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: BBC
Sep 29, 2007
More than 100,000 people in Japan have rallied against changes to school books detailing Japanese military involvement in mass suicides during World War II.
The protest, in Okinawa, was against moves to modify and tone down passages that say the army ordered Okinawans to kill themselves rather than surrender.
Okinawa's governor told crowds they could not ignore army involvement.
Some conservatives in Japan have in recent years questioned accounts of the country's
Source: BBC
Sep 29, 2007
Reconstruction work will begin next month on a revered shrine in the Iraqi city of Samarra blown up in the current conflict, UN cultural body Unesco says.
The al-Askari shrine, one of Iraq's most sacred Shia sites, was partly destroyed in two attacks over two years by suspected Sunni militants.
Thousands have died in sectarian violence triggered by the first attack.
Source: AP
Sep 29, 2007
For months, 11 folders of old papers rescued from his parents' closet sat in Thomas Willcox's sport utility vehicle. Then he realized some were signed by Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and might be valuable.
They were: The three letters written by Lee during the Civil War sold at auction Saturday for $61,000.
That was far off the record $630,000 a Lee item sold for in 2002. But it was an improvement from last year, when two letters from the general who surrendered in 18
Source: AP
Sep 29, 2007
LEVITTOWN, N.Y. - In 1951, 7-year-old Louise Cassano couldn't imagine a better life than the one here, where she rode her bicycle past rows of cookie-cutter houses, kids held backyard campouts in makeshift tents and nobody locked their front doors.
"It was an absolute ideal community," said Cassano, whose love affair with Levittown never waned — she still lives in the Long Island town dubbed by some as America's first suburb.
Cassano is among the organizers of
Source: CNN
Sep 29, 2007
With darkness settling over the battlefield and soldiers bedding down for the night, the familiar lyrics rose -- music and voices blending from both Union and Confederate camps.
"'Mid pleasures and palaces though I may roam,
"Be it ever so humble there's no place like home!"
On more than one occasion during the Civil War, those words -- from the prewar hit "Home, Sweet Home" -- brought the two sides together, an impromptu and peacef
Source: Hofstra University--Press Release
Sep 28, 2007
Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY – Attorney Norman E. Kent '71, '75 has established an endowed scholarship named for his friend Allard K. Lowenstein, the late Long Island congressman and champion of civil rights in the 60s and 70s.
The scholarship will be awarded to a qualified upperclassman selected on the basis of financial need, academic achievement and an undergraduate record that demonstrates a history and commitment to advancing the cause of equality and civil rights for all
Source: History Today
Sep 28, 2007
Papers declassified at the [UK] National Archives reveal British and American authorities opposed the harsh Soviet prison regime forced on Nazi deputy Rudolf Hess. Files show Britain argued against attempts to turn Berlin’s Spandau prison, jointly run by the four victorious Allied powers, into a gulag. Cold War tension further escalated in 1974 when Hess, who committed suicide 13 years later, was thought to have cancer. British governor Robert de Burlet stated: "Whatever horrors the Germans
Source: Reuters
Sep 28, 2007
The U.S. government apparently derived no clear benefit by recruiting ex-Nazis as Cold War spies, but potentially huge gaps remain in the public record of U.S. ties to World War Two war criminals, according to a report issued on Friday.
The report to Congress, by an interagency group that examined the United States' use of German and Japanese war criminals during and after the war, also said the CIA had no set policy for hiring former war criminals to spy on postwar foes including t
Source: Spiegel
Sep 28, 2007
The Berlin Wall was built in 1961. A new study shows that West Germany new about the plans before it went up.
It's a well-known fact that East Germany had agents crawling all over West Germany during the Cold War. Up to 6,000 of them, some in high places, were regularly passing information eastwards across the wall.
According to a new study published on Friday, though, when it came to recruiting spooks, the West Germans were even better. Fully 10,000 citizens of Germany's communis
Source: Newsletter of the New York American Revolution Round Table
Sep 28, 2007
This is a call to arms for the NY Round Table and other RT’s around the country as well as to all lovers of American History. The Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, one of the supposedly most venerated scholarly organiza5ions on the globe, is about to obtain permission to building housing on 22 acres of the Princeton Battlefield on which as many as 75% of Washington’s troops fought and died. The IAS is ignoring its own survey report, in which an archaeologist found dozens of musket balls,
Source: Newsletter of the New York American Revolution Round Table
Sep 28, 2007
On June 12, the Common Sense Society of Fort Lee met and elected a slate of officers. Their goal is to erect a statue of Tom Paine in Fort Lee’s Monument Park. They have commissioned sculptor David Frech of New York to create the statue. It will be only the sixth statue of Tom in the world and the fourth in America. For many years, Fort Lee has celebrated the American retreat from Fort Lee in 1776 and the withdrawal across New Jersey as a "retreat to victory." They point to the near mi
Source: Newsletter of the New York American Revolution Round Table
Sep 28, 2007
Using ground penetrating radar, Connecticut’s state archeologist, Nicholas Bellantoni, recently began searching for the mass grave of 46 prisoners of war who had been captured in the fighting in New York in 1776 and shipped back to Connecticut in 1777. They numbered about 200 and were all in various stages of smallpox. The sickest were put into a temporary hospital in Milford’s Town Hall, where 46 died. The rest apparently struggled to get home. Many died enroute. Mr. Bellantoni says sending the
Source: Laray Polk in the Dallas Morning News
Sep 28, 2007
[Laray Polk is an artist and activist who lives in Dallas. Her e-mail address is laraypolk@earthlink.net.]
There is much concern over SB 866, the Presidential Records Act Amendments of 2007. Librarians, historians and archivists from around the country have issued position statements regarding the bill and have worked diligently to keep it moving.
SB 866 would rescind President Bush's Executive Order 13233, an order that ren
Source: AP
Sep 28, 2007
There is a "high degree of probability" that bones found recently near the Russian city of Yekaterinburg are those of a daughter and son of the last czar, an official said Friday, citing preliminary forensic work.
If confirmed, the latest find would fill in a missing chapter in the story of the doomed Romanovs, who were killed after the violent 1917 Bolshevik Revolution ushered in more than 70 years of Communist Party rule.
The bones were found by archaeologis
Source: http://www.nwipp-newspapers.com
Sep 28, 2007
There is strong evidence to suggest that the first kings of Ireland came from Donegal, a leading archaeologist has claimed.
Brian Lacey, Chief Executive of the Discovery Programme, will explore his theory in detail when he speaks at the upcoming Beltany Heritage Conference in Raphoe.
Dr Lacey is one of two leading archaeologists who will speak at the conference.
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Sep 28, 2007
It’s fair to say that Columbia University has heard more than an earful over its decision to offer a speaking platform this week to Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Reaction ranged widely, with many condemning the university for inviting the controversial leader, others praising Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, for sternly rebuking the Iranian president while he looked on, and some doing both. Opinions flowed freely.
On Wednesday, one vehement critic, with a prominent p
Source: NYT
Sep 28, 2007
Patrick Henry and Francis Scott Key are out, but Susan B. Anthony and Nancy Pelosi are in. The White House was cut, but New York and Sept. 11 made the list.
Federal immigration authorities yesterday unveiled 100 new questions immigrants will have to study to pass a civics test to become naturalized American citizens.
The redesign of the test, the first since it was created in 1986 as a standardized examination, follows years of criticism in which conservatives said the
Source: History Today
Sep 27, 2007
A new national heritage police authority in Cambodia is enlisting the help of international security agencies to stop looting at its ancient sites. The Angkor Wat temples were protected by Unesco after years of fighting ended in the 1990s but remote sites have suffered extensive looting. US special agents and Cambodia’s agencies have been meeting to share expertise.
Source: AFP
Sep 27, 2007
Lucky fat ladies, porcelain pigs, ceramic musicians and giant Buddhas are crammed into Hong Kong's antique boutiques, but some experts, backed by Chinese law, say many of them shouldn't be here at all.
By a curious twist of history and geopolitics, Hong Kong has become the legitimate outlet for ill-gotten treasures of Chinese history, a legal market for illegally obtained objets d'art that can and do command huge sums.
On Hollywood Road, Hong Kong's famed strip of art a
Source: http://www.nature.com
Sep 27, 2007
The discovery of an adze fashioned from Hawaiian basalt on a Tuamotu atoll in French Polynesia provides the first material evidence that ancient voyagers made an 8,000-kilometre round trip from the South Pacific to Hawaii and back again.
More than 2,000 years ago, seafarers from Samoa and Tonga ventured eastward to settle on more remote archipelagos in the Pacific Ocean, including the Cook Islands, Tahiti, and the Marquesas Islands, colonizing most of these places by 900 AD. Eventua
