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: LiveScience
May 30, 2007
Maybe Pocahontas had a thing for men with superior mapping skills.
Captain John Smith, the famous founder of America's first settlement, at Jamestown, Virginia, traced the Chesapeake Bay river system with remarkable precision from his primitive sailboat, geographers have discovered.
Using a sophisticated "remapping" system that merges old maps with the modern lay of the land, the team from Maryland's Salisbury University found that Smith's 1608 exploratory cha
Source: NewsHour (PBS)
May 30, 2007
In collaboration with the Smithsonian Institute, the Museo Alameda, which opened in San Antonio, Texas, in April, showcases Hispanic influence in American art and music.
Source: Herald Sun (Australia)
May 30, 2007
WOULD-be citizens will have to answer questions about Australia's convict past, Federation, and the nation's wartime exploits.
The Herald Sun has obtained a list of the subjects covered in a new citizenship study guide, The Australian Way of Life.
Every question on the Government's new citizenship test will be drawn from the book.
An Australian history section will look at early settlement of the country, convicts, Aboriginal habitation, Federation and Aus
Source: OneWorld/Yahoo
May 30, 2007
For the first time in recorded history, the majority of the world's population is living in cities.
"It's a wake-up call," said Ron Wimberley, distinguished professor of sociology at North Carolina State University. "It's always been assumed that rural areas will always produce what they're supposed to produce: natural resources, food, fiber, water, air, timber -- the things that are our daily basic needs."
"But if we keep extracting all the goo
Source: Scotsman
May 30, 2007
KEY coastal sites which tell the story of Scotland's ancient past are in danger of being washed away, experts warned yesterday.
Archaeologists said that historic treasures could be lost forever unless action is taken now.
The most endangered sites include Viking and Iron Age remains in Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides - where rare dry-stone brochs and Viking houses are threatened by global warming, rising sea levels, storms and erosion.
Source: NYT
May 30, 2007
As the Bush administration completes secret new rules governing interrogations, a group of experts advising the intelligence agencies are arguing that the harsh techniques used since the 2001 terrorist attacks are outmoded, amateurish and unreliable....
President Bush has insisted that those secret “enhanced” techniques are crucial, and he is far from alone. The notion that turning up pressure and pain on a prisoner will produce valuable intelligence is a staple of popular culture
Source: NYT
May 30, 2007
In what has become an annual rite, British college teachers will debate Wednesday whether they should punish their Israeli colleagues, in solidarity with Palestinians calling for boycotts, and whether it would be anti-Semitic to do so.
The questions reflect some of the deepest and most ambiguous strands in the history of a land that issued the Balfour declaration in 1917, offering “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine in almost the same breath as it promised Arab inde
Source: BBC
May 29, 2007
A student has found the passport used by Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann to enter Argentina in 1950.
The passport was issued by the Red Cross, in the Italian city of Genoa, under the name of Ricardo Klement.
The student found the passport among court documents while investigating Eichmann's capture in 1960 by the Israeli secret service.
He was tried and sentenced to death in Israel in 1962 for his role in mass killings of Jews during World War II.
Source: Buffalo News
May 29, 2007
Harriet Tubman looms large in the story of the Underground Railroad, and New York Power Authority money is likely to make her even more visible in Niagara River communities.
But it might not be in a way Tubman would have recognized.
The state so far has snubbed a proposal to honor the most popular Underground Railroad conductor by revamping a Niagara Falls street near where she moved escaped slaves to freedom.
Meanwhile, state officials have begun to embrace a $250,000 plan downriv
Source: MESA website
May 29, 2007
The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) is gravely concerned by the escalating pattern of harassment and detention of American academic researchers and scholars by the Iranian government, and believes that there are significant risks for researchers who intend to travel to Iran, especially those holding dual Iranian-American citizenship.The Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) was founded in 1966 to promote scholarship and teaching on t
Source: Denver Post Editorial
May 29, 2007
More than two years have passed since the waves of controversy first started lapping at Ward Churchill, the embattled University of Colorado professor. In that same time, other recognizable names tied to CU - Betsy Hoffman, Gary Barnett - have been relegated to history.
Yet Churchill remains.
That's because the ethnic studies professor has been given the appropriate due process - and then some.
It's never been easy to fire a tenured professor, which is good
Source: Reuters
May 29, 2007
In a high-tech age of instant communication, old-fashioned history is enjoying a renaissance in U.S. popular culture.
History tomes crowd best-seller lists. Historical documentaries fill the airwaves. And people pay thousands of dollars to spend whole weekends with noted historians, much the way rock-n-roll or baseball fans attend fantasy camps with their heroes.
"At all levels of American society there is this hunger to understand the past and relate it to the pre
Source: AP
May 29, 2007
A lawyer for Vice President Dick Cheney told the Secret Service in September to eliminate data on who visited Cheney at his official residence, a newly disclosed letter states. The Sept. 13, 2006, letter from Cheney's lawyer says logs for Cheney's residence on the grounds of the Naval Observatory are subject to the Presidential Records Act.
Such a designation prevents the public from learning who visited the vice president.
The Justice Department filed the letter Friday
Source: NYT
May 29, 2007
In the collection of the British Library there are two Gutenberg Bibles, two copies of Magna Carta, five copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio and now something new: your e-mail messages.
Or at least ones like them. Throughout this month the library, in partnership with Microsoft, has been collecting e-mail notes that ordinary Britons and others have sent — 13,807 so far — as a way of capturing a sense of life in the 21st century.
“E-mail is the first major upheaval in wr
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 29, 2007
On Thursday, Robert L. Trivers took a train to Boston to give a talk at Harvard University the next day. Trivers is a prominent evolutionary biologist and anthropologist at Rutgers University and he had been invited to Cambridge in honor of his having won this year’s Crafoord Prize in Biosciences, a top international award that many consider a notch below the Nobel.
Trivers never got to give his talk. He says that hours before he was scheduled to lecture, he was called by an organiz
Source: Inside Higher Ed
May 29, 2007
[Hank Brown, president of the University of Colorado System] formally recommended that [Ward] Churchill, who has tenure as an ethnic studies professor at Boulder, be fired. In a detailed letter to the Board of Regents, Brown said that Churchill’s violations of academic research norms were too serious and too numerous to ignore — regardless of the circumstances that led to all the scrutiny.
Brown emphatically rejected the idea that First Amendment issues were raised because the inqui
Source: Juan Cole at Informed Comment (blog)
May 29, 2007
Guerrillas detonated a huge bomb in front of the shrine of Abdul Qadir al-Gilani (Jilani, Kilani) in central Baghdad on Monday, killing (according to Reuters, above) some 24 persons and wounding 90 according to late reports. The bombing damaged the dome and the base of the minaret of the mosque attached to the shrine.
Shaikh Abdul Qadir al-Gilani (d. 1166 A.D.) was a great mystic who founded the vast Qadiriya Sufi order.
An Ottoman mystic, Shaikh Muzaff
Source: http://www.shippingtimes.co.uk
May 29, 2007
Shocking decision from Scottish council will see the last of two clippers consigned to history.
Glasgow's Evening Times newspaper reported today that the world's oldest clipper, the sv CARRICK, is to be scrapped.
North Ayrshire Council have decided that the ship should be 'deconstructed', despite pleas from Sunderland and Australia as well as voices in Scotland pointing out the historic merits of the Sunderland-built ship.
North Ayrshire Council planning co
Source: Independent (UK)
May 29, 2007
A former Ku Klux Klansman will go on trial tomorrow for the murder of two young black men who were abducted, beaten and dumped into the Mississippi river in 1964.
James Ford Seale, 71, a former crop duster and sheriff's deputy, faces spending the rest of his life in prison if convicted in a trial that civil rights groups hope will be the first prosecution in a wave of rekindled investigations into unsolved race killings from the era.
Seale and fellow Klansmen are allege
Source: BBC
May 29, 2007
The former head of the British Army has said he believes innocent people were shot on Bloody Sunday. General Sir Mike Jackson made the comments in an interview with BBC Northern Ireland's Spotlight programme.
He is among former soldiers who gave their views to mark the end of the Army's role in supporting the police in Northern Ireland.
Sir Mike, who served in NI for seven years, was a captain with the parachute regiment on the day.
He said people must wait
