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: NYT
Nov 3, 2006
For all his exultation in fleeing slavery to New York on the Underground Railroad, Frederick Douglass recalled how formidable the city soon seemed. “The loneliness overcame me,” he wrote of his first perch upon liberty in 1838, before he blazed into history as the articulator of African-Americans’ determination to shuck slavery. “There I was in the midst of thousands, and yet a perfect stranger,” Douglass recorded of his early glimpse of New Yorkers. “I dared not to unfold to any of them my sad
Source: Discovery Channel
Nov 3, 2006
Leonardo da Vinci may have had an Arab heritage, according to Italian researchers who have isolated and reconstructed the Renaissance master's fingerprint. The fingerprint represents the only biological trace of the Florentine genius, said Luigi Capasso, an anthropologist at Chieti University. "It is actually the first evidence of Leonardo's corporeality," Capasso told Discovery News. Indeed, nothing is left of the painter, engineer, mathematician, philosopher and
Source: Alastair Northedge in The Art newspaper
Nov 2, 2006
[The writer is the professor of Islamic art and architecture at the Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) ]
At the end of August, The Art Newspaper revealed the stunning news that Donny George, president of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in Iraq, had been forced to flee the country in fear of his life and take refuge in Damascus. In recent months, Dr George sealed up the treasures of the National Museum in Baghdad behind concrete walls, as it was too dangerous to le
Source: Washington Times
Nov 2, 2006
[I]n spite of Americans' tendency to zip by them, historical road markers are making a comeback, thanks in part to new state programs that have reinvigorated an old genre.
New, more detailed, markers are filled with tales of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and the organizations behind them want to ensure that their groups get recognized for their contributions to our collective history.
"We want to tell more of the story," says Scott Arno
Source: AP
Nov 2, 2006
Conservators trying to restore a 1,900-year-old statue of Venus have put their heads together with airline maintenance inspectors who usually scrutinize welds and repairs in jet engines for any cracks.
Officials at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University this summer bought the Roman marble statue and its head, which had broken off sometime in the past 170 years.
On Thursday, they enlisted the help of Delta Air Lines inspectors at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Inte
Source: Robert Schmuhl in the CS Monitor
Nov 2, 2006
[Robert Schmuhl is a professor of American studies and journalism at the University of Notre Dame. His collection of essays, "In So Many Words: Arguments and Adventures," has just been published.]
Following the ins and outs of this year's midterm elections can make a voter feel trapped in a time warp.
Parallels to 1994 abound with great frequency: dissatisfaction with one-party control in Washington, anemic approval marks for Congress and the president, naggi
Source: Independent (UK)
Nov 2, 2006
He was the man who helped win the Battle of Britain and whose invention went on to lay the foundations for a host of modern life-saving technologies. Yet more than 30 years after his death, Sir Robert Watson-Watt, the father of radar, is almost forgotten - one of the great unsung heroes of the Second World War.
Now, an international fundraising appeal has been launched to commemorate his achievements. The recently formed Watson-Watt Society wants to raise £50,000 to build a memoria
Source: Times Online (UK)
Nov 2, 2006
The ashes of the child conceived aboard the Titanic by a runaway couple, whose romance inspired the blockbuster film, have been scattered on to the Atlantic.
Yesterday the crew of a new Tamar Class lifeboat off Padstow, Cornwall, scattered the remains of Ellen Walker, who died, aged 92, in October last year.
The tragic story of the love affair between her parents, Henry Morley, 37, a married Worcester shopkeeper, and Katy Phillips, a 19-year-old shop assistant, is tho
Source: Salon
Nov 2, 2006
William Styron, the Pulitzer Prize-winning
author of"The Confessions of Nat Turner" and other novels whose
explorations of the darkest corners of the human mind and experience were
charged by his own near-suicidal demons, died Wednesday. He was 81.
Styron's daughter, Alexandra, said the author died of pneumonia at a
hospital in Martha's Vineyard, Mass. Styron, who had homes in Martha's
Vineyard and Connecticut, had been in failing health for a long time."This is terrible," said Kur
Source: Reuters
Nov 2, 2006
The fictional memoirs of a Nazi SS officer written in
French by an American are in line to win the top French literary prize but
critics are split over whether the novel is a new War and Peace or a piece
of tasteless historical voyeurism."Les Bienveillantes" ("The Kindly Ones") by Jonathan Littell has been
hailed as"the phenomenon of the literary season", selling over 200,000
copies and attracting the kind of reviews that most writers can only dream
of.
Littell, 39, has been comp
Source: Peoples Daily Online
Nov 2, 2006
Chinese archaeologists said underground passages in the ruins of an
ancient Chinese capital near Xi'an might have been dug during complex
power struggles in the Han Dynasty 2,200 years ago."The underground passages are the first ever discovered in the ruins of an
ancient Chinese capital," said Liu Qingzhu, a researcher with the Chinese
Institute of Archaeology in the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).
"The tunnels were mostly discovered under the palaces where the royal
women
Source: Perspectives, the newsmagazine of the AHA
Nov 1, 2006
The American Historical Association instituted the Theodore Roosevelt-Woodrow Wilson Award in 2003 to honor a person not in academe—a public official or civil servant, for instance—who has made extraordinary contributions to the study, teaching, and understanding of history. At its 121st meeting, the Association will confer the award upon John Lewis, the congressional representative for the 5th District in Georgia. In honoring Representative Lewis, the AHA is recognizing in particular his unstin
Source: NYT
Nov 1, 2006
WHEN Joan Hotson turned 65, she says, each of her five daughters began angling to inherit The Book.
They knew it wasn’t going to happen any time soon, but they were quite determined,” Ms. Hotson said. The object of their interest was a long out-of-print cookbook, “Pillsbury’s Best 1000 Recipes: Best of the Bake-Off Collection,” published in 1959. Ms. Hotson received her copy, including recipes for Chocolate Pixie Cookies and Orange Kiss-Me Cake, as a wedding present in 1962.
Source: AP
Nov 1, 2006
The Stardust, the neon-wrapped casino with a mobbed-up past whose 1,065 rooms once set the standard for size on the Las Vegas Strip, witnessed its last roll of the dice Wednesday.
Wistful longtime employees and loyal gamblers gathered for a last farewell to the iconic 48-year-old institution, which is to be razed early next year to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s planned $4 billion Echelon Place resort.
Source: Hartford Courant
Nov 1, 2006
Researching the travels of the French army through Connecticut during the American Revolution, historian Mary M. Donohue assumed that, in all likelihood, any physical evidence of the exact route was exceedingly scarce, if not lost to the ages. Likewise, finding tangible evidence of the campsites and taverns where soldiers and officers spent their nights seemed unlikely.
"I think there was some feeling on our part that, well, a lot has happened in 225 years; `I can't imagine we
Source: NYT
Nov 1, 2006
Harry Houdini is still dead and still not talking. Efforts to reach him yesterday failed.
The expectations were not terribly high at an annual séance held on Halloween, the day on which Houdini died in 1926. Teller, the quieter half of Penn and Teller, showed up, saying, “I’d be stunned if Houdini showed up, and so would he.”
So the question was whether Houdini — the master escape artist, the man who could slip out of handcuffs and arise from tomblike burials — would es
Source: Times Online (UK)
Nov 1, 2006
FIRST Bombay became Mumbai. Then Madras switched to Chennai and Calcutta to Kolkata. Now Bangalore, India’s call-centre capital, is changing its name to Bengaluru, in the latest move to shed the linguistic legacies of colonial rule.
The change is stirring unusual controversy among business leaders, who argue that Bangalore is a respected international brand and that tampering with it is a waste of time and money.
An additional dispute has erupted over whether its pre-
Source: Independent (UK)
Nov 1, 2006
The descendants of Benito Mussolini, Italy's dictator for 20 disastrous years, were locked in tense meetings yesterday as a new argument broke over the fate of Il Duce's remains.
The family were said to be bitterly divided over whether the body should remain in the family tomb in the Adriatic Sea town of Predappio, or moved to a grander location in Rome.
The row came less than two months after an unrelated argument pitted members of the clan against each other over whe
Source: Guardian
Nov 1, 2006
John Reid yesterday invoked the memory of Barnes Wallis, the inventor of the Dambusters' raid "bouncing bomb", and Alan Turing, the Enigma codebreaker, in appealing to British industry to encourage technical innovation in the "war against terror".
The home secretary, speaking at the launch of new anti-terror search technology, described "the struggle against Islamist terrorism" as a constant fight to stay one step ahead and compared it to the technolog
Source: NYT
Nov 1, 2006
The New-York Historical Society wants to begin a $20 million renovation of its landmark building at 170 Central Park West that would also allow a developer to build a 23-story glass apartment tower behind the society’s museum and library, altering the skyline.
The society has approached the Landmarks Preservation Commission, which must approve changes to the exterior of the society’s austere neoclassical palazzo between 76th and 77th Streets, across from the American Museum of Natur
