cairns with messages from sailors who abandoned ship. They've taken oral history from Inuit people whose ancestors saw the ships get stuck in giant ice floes. In several cases, they've dug up the bones and preserved bodies of the ship's crew. But they've found no ships, no logs, and no sign of Franklin himself.
In subsequent years, a rough sketch of the troubles emerged. During the first winter, the crew disembarked, travelled south to hunt. Franklin left a reassuring message in a rock cairn, signed "All well". A month later, he was dead....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 9, 2011
Fidel Castro has broken a long silence by granting an interview to a Venezuelan television station, his first since rumours began to spread that the former Cuban leader might be sick or near death. A top Cuban official said on Thursday that the revolutionary is in good health.Photographs of the sit-down with a journalist from Venezolana de Television were posted on Cubadebate, a state-run website. The 85-year-old appears relaxed and healthy in the pictures, sitting in an easy chair and wearing a white jacket and green pants.The website said the interview occurred Tuesday in Havana, but it had not yet been broadcast and it was not immediately clear when it would be....
Source: Yahoo News
September 6, 2011
Ten years after the terrorist attacks, and less than a week from the ribbon-cutting at the new World Trade Center, the New York City mayor says it's time to retire Ground Zero.
In a speech delivered this morning on Wall Street, Michael Bloomberg said the new construction and memorial on the site has made the name no longer fitting, news site DNAinfo.com reports.
His call for the name change isn't the first: For years Downtown residents have asked officials to stop calling the two rising skyscrapers and eight-acre memorial "Ground Zero," according to the article, saying that moniker recognizes only the past destruction rather than the promise of recovery.
The largest tower at the new World Trade Center will reach 1,776 feet, becoming the tallest building in the country when completed, while towers two, three, and four will each be successively shorter.
Despite the years of construction delays and cost overruns, Bloomberg says the half-finished office complex on the site of the former twin towers is the center of a growing and vibrant neighborhood, which boasts its highest population since the 1920s...
Source: Reuters
September 6, 2011
LONDON (Reuters) - It's a lesson that Germany might not want to hear, but history suggests that greater centralization of tax and spending powers is the outcome when monetary unions run into crises like the one now sorely testing the euro zone.In a study of the political and fiscal record of five federal states, economic historian Michael Bordo concludes that such a policy response is already unfolding in the European Union, as illustrated by the creation of a euro area financial rescue fund."History suggests that the creation of a union-wide bond market with a common bond may prove to be a successful way to finance increases in public expenditure to prevent the malaise experienced today in Europe," Bordo wrote in a paper co-authored with Agnieszka Markiewicz and Lars Jonung....
Source: Reuters
September 8, 2011
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Ten years after al Qaeda's attack on the United States, the vast majority of the 9/11 Commission's investigative records remain sealed at the National Archives in Washington, even though the commission had directed the archives to make most of the material public in 2009, Reuters has learned.The National Archives' failure to release the material presents a hurdle for historians and others seeking to plumb one of the most dramatic events in modern American history.The 575 cubic feet of records were in large part the basis for the commission's public report, issued July 22, 2004. The commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was established by Congress in late 2002 to investigate the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks, the pre-attack effectiveness of intelligence agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the government's emergency response.
Source: Yahoo News
September 7, 2011
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — A Goodwill worker who spotted a photograph of Confederate General Robert E. Lee has helped the charity make $23,000 in an online auction.The tintype photograph was in a bin, about to be shipped out, when a worker grabbed it and sent it to the charity's local online department. The item was then put up for auction, which closed Wednesday night....
Source: Live Science
September 5, 2011
Our species may have bred with a now extinct lineage of humanity before leaving Africa, scientists say.Although we modern humans are now the only surviving lineage of humanity, others once roamed the Earth, making their way out of Africa before our species did, including the familiar Neanderthals in West Asia and Europe and the newfound Denisovans in East Asia. Genetic analysis of fossils of these extinct lineages has revealed they once interbred with modern humans, unions that may have endowed our lineage with mutations that protected them as we began expanding across the world about 65,000 yeas ago.
Source: Discovery News
September 7, 2011
Unraveling the mystery surrounding the shipwreck found last year during excavations of the World Trade Center site has resulted in several facts as well as theories. The 18th century vessel, likely a single-masted sloop, measured approximately 50 feet long, and had a shallow, double-ended draft aided by a small, tapered keel built of squared-off hickory that that ran from stem-to-stern. The hull was built from Philadelphia oak trees -- one of which had lived for at least 111 years and was still growing in 1773, its youngest sapwood preserved in one of the boat's timbers.Maritime historian Norman Brouwer had suggested that the unusually crafted sailboat was from a small rural shipyard and the trees for its timber from the same forest. "The data we see suggest something very similar," says Neil Pederson of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory's Tree Ring Lab in Palisades, NY. "It's an interesting intersection in experts," he told Discovery News. He was part of a four-person dendrochronology team from the Tree Ring Lab working on samples of the vessel's white oak planks and its hickory keel. Other tree species used in the boat's construction included spruce and southern yellow pine, reported wood deterioration researcher Robert Blanchette of the University of Maine.
Source: NPR
September 6, 2011
The headline writers at USA Today put it this way: "9/11: How One Day Changed Our World." National Geographic observed that the attacks of Sept. 11 would "alter the course of history."But the shocking assaults in 2001 on the World Trade towers, the Pentagon and the planned hit on the Capitol were not the first surprise attacks that changed the way humans do business.Through the centuries, there have been unexpected strikes on civilian targets that occurred during wars — declared or not — and peacetime attacks that came completely out of the blue. The Sept. 11 attacks fall into the latter category.Sudden assailments have toppled societies and shaken civilizations. The element of surprise can be a very potent change agent. And, perhaps, the most powerful weapon of all.One of the earliest accounts of an epic surprise attack comes from Greek mythology: the Trojan Horse. The episode, explains George Dameron, a history professor at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vt., is associated with the 10-year war between Greeks and Trojans....
Source: The Atlantic
September 8, 2011
Is the Australopithecus sediba our ancestor? New research in the journal Science suggests so, as high-resolution scans and uranium-dating tests reveal that this hominin exhibited primitive as well as human-like traits and existed around the same time early Homo species first walked the Earth."The many advanced features found in the brain and body, along with the earlier date, make it possibly the best candidate ancestor for our genus," says Lee Berger, the project leader from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, in a news release.
