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: WaPo
February 24, 2011
Some 11,500 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, a child died near a river in what is now central Alaska. The people living with the child in a tent-pole house - presumably the parents - placed the 3-year-old's body in their home's cooking pit and lit a fire. After two to three hours of burning, the family covered the remains with dirt and left.
That's the dramatic story emerging from the study of the oldest human remains ever found in Alaska - and some of the oldest in all of
Source: HNN Staff
February 24, 2011
Both Democrats and Republicans in Wisconsin are waging battle armed with the weapons of parliamentary procedure. Fourteen Democratic state senators have fled the state for neighboring Illinois. Their choice of refuge is eminently appropriate, for Abraham Lincoln himself famously tried to deny his political opponents quorum through a very unorthodox method of departure in 1840.Lincoln, then a young Whig state congressman, was a major backer of Illinois’s State Bank. &n
Source: Montreal Gazette
February 23, 2011
Back in 1989, a National Film Board documentary titled Dis paraitre warned that Quebec's French culture could disappear within a couple of decades.
That doomsday scenario has not come true.
But there is a group whose presence is fading in some parts of the province. Anglophones.
Quietly, without fanfare, English-speakers are disappearing from regions where the roots of both language communities run deep.
For rural anglophones, the prospect of D
Source: Preservation Nation
February 22, 2011
As the nation celebrates the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's birth this month, the Chicago apartment building where Reagan lived for one year appears slated for demolition.
The University of Chicago, which bought the Hyde Park building in 2004 and moved tenants out last year, plans to use the site to expand its campus. No demolition-permit application has been filed, and it's unclear when the university will tear down the building. University spokesman Jeremy Manier had no comm
Source: Salon
February 22, 2011
The Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas recently released a video of John F. Kennedy filmed on Nov. 21, 1963 -- the night before he was assassinated. The images were recorded at the Rice Hotel in Houston, where the President appeared at an event with local Hispanic leaders. The sadly audio-free clip shows an animated Kennedy with his wife, Jacqueline, as he approaches a podium to deliver remarks....
Source: WaPo
February 18, 2011
There's not much left of the oldest synagogue in the Americas: just a pile of crumbling bricks covered with moss and inhabited by a handful of speedy brown lizards that scamper into the underbrush as I walk around the remnants of Beracha ve Shalom, established on a hill along the Suriname River in 1685.
The only other visitors on this day, besides my guide and me, are some local Amerindian teenagers, who perch on a corner of the ruins, laughing, flirting and snapping digital photos
Source: Time.com
February 22, 2011
Republicans and Democrats deny that they want to see a government shutdown, but both parties accuse each other of secretly rooting for one. With the federal government perilously close to shuttering on March 4 if an agreement on spending cuts cannot be reached in Congress, neither side appears prepared to make serious concessions. And while a shutdown looms, it has become increasingly apparent that conditions are very different from the last time the government shut down over a partisan budget f
Source: National Parks Traveler
February 24, 2011
The Sesquicentennial of the Civil War has also brought renewed interest in the Underground Railroad, and a talk this Saturday at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park will examine an intriguing question: "The Underground Railroad Quilt Code - Truth or Myth?"
Information about the event notes,
"The Underground Railroad (UGRR) has captured the imagination of the country, and stories of its use have been published and repeated in countless books and songs
Source: Talking Points Memo
February 23, 2011
If you were worried there wouldn't be a 2012 candidate touting the pro-Crusades platform, then today is your lucky day!
"The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical," former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) told a South Carolina audience yesterday. "And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom."
Santorum's defense of the Crusades cam
Source: Post and Courier
February 23, 2011
SHUTES FOLLY -- The toaster-oven-size machine whirred quietly atop the tripod as its laser recorded up to 40,000 data points a second.
National Park Service architects brought it here Tuesday, and by Thursday, they expect to have collected between 150 million and 200 million electronic measurements of one of Charleston's most neglected historic sites.
Castle Pinckney has stood guard on this island for two centuries -- and the brick fortification looks every year its ag
Source: NYT
February 21, 2011
A literary detective story that began 18 months ago and was advanced through a chance reading of an 1880 edition of The Harvard Register has led researchers from the Jefferson Library at Monticello to a trove of books that were among the last ones that Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s most bibliophilic president, collected and read in the decade before he died.
The 28 titles in 74 volumes were discovered recently in the collection of Washington University in St. Louis, immediately el
Source: WaPo
February 23, 2011
VATICAN CITY -- The headline was an eye-grabber: "Homer and Bart are Catholic."
That this homage to The Simpsons was splashed across the Vatican's newspaper was odder still, hinting that as it nears its 150th year of publication, L'Osservatore Romano was trying to be relevant, hip, even a bit controversial.
It wasn't always so, and the pope's newspaper is still full of dense treatises on obscure 15th century saints, papal discourses and appointments of bishops
Source: National Parks Traveler
February 24, 2011
The Sesquicentennial of the Civil War has also brought renewed interest in the Underground Railroad, and a talk this Saturday at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park will examine an intriguing question: "The Underground Railroad Quilt Code - Truth or Myth?"
Information about the event notes,
"The Underground Railroad (UGRR) has captured the imagination of the country, and stories of its use have been published and repeated in countless books and songs
Source: Virginia Pilot
February 24, 2011
Sixty-six years ago Wednesday, Hershel "Woody" Williams was face down in the black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima when he heard the cheers.
He and thousands of other Marines and Navy corpsmen were trying to break through Japanese defenses on the South Pacific island during what became one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.
"The Marines around me started yelling and screaming and firing their weapons in the air and jumping up and down," Williams rec
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 24, 2011
MI5 and the police were concerned that associates of the fertiliser bombers were planning attacks 17 months before the July 7 bombings, it has emerged.
The security service had bugged fertiliser bomb plot ringleader Omar Khyam boasting he had four terrorist cells, any of which could carry out an attack, the July 7 inquest heard yesterday.
Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the London bombers, had been seen meeting with up with members of the fertiliser bomb plot on f
Source: CNBC
February 23, 2011
Inflation has led to political revolutions since Medieval times and we may be witnessing the fifth such great revolution in history unfolding in the Middle East and in our own country right now, said Dr. Ed Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist of Yardeni Research.
Yardeni cites the work of historian David Hackett Fischer, who described civilization’s first four major inflation cycles in his 1999 work The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. The fir
Source: BBC
February 23, 2011
Campaigners are celebrating a "major milestone" in the fight to save a London workhouse thought to have inspired the work of Charles Dickens.
The Cleveland Street Workhouse Group (CSWG) wants the 18th Century building in Fitzrovia - earmarked for demolition - to be given listed status.
It claims a positive English Heritage report acknowledges its "historical and architectural" contribution to London.
A government statement said a decisio
Source: BBC
February 23, 2011
A former Serbian chief of police has been jailed for 27 years for his role in the murder of more than 700 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999.
The UN tribunal at The Hague found Vlastimir Djordjevic guilty of five counts of crimes against humanity, including murder and deportation.
His actions had "contributed significantly" to the "campaign of terror" against Kosovans, it ruled.
Djordjevic had said he was not guilty as he had no control
Source: AP
February 23, 2011
The timeline, put together by the National September 11 Memorial & Museum and launched Wednesday, incorporates audio recordings from phone calls on that day, oral histories from survivors and eyewitnesses and graphic photographs and video snippets arranged in chronological order. Viewers can use social media including Facebook and Twitter as well as e-mail to share links to the site and to particular photos and videos.
The timeline starts at 5:45 a.m., with photographs of hijack
Source: CNN
February 23, 2011
Folks in Baltimore, Maryland, could be forgiven for doing a few double-takes at the tall stranger who rode into town Wednesday morning.
A man who looked an awful lot like the guy on the $5 bill arrived by carriage at Camden Station in a re-enactment of a secret transit by President-elect Abraham Lincoln exactly 150 years earlier.
Following his election in November 1860, Lincoln was making his way to Washington for his March 1861 inauguration when he learned of a possibl
