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: AP
Mar 3, 2007
RALEIGH, N.C. -- A shipwreck off the North Carolina coast believed to be that of notorious pirate Blackbeard could be fully excavated in three years, officials working on the project said.
"That's really our target," Steve Claggett, the state archaeologist, said Friday while discussing 10 years of research that has been conducted since the shipwreck was found just off Atlantic Beach.
The ship ran aground in 1718, and some researchers believe it was a French sl
Source: New York Times
Mar 2, 2007
JAMESTOWN, Va. —- At the banks of the James River here, not far from where an archaeological dig has found pottery shards and remains of settlers from 400 years ago, a proud Capt. John Smith faces the waters and the setting sun. A wooden stockade extends near the shoreline — the water has moved inland over the centuries — showing where his frail fort once stood. But Smith stands heroically tall, his bronze cape seeming to ripple in the brisk winter winds. Even the inscription proclaims his impor
Source: http://www.courierlife.net
Mar 2, 2007
Despite all of the commotion made about ridding the name of notorious anti-Semite Austin Corbin from the streets of Manhattan Beach, only about fifty people showed up at Kingsborough Community College Monday night to talk about the future of Corbin Place at a special Community Board 15 hearing.
Still, based on the impassioned speeches that were made, it was almost guaranteed that the man of the hour – Austin Corbin – was smiling from the hereafter, happy with the knowledge that he
Source: Deutsche-Welle
Mar 2, 2007
European Union education ministers have met this week in Heidelberg and discussed the creation of a common European history book. Germany has promoted the idea, but Poland and The Netherlands are skeptical.
At the meeting in Heidelberg, German Minister of Education and Research Annette Schavan said"education is one of Europe's most important resources for power and prosperity."
She also said that education is essential for shaping identity and for social cohesion in Europe. The mini
Source: Baltimore Sun
Mar 2, 2007
Many people know that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's father was from Kenya and his mother from Kansas.
But an intriguing sliver of his family history has received almost no attention until now: It appears that forebears of his white mother owned slaves, according to genealogical research and census records.
The records - which had never been addressed publicly by the Illinois senator or his relatives - were first noted in an ancestry report compiled by
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 2, 2007
From the founding of Howard University in 1866 as a premier college for black scholars until the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, "strong color prejudice" against darker-skinned black students was commonplace at the institution, writes Audrey Elisa Kerr, an associate professor of English at Southern Connecticut State University.
Drawing largely on oral history, Ms. Kerr traces color prejudice -- "or the belief in color prejudice" -- at Howard back to the 1887
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 2, 2007
Yale University has received a “generous gift” from an alumnus — Jeffrey H. Loria, owner of the Florida Marlins baseball team — that will help pay for the construction of a new building for the department of art history.
The university did not disclose the amount of the donation, but said the building would be named the Jeffrey Loria Center for the History of Art. It is part of the university’s Arts Area Plan, a $500-million effort involving renovation and new construction for Yale’
Source: Lee White in the newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Mar 2, 2007
On February 28, 2007, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee
held a hearing on changing the presidential library funding disclosure
process. Sharon K. Fawcett, Assistant Archivist for Presidential
Libraries, testified on behalf of NARA. Also testifying were Celia Viggo
Wexler of Common Cause and Sheila Krumholz of the Center for Responsive
Politics.On March 1, Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) introduced legislation (H.R. 1254)
to require presidential lib
Source: AP
Mar 2, 2007
ATHENS, Greece -- Archaeologists have discovered extensive remains of what is believed to be an ancient marketplace with shops and a religious center at the southern edge of Athens, the Culture Ministry said Friday. The finds, in the coastal neighborhood of Voula, date from the 4th or 5th century B.C.
"It is a very large complex," the ministry said. "It was a site of rich financial and religious activity, which was most probably a marketplace."...
Ar
Source: The Australian
Mar 2, 2007
The Australian Government may join an attempted mediation between Aborigines and a leading British museum over tests on indigenous remains.
London's Natural History Museum has offered to try mediation in the dispute over its plans to conduct DNA and other tests on the remains of 17 Tasmanian Aborigines.
Yesterday, Aboriginal representatives responded to the offer with caution and surprise, while federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough flagged a role for the commo
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 2, 2007
Public access to presidential records came under scrutiny in the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday as a panel of archivists, historians, and lawyers told a subcommittee about threats to access, and lawmakers introduced two bipartisan bills that would reform key aspects of how presidential documents are preserved and controlled.At a hearing of the Subcommittee on Information Policy, Census, and National Archives, witness after witness told lawmakers that public access
Source: AP
Mar 2, 2007
TOKYO -- Anyone who doubts that the Japanese army forced Asian women into sexual slavery in World War II should "face the truth," South Korea's foreign minister said Friday as outrage grew over comments by Japan's prime minister that there was no evidence of the enslavement.
Women's rights activists in the Philippines and a group of lawmakers in South Korea also denounced the remarks by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday that there was no proof that so-called &
Source: Los Angeles Times
Mar 2, 2007
TOKYO —- The sensitive debate over Japan's wartime conduct was reignited Thursday when nationalist lawmakers demanded that the government recant its admission that the Japanese military forced women into sexual slavery, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe agreed there is no evidence that it did.
But Abe also said the government would not revise or reopen debate on its 1993 apology to the victims, in which it acknowledged the Japanese military's role in forcibly recruiting women and holdin
Source: Washington Post
Mar 2, 2007
A bipartisan proposal targeting White House rules on the release of presidential papers would claw back power over public records from the executive branch, advocates of the bill say.
The House measure, introduced yesterday, would overturn President Bush's 2001 executive order. Bush's order "gave current and former presidents and vice presidents broad authority to withhold presidential records or delay their release indefinitely," Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of
Source: Independent
Mar 2, 2007
As a place best known for its cable manufacturing industry, Prescot has been unaccustomed to a role in the cultural life of the nation. But that may be about to change as the town, on the Merseyside-Lancashire border, seeks to capitalise on the little-known fact that a young William Shakespeare sought refuge there in the 1580s and influenced the development of its Elizabethan theatre -- the first built outside of London.
Shakespeare was probably sent from Stratford Grammar School to
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 2, 2007
ROME -- The first known painting by Piero della Francesca, thought to have been lost, has been found in Chile nearly 70 years after it disappeared. Madonna col Bambino, painted in tempera on panel between 1436 and 1439, was last seen in 1940 in the collection of a Florentine count in Italy. It was tracked down to the collection of a lawyer in Santiago by the organisers of an exhibition that opens in Arezzo this month.
Source: Times (of London)
Mar 2, 2007
Under close guard in a military prison in Phnom Penh, a solitary old man awaits trial for one of the 20th century’s worst episodes of mass murder.
A tribunal backed by the United Nations to examine the crimes of the Khmer Rouge is due to get under way later this year after a decade of foot-dragging, political obstruction and prevarication.
Yet with thousands of killers still living freely, including some of the most important figures from the old regime, there is so far
Source: Guardian
Mar 2, 2007
The poet WH Auden repeatedly evaded British intelligence's attempts to find out whether he was involved in the dramatic disappearance of the Cambridge spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean in 1951, according to secret files made public today.
The suspicion was triggered by reports from a Reuters journalist that Burgess had tried to call his friend Auden the day before he left England. Investigators thought Burgess may have been planning to flee to Auden's holiday villa on the island
Source: AP
Mar 2, 2007
THESSALONIKI, Greece -- A 2,200-year-old statue of the goddess Hera has been found in a wall of a city under Mount Olympus, mythical home of Greece's ancient gods, archaeologists announced Thursday.
The headless marble statue was discovered last year during excavations in the ruins of ancient Dion, some 50 miles southwest of Thessaloniki.
Archaeologist Dimitris Pantermalis said the life-sized statue had been used by the early Christian inhabitants of the city of Dion as
Source: Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite, Jr. at their website, Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph
Mar 1, 2007
“In the past decade,” the Yale historian David Blight has recently written, “the neo-Confederate fringe of Civil War enthusiasm . . . has contended that thousands of African Americans, slave and free, willingly joined the Confederate war effort as soldiers and fought for their ‘homeland’ . . . . Slaves’ fidelity to their masters’ cause - - a falsehood constructed to support claims that the war was not about slavery - - has long formed one of the staple arguments in Lost Cause ideology.”
