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
Jun 27, 2007
Archaeologists are excavating the remains of houses believed to date back 2,000 years after they were uncovered by a ferocious storm. Fife-based charity Scottish Coastal Archaeology and the Problem of Erosion (Scape) is leading a community project at the site on North Uist.
Scape is investigating the suspected Iron Age round houses before they vanish in another powerful storm.
The organisation is also carrying out work at another historic site in Brora.
Vio
Source: NYT
Jun 27, 2007
Citing a harsh report on missteps at the Smithsonian Institution, Senator Dianne Feinstein declared at a hearing on Tuesday that the museum complex should move quickly to replace its ousted top executive rather than take an estimated six months to a year.
“This represents significant jeopardy to the institution,” said Ms. Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee. “I have a hard time understanding why we need this huge search p
Source: http://www.dw-world.de
Jun 27, 2007
Germany's memorial sites at Nazi concentration camps are in dire economic straits. They are calling for more political responsibility to ensure that they can continue to fulfill their educational task.
The Dachau concentration camp memorial site near Munich receives over 800,000 visitors per year. Internationally, it is among the best-known sites commemorating the memory of the millions who perished in the Holocaust in Europe.
But faced with an acute cash crunch, memori
Source: Miami Herald
Jun 27, 2007
The epic drought gripping Lake Okeechobee has opened a mud-spattered window into Florida's prehistoric past.
Since March, falling water levels have exposed 21 archaeological sites -- for now, the locations a secret to the public. Thousands of artifacts have been unearthed, including pieces of pottery, shell pendants, candleholders, arrowheads and fishing weights.
Human bones, too.
Archaeological teams from the state and Palm Beach County are hunting for still mor
Source: http://www.ledger-enquirer.com (Columbus, Ohio)
Jun 27, 2007
When we took it down from the wall, Barbara Romey treated the framed certificate like a delicate work of art. No one at the newspaper knew she was taking it. But because she's a historian, I knew she'd take good care of the Ledger's Pulitzer Prize.
OK, so it was the certificate. The gold Pulitzer medal is tucked away in a vault. That didn't diminish the value of this piece of paper that had been displayed at the newspaper since 1955.
Barbara and I met when her class fro
Source: WaPo
Jun 27, 2007
Justice John Paul Stevens, the third-oldest person ever to sit on the Supreme Court, turned 87 on April 20. If he's still on the court 142 days from now, he'll overtake Roger B. Taney, who died as chief justice in 1864 at the age of 87 years 209 days.
Stevens still has a long way to go if he wants to catch Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who was 90 when he retired from the court in 1932. But he has already started invoking his considerable life experience to buttress his opinions.
Source: AP
Jun 27, 2007
The U.S. State Department gave final approval Wednesday, June 27, 2007, for one of the world's most famous fossils, the 3.2 million-year-old Lucy skeleton unearthed in Ethiopia in 1974, to tour the U.S. on exhibit for the first time. The Smithsonian has objected to the idea, however, because museum experts don't think the fragile remains should travel, so Lucy won't be stopping at the National Natural History Museum, but in other U.S. museums instead.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Jun 27, 2007
Think the idea of "Photoshopping" pictures is new? Photo tampering goes back to at least around 1860, though the methods were far more low-tech than today (but surprisingly convincing). Apparently this image of Abraham Lincoln is a mash-up of Lincoln's head and John Calhoun's body. Hany Farid, a Dartmouth University professor of computer science, lays out several examples of photo tampering through the ages and points to tools to detect a cut-and-paste job. We saw it mentioned on the V
Source: NYT
Jun 27, 2007
By next year, more than half the world’s population, 3.3 billion people, will for the first time live in towns and cities, a number expected to swell to almost 5 billion by 2030, according to a United Nations Population Fund report released today.
The onrush of change will be particularly extraordinary in Africa and Asia, where between 2000 and 2030 “the accumulated urban growth of these two regions during the whole span of history will be duplicated in a single generation,” the rep
Source: NYT
Jun 27, 2007
Even before a United States Congressional panel overwhelmingly passed a resolution on Tuesday urging Japan to apologize for its wartime sex slavery, the Japanese government said it would have no comment.
But the vote of 39 to 2 by the House Committee on Foreign Affairs has set the stage for an adoption by the full House of Representatives next month, at which point Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will face pressure to respond in some way or another.
Already Mr. Abe, who initi
Source: NYT
Jun 27, 2007
A single tooth and some DNA clues appear to have solved the mystery of the lost mummy of Hatshepsut, one of the great queens of ancient Egypt, who reigned in the 15th century B.C.
Archaeologists who conducted the research, to be announced formally today in Cairo, said this was the first mummy of an Egyptian ruler to be found and “positively identified” since King Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened in 1922.
Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities
Source: Australian
Jun 27, 2007
HIGH school students would be able to avoid studying Gallipoli and the Anzacs under the draft Australian history curriculum prepared as a result of last year's history summit.
The draft for high school history, obtained by The Australian, also overlooks the achievements of the Hawke-Keating governments and the economic reforms of the past 25 years.
A four-member committee that includes controversial historian Geoffrey Blainey and social commentator Gerard Henderson will
Source: BBC
Jun 26, 2007
One of the biggest Iron Age roundhouses ever found in Scotland has been uncovered during an archaeological dig near Inverurie in Aberdeenshire.
The 2,000-year-old stone building was found in the Bennachie hills on the site of an earlier Bronze Age fort.
The archaeologists who uncovered it said the size of the building suggested it was inhabited by society's elite.
Source: AP
Jun 26, 2007
The last wishes of a Civil War veteran are being fulfilled almost 80 years after his death, as three nonprofits split a nest egg now worth nearly $10 million.
Authorities had to sort out a complex money trail before awarding the money, some two years after the death of the soldier's last named beneficiary, a grandchild.
"Who would have thought that in 2007, you'd get a gift from a Civil War veteran?" asked Mark Stubis, a spokesman for KidsPeace, the children'
Source: http://www.philly.com
Jun 26, 2007
Amid the kind of steaminess that plagued soldiers on Sept. 11, 1777, federal, state, and local officials reversed history Tuesday, turning the Battle of the Brandywine into an American victory - for preservationists.
On a scenic hillside in Chester County, the Brandywine Conservancy announced the purchase of the 100-acre Skirmish Hill Farm from the Odell family for $8 million last month. The sale completes a two-decade struggle to save this site and others nearby, where some of the
Source: http://www.dailypress.com
Jun 26, 2007
Jamestown Rediscovery archaeologists picked their way through nearly 1,500 cubic feet of soil this past week, exposing parts of the historic English fort that have not been seen since slaves transformed the site into a Confederate earthwork during the Civil War. The newly uncovered landscape includes evidence of several early fort-period features, including postholes and a possible grave shaft. But far more prominent and still growing is a large, artifact-filled boundary ditch that dates to the
Source: http://www.dominicantoday.com
Jun 26, 2007
SANTO DOMINGO.- A journalist and historian said there’s "forceful and irrefutable" proof of the United States Government’s participation in the plot to physically eliminate the dictator Rafael Trujillo.
Víctor Grimaldi, in a 12 page document published in: osersosa.blogspot.com, said to deny the U.S. took part in Trujillo’s death is to “try to block the sun with a finger.”
He said in the first interrogations into the judicial case in June 2, 1961 –which can be
Source: Forbes
Jun 26, 2007
If John Adams had had his way, Independence Day this year would be celebrated on a Monday, providing everyone with a three-day weekend. Instead, this holiday celebrating freedom remains subject to the tyranny of the calendar, which this year dictates that Independence Day falls on Wednesday, July 4.
But July 4 was not, in fact, the date on which the Second Continental Congress voted to dissolve the bonds that connected the 13 colonies to Great Britain. Lots of momentous events have
Source: NYT
Jun 26, 2007
Historians often assume that they need pay no attention to human evolution because the process ground to a halt in the distant past. That assumption is looking less and less secure in light of new findings based on decoding human DNA.
People have continued to evolve since leaving the ancestral homeland in northeastern Africa some 50,000 years ago, both through the random process known as genetic drift and through natural selection. The genome bears many fingerprints in places where
Source: NYT
Jun 26, 2007
Time was, fossils and a few stone artifacts were about the only means scientists had of tracing the lines of early human evolution. And gaps in such material evidence were frustratingly wide....
[Now] new finds have filled in some of the yawning gaps in the fossil record. They have doubled the record’s time span from 3.5 million back almost to 7 million years ago and more than doubled the number of earliest known hominid species. The teeth and bone fragments suggest the form — the m
