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.coloradoan.com
May 23, 2007
A U.S. Department of Education report card says high school seniors are faring better in history than in past years, but the change is yet to be evident among freshman at Colorado State University....
At CSU, professors say first- year students do seem to show greater interest in history and current events, but their writ-ing and analytic skills are declining.
“What I’m hearing from faculty is there’s not any broad sense that students are coming to CSU better prepared,”
Source: Der Spiegel
May 23, 2007
Gentleman warrior, military genius. The legend of Erwin Rommel, the German Field Marshal who outfoxed the British in North Africa, lives on. But a new TV documentary seeks to correct that image by arguing that his victories nearly brought the Holocaust to the Middle East.If Erwin Rommel, lauded as a master military tactician even by his enemies, had managed to fight his way through North Africa, he would have sealed the fate of thousands of Jews who had fled to Palestine fro
Source: IHT
May 23, 2007
Five years after the discovery of two wooden trunks containing letters and other writings by U.S. General Robert E. Lee, the Virginia Historical Society is making most of the materials available to researchers.Mary Custis Lee, the unofficial family archivist, stowed the trunks at the bank because she had an account there, said Lee Shepard, the Virginia Historical Society's director of manuscripts and archives. She died in 1918, and the trunks were not rediscovered by family
Source: New York Observer
May 23, 2007
“I seem to be the last man standing here,” said Jeff Roth. Dressed in a sharp gray suit with a white handkerchief peeking from the pocket, Mr. Roth was 24 feet below sidewalk level, in the depths of the New York Times Building at 229 West 43rd Street.
Mr. Roth, a group-three clerk for The Times, is the keeper of the paper’s morgue, the files of millions of clippings that served as the institutional memory for a century. “There were probably 50 guys like me at one time, who knew wher
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 23, 2007
Last week Baylor University posted on its Web site the eight-minute video that accompanied its apparently unsuccessful proposal to house the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
Among many other things, the video features Orel Hershiser, the star baseball pitcher, suggesting that a Little League field be included within the library complex. Mr. Bush was a part owner of the Texas Rangers baseball team in the years before he sought elective office. The video was sent to the
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 23, 2007
Term-paper and essay-writing services join prostitutes, firearms dealers, and hacking sites in Google's forbidden-advertising zone, the company announced on Tuesday.
Academic paper-writing services, or "paper mills," will no longer be able to buy search terms in the Google AdWords program, and thus their ads will no longer pop up in the "sponsored links" sections of a Google search-results page. (Links to those sites could still be found among the results on the
Source: NYT
May 23, 2007
Three days after a police raid touched off a violent confrontation between the Lebanese Army and a militant Palestinian group, Fatah al Islam, the first clear look inside the camp on Tuesday presented stark reminders of Lebanon’s bloody past.
And ominous warnings from Palestinian groups in other camps as well as a suicide bombing in an apartment in Tripoli raised fears that the conflict could spread to other parts of the country and destabilize the already shaky government of Prime
Source: http://english.donga.com
May 23, 2007
Prestigious universities located in Seoul and its adjacent areas such as Korea University and Yonsei University have decided to require applicants to take an exam on national history as a mandatory subject on their college entrance examinations. This will start in 2010 when current first-year high school students are entering into college.
Since only Seoul National University has required applicants to take a history exam, there have been a few students who chose history among other
Source: Wired
May 22, 2007
It doesn't have a name yet, but when it's completed in 2011, the 2,001-foot-tall concrete-and-steel tower in the Sumida River region of Tokyo will be the tallest free-standing antenna in the world. Ostensibly, its purpose is to host all of the city's digital radio and television signals, plus a mobile TV network. But the massive transmitter will also broadcast Japan's global cultural significance.
It's no coincidence that the new structure resembles the old 1,092-foot-high Tokyo Tower, wh
Source: http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com
May 22, 2007
For a 143-year-old piece of paper, a letter written by Ulysses S. Grant recently unearthed at the Brown County Historical Society's library is in pretty good shape.
"You can still see the ink quite clearly," said Wendy Barszcz, executive director of the society. "That's good for a document of this age."
The communiqué from Gen. Grant to then-Capt. Melancton Smith came at a crucial junction in the Civil War in City Point, Va., requesting Smith sweep t
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org
May 22, 2007
A team of Texas A&M University researchers will soon be recovering artifacts from a 200-year-old shipwreck that lies more than 4,000 feet beneath the Gulf of Mexico, making it the deepest such recovery effort ever attempted in the gulf.
The $4.8 million project, funded by the Okeanos Gas Gathering Company, will begin today (May 22) says William Bryant, professor of oceanography, and Donny Hamilton, professor of anthropology at Texas A&M. Peter Hitchcock, a doctoral student a
Source: NewsHour (PBS)
May 22, 2007
Congress has approved about $450 billion to date for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but economists also have been tabulating the long-term costs such as veterans' care. JIM LEHRER: Now, what the war in Iraq is costing. Democrats in Congress are still trying to pass a war funding bill the president will sign. That legislation will provide money for military operations, but those funds are only part of the larger price tag. The NewsHour's economics correspondent, Paul Solman,
Source: NYT
May 22, 2007
In the latest round of publishing one-upmanship, the two publishers of rival biographies of Hillary Rodham Clinton have moved up their on-sale dates once again.
Alfred A. Knopf plans to start selling “A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton” by Carl Bernstein on June 5, and, on June 8, Little, Brown & Company will publish “Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” by Jeff Gerth, a former reporter for The New York Times, and Don Van Natta Jr., a T
Source: NYT
May 22, 2007
As Rudolph W. Giuliani runs for president, his image as a chief executive who steered New York through the disaster of Sept. 11 has become a pillar of his campaign. But one former member of his inner circle keeps surfacing to revisit that history in ways that are unflattering to Mr. Giuliani: Jerome M. Hauer, New York City’s first emergency management director.
In recent days, Mr. Hauer has challenged Mr. Giuliani’s recollection that he had little role as mayor in placing the city’s
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 22, 2007
Oxford University Press has suspended sales of a gazetteer published in 2005 after an outcry over errors that was led by historians and government officials in the southern state of Karnataka, the Khaleej Times reports. Among other errors, the book, the Concise Dictionary of World Place Names, says that the local language in Bangalore, Karnataka’s capital, is Bengali. Actually the language is Kannada. Bengali is spoken in Bangladesh and neighboring regions of northeastern India.
The episod
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
May 22, 2007
The University of California appears to have backed down in its dispute with the family of Jacques Derrida, agreeing to drop a lawsuit against his widow and to relinquish its claim to some of the papers of the late French philosopher and literary theorist.
The university filed a motion to dismiss its lawsuit last Friday. An agreement still has to be signed by the Derrida family and approved by the court, according to a university spokeswoman.
Last November the universit
Source: Juan Cole at Informed Comment (blog)
May 22, 2007
Here is a chart of guerrilla attacks in Iraq since 2003 through April 2007. It is from a GAO document on Iraq,"GAO-07-677 Iraq Electricity and Oil," p. 34. The original is in .pdf format here. I think it says it all. Note that all the activity related to the"surge" seems to have gotten the mayhem nearly back down to what it was in . . . July 2006, that veritable paradise of communal harmony.
Source: IHT
May 22, 2007
In a grove of evergreens on the edge an old insane asylum's grounds lie the bodies of 1,000 people who were once called inmates. They died at the Hastings Regional Center from 1888 to 1959, and a small gray stone marks each grave. There are no names, birth dates or death dates. Just patient numbers.
Now, mental-health advocates, historians and others are trying to get U.S. states to make the names public.On Monday, advocates for the release were handed a blow wh
Source: Detroit Free Press
May 22, 2007
God, family and country leap from the pages in the just-released diaries of former President Ronald Reagan, but the cover-to-cover theme in Reagan’s writings from the world stage is his wife, Nancy.The 784-page “The Reagan Diaries,” edited by Douglas Brinkley, made its debut Monday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, a day before the $35 book’s national release. Nancy Reagan placed two of her late husband’s five maroon, leather-bound diaries in a display case.
Source: Hartford Courant
May 22, 2007
A United Nations committee accused Japan of trying to whitewash its past practice of forcing women to become sex slaves for Japanese Imperial army soldiers, and urged Tokyo to help surviving victims.The criticism by the U.N. Committee Against Torture comes after Prime Minister Shinzo Abe set off a furor by saying there was no proof the government forced thousands of women from Asia and elsewhere to work as prostitutes for front-line troops during World War II.
