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: The World (PRI/BBC)
Feb 21, 2007
Thirty-five years ago today, President Richard Nixon got off a plane in Beijing, China. That began a new era in US-China relations. The opening for it came with something that's now called ping-pong diplomacy. The World's Mary Kay Magistad has more on how it started. [audio report]...
Source: AP
Feb 21, 2007
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - After 81 years of war paint and feathered headdresses, the University of Illinois' controversial American Indian mascot is performing his last dance.
After that, Chief Illiniwek's image and regalia will continue to be a subject of negotiations.
The mascot, whose fate was decided by school officials last week, will take center stage at Assembly Hall for one last performance Wednesday night during the men's basketball game between Illinois and Michigan.
Source: Courier Mail (Australia)
Feb 21, 2007
The Australian and British governments today will be pitted against each other in a heavyweight court battle over whether scientists can conduct tests on Aboriginal remains.The Australian Government yesterday announced it would seek to join the legal fight to stop researchers at London's Natural History Museum testing the skulls and bones of 17 Tasmanian Aborigines.
It will apply to be part of a court battle beginning late today in the British High Court, when t
Source: LAT
Feb 21, 2007
In the fierce struggles of the 19th century to abolish slavery, Abraham Lincoln remains the mythic American champion. In Britain, however, that honor belongs to William Wilberforce, the Christian activist and member of Parliament who thundered against the slave trade for 20 years. Friday marks the 200th anniversary of his legislative triumph — a campaign rich with lessons for modern-day reformers.When Wilberforce first raised his voice in the House of Commons for the cause o
Source: Charleston Post and Courier
Feb 21, 2007
A group of South Carolina professors and historians are gathering oral histories to preserve a piece of the state's civil rights history. They have been traveling throughout the state to videotape leaders and grass-roots participants in the struggle for civil rights as they recount their experiences growing up and during the movement. Their research and documentaries are being carried out individually and for different projects, but they share a common goal of preserving the
Source: International Herald Tribune
Feb 21, 2007
For nearly a century, a large oval-shape linen tent where George Washington is believed to have slept during the Revolutionary War sat on display in Valley Forge, Pa., with a gaping hole in its roof. But now a combination of luck and forensic detective work has led to the discovery of the missing section of fabric — snipped out, historians believe, by a memorabilia seeker — and to the discovery that the tent was originally striped blue and white."It is the missing piece
Source: Independent (UK)
Feb 21, 2007
The hitherto unknown 8mm colour film of JFK's last motorcade, donated to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, does not cover the assassination itself. Instead its centrepiece is a radiant Jacqueline Kennedy, waving to the crowds lining the downtown pavement, a few blocks from Dealey Plaza where her husband John was assasinated.The sky is cloudless, Dallas' skyscrapers are bedecked with the national flag, and excited bystanders wave at the camera as they wait for the Kennedys. M
Source: Connecticut Post
Feb 21, 2007
Instead of the grim visage of George Washington staring out from the hard metal of the new $1 presidential coins, imagine the face of one-time cooper's apprentice — and Connecticut native — Samuel Huntington. That, according to historian Stanley Klos, is who should have been on the coin that entered circulation last week.Klos, a Florida resident, has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and threatened to file for an injunction to stop the further distribution
Source: AP
Feb 21, 2007
It may be that the world's most famously enigmatic woman has shed some of her mystery. An amateur historian believes he has found the final resting place of the Florentine Renaissance woman who inspired Leonardo da Vinci's most renowned painting: the Mona Lisa.Giuseppe Pallanti, a high school economics teacher from Florence who has written a book about the Mona Lisa, has unearthed a death certificate that shows the woman believed by some to have inspired the artist, Li
Source: New York Times
Feb 21, 2007
When half a dozen students in Neil Waters’s Japanese history class at Middlebury College asserted on exams that the Jesuits supported the Shimabara Rebellion in 17th-century Japan, he knew something was wrong. The Jesuits were in “no position to aid a revolution,” he said; the few of them in Japan were in hiding.
He figured out the problem soon enough. The obscure, though incorrect, information was from Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia, and the students had picked it
Source: Washington Post
Feb 21, 2007
In a chandeliered room at the Justice Department, the longtime head of the counterespionage section, the chief of the public integrity unit, a deputy assistant attorney general, some trial lawyers and a few FBI agents all looked down at their pant legs and socks.
While waving his own leg in the air in illustration, Paul Brachfeld, inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration, asked the group rhetorically if "something white" could be easily mistake
Source: Boston Globe
Feb 20, 2007
There is no reason to be nostalgic about the Cold War nightmare of a thermonuclear Armageddon, superpower proxy wars across the Third World, the Soviet gulag, the censorship imposed throughout the communist bloc, or the opportunistic witch-hunting of the McCarthy period in America. Yet there is something quaint about the revelation that the CIA had Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago" surreptitiously published in Russian to boost his chances of winning the 1958 Nobel Prize in liter
Source: Daily Princetonian
Feb 20, 2007
The Princeton Battlefield has been a place of quiet contemplation for more than two centuries, where scholars and aspiring history buffs can walk on the hallowed ground of one of the nation's most pivotal battles. Yet a new struggle has emerged on this land in recent years, not between the redcoats and the rebels, but between an academic institution and a local preservation society.
At stake is a parcel of land, roughly 25 acres in size, owned by the Institute of Advanced Study,
Source: http://savannahnow.com
Feb 20, 2007
Made from humble material, Ossabaw Island's three tabby slave cabins now represent a historical and archaeological treasure of immeasurable value.
The 19th-century tabbies are "probably the most-intact examples of their type in North America," said Georgia state archaeologist David Crass. They represent "wonderful archeology that can give voices to those who were voiceless in our history books."
The cabins survived the Civil War, stood through hurric
Source: BBC News
Feb 20, 2007
A sharp freeze could have dealt the killer blow that finished off our evolutionary cousins the Neanderthals, according to a new study.
The ancient humans are thought to have died out in most parts of Europe by about 35,000 years ago.
And now new data from their last known refuge in southern Iberia indicates the final population was probably beaten by a cold spell some 24,000 years ago.
The research is reported by experts from the Gibraltar Museum and Spain.
Source: International Herald Tribune
Feb 20, 2007
MATSUE, Japan -- As snow silently fell on the miniature garden outside, Bon Koizumi sat on the same tatami mat floor where, more than a century before, his great-grandfather had penned some of Japan's best-loved traditional folk tales. It was the perfect image of Japanese repose, except for the sepia-toned photo of Koizumi's ancestor, whose bushy mustache and aquiline nose showed an unmistakably Western face.
His great-grandfather was Lafcadio Hearn, the Irish-Greek author whose wan
Source: Times-Dispatch
Feb 20, 2007
The Museum of the Confederacy will likely drop the word "Confederacy" from its name when it moves its collection to a new home.
"One of our challenges is a gap between the public's perception of who we are and the role we play, and the reality of who we are and the role we play," Waite Rawls, the museum's president and CEO, said yesterday.
"The repositioning we have done over the past 30 years is to be more of a modern education institution and
Source: Press Release -- American Revolution Center
Feb 20, 2007
Today the American Revolution Center announced an extraordinary discovery surrounding the tent or "marquee" which George Washington used as his traveling "oval office" during the American Revolution. During the completion of the marquee's conservation process, a missing piece from the marquee ceiling was miraculously found. This announcement comes two days before the 275th birthday of the nation's first president.
Source: Willie Drye in National Geographic News
Feb 20, 2007
Residents of a 15th-century New World mining colony founded by Christopher Columbus turned to desperate measures in the face of rapidly deteriorating conditions, a new study suggests.
According to researchers from the University of Arizona, the colony of La Isabela's situation was so dire that the miners tried to smelt their own supplies by extracting silver from lead ore they brought with them from Europe.
Archaeologists working at the site—located in what is now the Dominican Republic—in
Source: National Geographic News
Feb 20, 2007
Residents of a 15th-century new world mining colony founded by Christopher Columbus turned to desperate measures in the face of rapidly deteriorating conditions, a new study suggests.
According to researchers from the University of Arizona, the colony of La Isabela's situation was so dire that the miners tried to smelt their own supplies by extracting silver from lead ore they brought with them from Europe.
Archaeologists working at the site—-located in what is now the
