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: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 30, 2009
Using his video blog on the Kremlin website to wade into a debate that still divides Russia more than half a century after Stalin's death, Mr Medvedev said it was wrong to be an apologist for someone who had destroyed their own people and sent millions of innocents to die in the gulag or be shot.
"Even now you can hear people say that what happened to the many victims was justified by certain higher government aims," said a sombre-faced Mr Medvedev.
"[Bu
Source: Time
Oct 30, 2009
Nelson Mandela was still in jail when the first street was named after him. By the time he retired as President of South Africa, hundreds of streets, squares and schools bore his name, as did many more pop songs, books and movies. Not hard to understand. After all, Mandela, who endured 27 years of incarceration under apartheid only to emerge with forgiveness for his racist jailers and become an icon to the world, is an inspiring figure. But what about unauthorized books that bear Mandela's name?
Source: WSJ
Oct 30, 2009
Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader known for his steamrolling straight-talk, strutted into a modern art show at one of Moscow's famous exhibition halls in 1962 and explained, without mincing words, that the avant-garde art on display looked like dog droppings. "Why do you disfigure the faces of the Soviet people?" the excitable Khrushchev cried, rebuking the artists for their abstractions. He hurled a particularly offensive epithet at sculptor Ernst Neizvestny, who responded -- in a
Source: LA Times
Oct 30, 2009
Reporting from Tokyo and Seoul - Several politicians in South Korea and Japan have begun exploring the possibility of a joint history textbook between their nations and China. But given the lingering differences over issues ranging from past wars to current territorial claims, the proposal faces numerous hurdles.
Members of South Korea's ruling Grand National Party met informally in Seoul this month with counterparts from the majority Democratic Party of Japan. One of the main topi
Source: WSJ
Oct 30, 2009
YORK, Pa. -- Forty years after race riots erupted on its streets, this city in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania is about to elect its first African-American mayor.
Both the Democrat and Republican candidates are African-American, with Democrat Kim Bracey, York's former director of community development and a relative newcomer to politics, the favorite to win in a city where Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by nearly 2 to 1.
Republican Wendell Banks failed
Source: BBC History Magazine
Oct 30, 2009
We asked a panel of BBC magazine readers when they thought the past became history – and the results are in.
The very recent past should be considered history. That’s the result of a BBC History Magazine survey, which found that the majority of respondents believe the cut-off between current affairs and history occurred no more than ten years ago. Close to a third insisted that even a second before the present counts as history.
We commissioned this poll to coincide wit
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 30, 2009
The memoirs of the last SS adjutant to Adolf Hitler are to be published in a move historians say could cast away the last shred of doubt over his personal involvement in the Holocaust.
Fritz Darges died at the weekend aged 96 with instructions for his manuscript about his time spent at the side of the Führer to be published once he was gone.
Darges was the last surviving member of Hitler's inner circle and was present for all major conferences, social engagements and
Source: West Central Tribune (MN)
Oct 29, 2009
Union soldiers and Dakota warriors who clashed in a violent conflict 147 years ago may be remembered on the western Minnesota prairie where they gave their lives, and where the bodies of some still lie.
Gene Flaten, representing the Wood Lake Battlefield Preservation Association, told the Yellow Medicine County Board of Commissioners on Tuesday that the group is hopeful of seeing the site of the Sept. 23, 1862, Battle of Wood Lake designated as a national historic site within a year
Source: Newsweek
Oct 29, 2009
YouTube has built a global reputation as the place to go for video clips of singing cats, laughing babies, reckless drivers, and raucous wedding processionals. But there's more to the site than pointless entertainment; there is a growing collection of university lectures available, including one by a Harvard Business School professor talking about consumer psychology in the recession, and Cambridge University historian David Starkey discussing the history of the British monarchy. Earlier this ye
Source: AP
Oct 29, 2009
Swiss historian Jean-Francois Bergier, who led a highly critical probe of Switzerland's conduct during World War II, has died. He was 77.
Bergier received wide renown for leading an international panel in a major study that in 2001 concluded Switzerland "got involved in (Nazi) crimes by abandoning refugees to their persecutors" even though the Swiss government knew by 1942 of the Nazis' "final solution" and that rejected refugees would likely face deportation and
Source: Salon/Lost in Berlin
Oct 29, 2009
THE TERM “SEXUAL REVOLUTION” has become such a cliché in recent decades that it is hard to imagine that it ever had a tangible meaning. And yet, the transformation of global sexual mores that picked up steam in the 1960s really did transform society in ways we are still trying to understand. But how did it get started? Despite the theoretical writings of Sigmund Freud and the prophets of free love, this social and cultural earthquake frequently had humble beginnings. In Central Europe, for examp
Source: The Local (Sweden)
Oct 29, 2009
Swedish archaeologists are marveling over a collection of 9,000 year old artifacts recently uncovered at an excavation site central Sweden.
Parts of a bow, a paddle, and the wooden shaft of an axe are among the discoveries recently unearthed from the Stone Age settlement Kanaljorden outside of Motala, according to local media reports.
“Totally unbelievable,” project leader Fredrik Hallgren with the Stiftelsen Kulturmiljövård Mälardalen (‘Cultural Preservation Society of Mälar
Source: Live Science
Oct 29, 2009
Big orange veggies are pretty strange as far as holiday symbols go, but there are actual historical reasons that we carve pumpkins every Halloween.
Like Halloween itself, the display and carving of pumpkins – from the lanterns placed inside to the scary faces we pick – has pagan origins that morphed with the passage of time as well as the crossing of an ocean.
The modern traditions of Halloween have roots in a Celtic holiday called Samhain, which was celebrated througho
Source: BBC
Oct 29, 2009
Few wounds heal more slowly than those inflicted by a civil war. Dan Collyns reports from Peru where people are still struggling for reconciliation nearly a decade after the killing ended.
It was too late for the vet to save Tino and Zorrita. The Labradors died from poison which had been left on the doorstep of their owner's home in a middle-class Lima suburb.
Then came the telephone calls. "What we did to your dogs. We are going to do to you," said the deep-v
Source: The Daily Beast
Oct 29, 2009
More Bush-era torture documents could be forthcoming, if the Obama administration delivers on its promise to review more than 200 internal Bush documents, including a top-secret Defense memo outlining torture methods that authorities allegedly misplaced. The documents in question are part of a longstanding ACLU Freedom of Information Act request pertaining to the death, treatment, and rendition of detainees. The Bush administration had originally dismissed the now-scrutinized documents as irrele
Source: NYT
Oct 29, 2009
The Obama administration gave the green light this afternoon for construction to begin on the National Mall for a long-delayed memorial to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
At a ceremony on the future site of the memorial across the Tidal Basin from the Jefferson Memorial, Ken Salazar, the Interior secretary, signed the construction permits, along with Harry E. Johnson, the memorial project’s chief executive.
“It is time to honor Martin Luther King Jr. right here
Source: Newsweek
Oct 29, 2009
Thanks to recent discoveries that they were canny hunters, clever toolmakers, and probably endowed with the gift of language, Neanderthals have overcome some of the nastier calumnies hurled at them, especially that they were the "dumb brutes of the North," as evolutionary ecologist Clive Finlayson describes their popular image. But they have never managed to shake the charge that their extinction 30,000 years ago, when our subspecies of Homo sapiens replaced them in their European home
Source: CNSNews.com
Oct 29, 2009
President Barack Obama brought back Bush-era military trials for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay on Wednesday by signing new rules into law that will give detainees stronger legal rights in court.
Obama approved the new rules -- most of which he proposed in May -- as part of a $680 billion defense policy bill that cut some pricey and overlapping military weapons programs.
Source: boston.com
Oct 29, 2009
PROVIDENCE - Rhode Island residents will vote next year whether to shorten the state’s longest-in-the-nation formal name because of its association with slavery, state lawmakers decided yesterday.
Officially, Rhode Island is called “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations,’’ which some say conjures painful images of slavery in a state whose captains once grew wealthy off the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Critics of the move to shorten the state’s formal moniker argue the
Source: boston.com
Oct 29, 2009
Terry Greene of Cambridge had just dropped her son at school when she heard on the radio that a second tower at the World Trade Center had been hit by an airliner. At that moment, on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Greene knew that the tragedy in New York was no accident.
A short time later, Greene heard that United Flight 93 had crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa. “My first reaction was, ‘Good, it didn’t hit another target,’ ’’ Greene recalled.
But Greene’s world soo
