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: German Press Agency
Feb 1, 2007
A Salzburg publishing house has reissued Leopold
Mozart's legendary treatise on violin playing - 237 years after it was first in print, the Austrian press agency reported on Thursday. Polzer, an art publishing house, published 3,000 linen-bound copies of a revised version of the comprehensive treatise written by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's father around 1756.
A team of musicians and historians carefully adapted Leopold Mozart's 334-page work for the 21st century.
Source: Ken Gonzales-Day, in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, writing about his book.
Feb 1, 2007
The initial research for my book Lynching in the West: 1850-1935 grew out of an interdisciplinary approach in which I sought to pair historical case records with the analysis of photographic and historic images. In addition to tracking down historic photographs, drawings, and prints, I began looking for any kind of official documentation that I could find: an announcement in a newspaper, published leaflets, or first-person narratives which could be confirmed in multiple sources.
In
Source: Radio Praha
Feb 1, 2007
The head of the Czech Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Miloslav Vlk, announced on Wednesday that it was setting up a joint project with the Interior Ministry under which the country's Catholic priests will be screened for evidence of collaboration with the former regime. Historian Petr Blazek, present at the ministry's StB archive during a visit by the cardinal, explains that such collaboration took various forms."Many priests collaborated through different pro-regime or
Source: Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
Feb 1, 2007
Lesley Herrmann says there are a couple of ways to convince teens that school at the new Saturday Academy of American History at Karr High School in Algiers is a good idea.
"It looks very good on your resume," said Herrmann, executive director of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. "Also, it's a perk. The courses are very interesting and entertaining," covering material beyond the regular classroom.
Plus, there are no tests, grades or h
Source: NYT
Feb 1, 2007
The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts has sold a painting by Thomas Eakins to help it buy another.
Yesterday it announced that it had sold “The Cello Player,” an 1896 portrait that it had owned since 1897 (and that until Sunday had been at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of the exhibition “Americans in Paris, 1860-1900”) to raise the money to pay for “The Gross Clinic,” a revered work the academy is buying with the Philadelphia Museum of Art from Thomas Jeffer
Source: NYT
Feb 1, 2007
Salaries for some Smithsonian Institution executives are higher than those for other top federal jobs, including those of the United States president and vice president, according to the institution’s acting inspector general.
The salaries are, however, “generally comparable to those at selected nonprofit organizations,” the acting inspector general, A. Sprightley Ryan, said in a report issued on Tuesday....
Lawrence M. Small, the Smithsonian secretary, earned $884,733
Source: Mark Mardell's Europe Diary at the website of the BBC
Feb 1, 2007
There are too many freshly-cut flowers lying next to pictures of teenage boys in Kosovo.
On a hillside surrounded by snow-capped mountains, I am looking at the graves of those who died fighting for the Kosovo Liberation Army. A portrait of a young man in uniform is etched into the shiny marble head stone of each one, an Albanian flag flutters above every grave. The last person who lies here was killed only six years ago, the oldest grave is just 11 years old...
It was t
Source: New York Times
Feb 1, 2007
A federal judge abruptly adjourned a hearing yesterday on the settlement of a dispute over unpaid life insurance policies of Holocaust victims after a Miami lawyer and a survivor of a Nazi concentration camp raised objections.
Judge George B. Daniels of Federal District Court in Manhattan gave no explanation for ending the session that he had convened to determine the fairness of a settlement in which an Italian insurance company agreed to provide several million dollars to Holocaus
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Feb 1, 2007
The General Assembly would express "profound regret" for Virginia's role in slavery and for "historic wrongs visited upon native peoples" in the latest version of a proposed apology that cleared a House panel yesterday...
The committee accepted a substitute...which calls for the assembly to express "its profound regret for the commonwealth's role in sanctioning the immoral institution of human slavery, in the historic wrongs visited upon native peoples, and
Source: AP
Feb 1, 2007
Large steel columns from the fallen twin towers have been found beneath a service road being excavated at ground zero in the search for long-buried Sept. 11 remains, officials said Wednesday.
The surprising discovery of World Trade Center steel in the past week raises more questions about what was left at ground zero in the cleanup after the 2001 attacks and how the service road was created in the first place.
The steel, found during a dig for human remains that has yie
Source: Times (of London)
Feb 1, 2007
BEIJING -- China has accused Taiwan of trying to promote independence by rewriting its history textbooks.
The revised books for secondary school students will cease to refer to the mainland, or “our country” or “this country” and substitute the word China, emphasising the view that the island is not a part of China.
Yang Yi, the spokesman for China’s policymaking Taiwan Affairs Office, accused Taipei of playing tricks and insisted that Taiwan remained an inseparable par
Source: AFP
Feb 1, 2007
PARIS -- France has submitted 14 citadels and fortifications built by Marshal Vauban, the 17th-century military engineer, for a place on Unesco’s list of World Heritage sites [to mark the tricentenary of his death]...
The 14 sites include the French port city of Saint-Malo and its fortifications, left; a royal fort on the Brittany island of Belle Île, renovated by Vauban in 1689; the citadel in the eastern town of Besançon; and a mountain fort in southeastern Briançon.
Source: Telegraph
Feb 1, 2007
CAPE COAST, Ghana -- Under the battlements ringing Cape Coast Castle, Britain's former colonial seat in Ghana, a guide showed two dozen schoolgirls the underground passage linking the slave dungeons to the Door of No Return.
Until Britain led the world in outlawing the transatlantic slave trade 200 years ago next month, countless Africans shuffled through here to cramped ships waiting beyond the pounding surf.
But hundreds of Ghanaian girls the same age as those on thei
Source: Telegraph
Feb 1, 2007
A portrait of Adolf Hitler's foreign minister will remain hanging in the German embassy in London, the Berlin government has insisted.
It is defying calls to take down the picture, seen by critics to be "honouring a Nazi".
The Left party in Germany has campaigned for the removal of the oil painting of the convicted war criminal Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath, but the government rejected its motion in the Bundestag.
It said that the painting was a
Source: Washington Post
Feb 1, 2007
QATIF, Saudi Arabia -- Fawzia al-Hani dropped her black veil over her face and wept softly on Sunday, enveloping herself in the sadness of the last days of Imam Hussein, grandson of the prophet Muhammad and Shiite Islam's most tragic and revered martyr.
The women in the packed community center commemorating Ashura, the anniversary of Hussein's death in A.D. 680, watched on a projection screen as a turbaned cleric described how Hussein set out with a small band of family and follower
Source: http://www.travelandleisure.com
Feb 1, 2007
Last summer, the Iraqi State Board of Antiquities & Heritage in Baghdad invited me to be among the first foreign reporters since Saddam’s day to visit the ruins. About 35 Iraqi archaeologists were at work, backed up by 180 Archaeological Police officers. Most of the site, about 2,000 acres, is surrounded by barbed wire. American forces were there for four months during and after the 2003 invasion, and the directorate is still angry about their alleged treatment of the site. The soldiers pour
Source: People's Daily Online
Jan 31, 2007
A Chinese government official said on Thursday that the evidence for the Nanjing Massacre was "ironclad" in response to reports that a Japanese filmmaker in planning a documentary denying the atrocity.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu said Japan should take a correct and responsible attitude to history issues in order to win true trust from its Asian neighbors and the international community.
Jiang made the remarks when asked to comment on the pl
Source: Chicago Tribune
Jan 31, 2007
JAMESTOWN, Va. -- So this guy is walking toward the parking lot with his wife, big guy with a small camera around his neck, and he's obviously not happy.
"I thought there would be buildings," he says.
The first permanent English settlement in the New World is celebrating, in a responsibly big way, its 400th birthday this year.
To put that in era-perspective: In 1607, Shakespeare's latest hit play, "Antony and Cleopatra" (follow-up to his
Source: AP
Jan 31, 2007
Nero's Golden Palace will partly reopen to visitors next week, offering rare insight into archaeologists' efforts to preserve the first-century imperial residence from decay and humidity.
Visitors will have access to half of the palace, wandering through a maze of underground passageways, officials said Wednesday. They can also climb a 43-foot scaffolding and take a close look at the building's frescoed vaulted ceilings, as restorers and archaeologists work to clean the paint...
Source: WaPo
Jan 31, 2007
Deep in the Pomeranian forest, hidden among the groves of scraggly pine and birch, the World War II bomb squad is hard at work.
The flatlands of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, a sparsely populated state that covers northeastern Germany, are still littered with thousands of tons of unexploded ordnance from the Nazi era. There are cluster bombs, mortar shells, hand grenades, rockets. Most were manufactured and abandoned by the Third Reich, but there are also plenty of aging but still
