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: http://www.bizjournals.com
Aug 7, 2007
The planned New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe received a $1 million gift from the Messengers of Healing Winds Foundation.
The gift is the largest ever made in New Mexico by the Santa Fe-based foundation, which focuses on supporting environmental programs, animal dignity and fine arts, education and social service projects in New Mexico, northwest Iowa, South Dakota and southern Florida.
The gift will help build exhibitions at the new 95,000-square-foot New Mexico Hi
Source: Times (UK)
Aug 7, 2007
The future of history as an A level subject is at risk as pupils choose “soft options” such as media studies over traditional academic subjects, the head of an examiners’ body has said.
Katherine Tattersall, of the Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors, gave warning that the subject could disappear from some schools because it was no longer compulsory for pupils over 14.
Ms Tattersall said that history was one of the subjects that was threatened by alternative A
Source: AP
Aug 7, 2007
A year after adding books to its growing entertainment lineup, Starbucks Corp. said Tuesday it will soon begin selling its third pick, a collection of 50 stories in an oral history project compiled on book and CD.
Edited by Peabody Award winner Dave Isay, "Listening Is An Act of Love: A Celebration of American Lives from the StoryCorps Project" will go on sale at Starbucks' more than 6,500 company-operated U.S. stores beginning Nov. 8, the company said.
First-
Source: http://www.24hourmuseum.org.uk
Aug 7, 2007
Archaeologists have discovered a large group of ancient rock art in Perthshire, which they hope will shed more light on the area’s prehistoric inhabitants.
A team working on National Trust for Scotland (NTS) land as part of the Ben Lawers Historic Landscape Project found the previously undiscovered ‘cup-and-ring’ style markings on a hillside overlooking Loch Tay and Kenmore. The carvings could date back to Neolithic times and be up to 5,000 years old.
Source: http://www.irishexaminer.com
Aug 7, 2007
ANTI-M3 motorway protesters yesterday mounted a dawn vigil to defend a heritage site near the historic Hill of Tara.
Protect Tara supporters were triggered by speculation that the authorities were going ahead with plans to dismantle and “preserve as record” the so-called royal temple at Lismullin in Co Meath.
Feelings have run high, with heritage defenders claiming a priceless world treasure would be lost for ever if the motorway scheme goes ahead in its present form.
Source: http://www.thinkspain.com
Aug 7, 2007
Heartless vandals have destroyed cave paintings dating back thousands of years with graffiti.
Fluorescent yellow paint was sprayed over carvings, thought to be around 8,000 years old, inside the Cova de la Clau in Palma de Gandia, last week.
However, they left a 16,000-year-old engraving of a horse in the Cova del Parpalló untouched.
Source: http://www.womensenews.org
Aug 7, 2007
On Aug. 26 U.S. women mark the 87th anniversary of the 19th Amendment giving them the right to vote. By some measures there is plenty to celebrate. Women have turned out to vote at a higher rate than men since the 1980s.
In the 2006 midterm election 2 million more young women voted than in the previous comparable cycle, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, which credits the rise i
Source: AP
Aug 7, 2007
LOUISVILLE, Ky. -- A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that a filly can't be named "Sally Hemings" after Thomas Jefferson's most famous slave and reputed lover.
The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ruled that the Jockey Club can legally bar horse owner Garrett Redmond from naming his 4-year-old horse after Hemings.
Judge Alice Batchelder, writing for the three-judge panel, said Redmond has other options that may be approved by the Jockey Club, whic
Source: WaPo
Aug 7, 2007
Should the government encourage assimilation?
The Bush administration is taking steps to do that. The Task Force on New Americans, created by executive order last year, recently presented initiatives that supporters say will help immigrants "become fully American."
Among the government initiatives is a Web site to direct immigrants to information on benefits, English classes and volunteer work. Another site offers resources for English and citizenship-test tea
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Aug 7, 2007
Adolf Hitler's newly discovered record collection has revealed that he listened in private to the Jewish musicians and Russian composers branded "subhuman" by his regime.
The Nazi dictator's musical tastes have been revealed after nearly 100 of his gramophone discs were found in a dacha outside Moscow.
For the most part, the collection is fairly predictable - dominated by recordings of Wagner, Beethoven and Bruckner. But a sprinkling of Tchaikovsky, Borodin an
Source: NYT
Aug 7, 2007
TIMBUKTU, Mali — Ismaël Diadié Haïdara held a treasure in his slender fingers that has somehow endured through 11 generations — a square of battered leather enclosing a history of the two branches of his family, one side reaching back to the Visigoths in Spain and the other to the ancient origins of the Songhai emperors who ruled this city at its zenith.
"This is our family’s story,” he said, carefully leafing through the unbound pages. “It was written in 1519.”
Th
Source: Las Vegas Sun
Aug 7, 2007
Art historians had known of the Van Gogh drawing, stored at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. But they had always wondered whether it was a copy of a completed painting.
Now, at last, the painting itself has been discovered - concealed under another painting in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Van Gogh Museum said Friday. The work, "Wild Vegetation," painted in June 1889, was discovered in an x-ray of "The Ravine," which Van Gogh painte
Source: Cambridge Evening News
Aug 7, 2007
Historians at Cambridge University have taken seven years to painstakingly extract 320-year-old stories of freak weather, bishops behaving badly and prisoners being held without trial. The 900,000-word eyewitness account of life in Restoration England is taken from a diary which required a specialist code-breaker to decipher and some have claimed rivals Samuel Pepys.The Entring Book diary of Roger Morrice, a Cambridge alumnus and former clergyman, was written in his own 17t
Source: AFP
Aug 7, 2007
A new analysis of the dental fossils
of human ancestors suggests that Asian populations
played a larger role than Africans in colonizing
Europe millions of years ago, said a study released
Monday.
The findings challenge the prevailing"Out of Africa"
theory, which holds that anatomically modern man first
arose from one point in Africa and fanned out to
conquer the globe, and bolsters the notion that Homo
sapiens evolved from different populations in
different parts of the globe.
Source: Live Science
Aug 7, 2007
North Americans have always taken the heat for killing off millions of American bison during the early 1800s. A new study, however, pins the blame on Europeans.Europe's advanced tanning expertise drove the large, iconic mammal to near extinction in the United States, according to a a review of international trade records, diaries and other historical documents conducted by University of Calgary environmental economist M. Scott Taylor.
"The story of the buff
Source: NYT
Aug 7, 2007
For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.
Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers fo
Source: Fox News
Aug 7, 2007
Adolf Hitler, the most notorious champion of Richard Wagner and “racially pure” German music, banished Jewish and Russian musicians from the concert halls of the Third Reich — but apparently listened secretly to their work.New light has been shed on the Nazi leader’s musical tastes by the discovery of what are said to be a hundred of his gramophone records found in the attic of a former Soviet intelligence officer, Lev Besymenski.
“There were classical recording
Source: http://www.asianews.it
Aug 6, 2007
Tens of thousands of elderly survivors, children and dignitaries gathered at the Peace Memorial Park, to remember the more than 250,000 people who ultimately died on the 62nd anniversary of the blast. During the ceremony Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba, singled out the United States for “failing to halt nuclear proliferation”.
In the Peace Memorial Park, close to ground zero of the blast, participants held a minutes silence at 8.05 local time when the B-29 Enola Gay bomber dropped the atomic
Source: LAT
Aug 6, 2007
ATLANTA — Three years ago, when Charles Steele Jr. became president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he worked out of a cramped headquarters without power or light. The embattled civil rights group's funds were scant, and so, too, was it's sense of mission.
Its fortunes have since changed, and the organization that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. co-founded is marking its 50th anniversary today with the opening of a $3-million international headquarters here. The bui
Source: Press Release--Alisa Giardinelli, Swarthmore College
Aug 6, 2007
The Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College is the new home for a rare collection of papers belonging to a central yet largely unknown figure in the effort to win women the right to vote. The papers of Mariana Wright Chapman, the president of the New York State Suffrage Association in the 1890s, had not been available to the public before their arrival at Swarthmore earlier this year.
Among the Chapman Collection are dozens of letters from famous women's rights advo
