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: Chicago Tribune
Sep 28, 2006
The Chicago Historical Society's new name, the Chicago History Museum, may do little to bring in new visitors. But the lowrider in the lobby? That might turn a few heads. The blue, custom-built 1978 Monte Carlo embodies the museum's idea of today's Chicago: modern, lively and multicultural. And if the lowrider's juiced-up hydraulics, swiveling driver's seat and fuzzy dice don't accomplish getting visitors' attentions, the inscription on the car's hood should do the job.
Source: Indianapolis Star
Sep 28, 2006
Silas Simmons was handed a photograph and asked if he recognized anyone in it. He fixed his eyes on the sepia image and moved his curled fingers over the glass and frame, soaking in the faces for more than 20 silent seconds.
It was a picture of the 1913 Homestead Grays, a primordial Pittsburgh-area baseball team that played before the Negro leagues were even born. His mind, Simmons said, needed time to connect the faces to positions to names. He was entitled to the delay; next month
Source: Guardian
Sep 28, 2006
The compass which helped to create the legend of Lawrence of Arabia, steering him across the desert on a camel during the Arab revolt against the Turks in 1916-18, was sold yesterday for £264,000 [about US$500,000], together with a cheap watch and an inscribed cigarette case.
The startling price at the Christie's auction - paid by an anonymous telephone bidder, vastly over a top pre-sale estimate of £16,000 - was testament to the world's enduring fascination with a slight, awkward
Source: PhysOrg.com
Sep 27, 2006
A team of researchers that includes scholars from the University of Massachusetts Amherst is using computerized analysis of the writing of William Shakespeare to dispel lingering doubts about his authorship of many works and to trace the outlines of his total body of compositions.
Using a method called computational stylistics, the researchers count the frequency of common words, and rare words, to detect Shakespeare’s writing style, producing his distinct and unmistakable “literar
Source: Reuters
Sep 27, 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - Women are to be recognized for the first time as
descendants of Confucius in a new family tree of the ancient Chinese
philosopher, Xinhua news agency said on Wednesday.
"We have to adapt to the times," it quoted Kong Dehong, a descendant
heading the fifth update of the family tree, as saying, adding that more
than 1 million descendants of Confucius will be added.
"Men and women are equal now. Even if a woman has to leave the family when
she gets married to live w
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Sep 27, 2006
His promise to the party faithful that he would 'always' be with them earned Tony Blair a seven-minute standing ovation.
But the Labour conference may have been slightly less overawed if they had realised that the Prime Minister had based the finale to his farewell speech on the words of a fugitive double murderer.
Mr Blair has confided to friends that he drew inspiration for his big sign-off from a favourite passage of John Steinbeck's 1939 classic The Grapes of Wrat
Source: Berkeley Lab Release
Sep 27, 2006
Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Bar-Ilan University have discovered unusually high concentrations of silver in samples of many different types of pottery from excavations in Jerusalem of the late Second Temple period, the first century BCE (Before the Common Era) through 70 CE (Common Era). This is the first study ever conducted on silver in archaeological ceramics.David Adan-Bayewitz, Associate Profess
Source: NYT
Sep 27, 2006
Iva Toguri D’Aquino, the Japanese-American convicted of treason in 1949 for broadcasting propaganda from Japan to United States servicemen in World War II as the seductive but sinister Tokyo Rose, died Tuesday in Chicago. Mrs. D’Aquino, who served more than six years in prison but steadfastly denied disloyalty and received a presidential pardon in 1977, was 90.
Her death, at a Chicago hospital, was confirmed by a nephew, William Toguri, who said only that Mrs. D’Aquino had died of
Source: Wichita Eagle
Sep 27, 2006
George Washington: General. President. Whiskey purveyor? Yep. In his later years, Washington's Mount Vernon estate housed one of fledgling America's largest and most profitable distilleries, capable of producing 11,000 gallons a year at a time when most liquor makers could muster only a few hundred.
"It was a major commercial operation . . . it was as good as any whiskey that was being made," said Dennis Pogue, a historian at Mount Vernon.
Source: Thomas Blanton in a press release issued by the National Security Archive
Sep 27, 2006
In a series of recent public statements, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has again denied that the Clinton administration presented the incoming administration of President George W. Bush with a "comprehensive strategy" against al-Qaeda. Rice's denials were prompted by a September 22 Fox News interview with Bill Clinton in which the former president asserted that he had "left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy" with the incoming Bush administration in January 2001. In a
Source: AP
Sep 27, 2006
Gather 'round, boys and girls, for a titillating Halloween tale: The Petrified Body of Lake Placid.
Mabel Douglass was the first dean of the New Jersey College for Women, which was renamed in her honor back in 1955. But in 1933, she was a retiree who went out in a canoe one day -- and simply disappeared.
Thirty years later, on a shelf about 90 feet down in the lake, her perfectly preserved body was discovered by divers. Her petrified remains were finally interred in Bro
Source: Guardian
Sep 27, 2006
Argentinian school children are to be treated to a revised version of history with a new secondary school textbook accusing Britain of illegally "colonising" the Falkland Islands, writes Laura Smith.
According to the new tome, British forces arrived secretly on the islands, took them by force from the Spanish and have refused to discuss the island's sovereignty with Argentina ever since.
The British version of events - that it took formal possession in 1765 af
Source: Yahoo
Sep 27, 2006
MARLBOROUGH, Mass. - A riches-to-rags story could be unfolding in Horatio Alger's hometown. As this Boston suburb gets ready for its 11th annual Horatio Alger Street Fair, town leaders are considering dropping Alger's name from the festival next year because of allegations of pedophilia against the 19th-century children's author.
In the 1860s, Alger quietly resigned as a Unitarian minister at a church on Cape Cod after he was accused of assaulting two boys — an incident that is old
Source: The Independent (London)
Sep 27, 2006
Neanderthal finds are like prehistoric buses. You wait for tens of thousands of years, and then two important revelations come along together. French and Belgian archaeologists have found proof that Neanderthals - mankind's closest relatives - were living in near-tropical conditions, hunting rhinoceros and elephant, close to what is now France's Channel coast 125,000 years ago.
No traces of Neanderthal activity have previously been found in north-west Europe during this period - a 1
Source: The Washington Post
Sep 27, 2006
Pvt. Francis Lupo was buried again yesterday. This time he'll get a headstone of white marble. Soldiers of the Army's Old Guard carried his coffin up a gentle slope and set it down on polished rails above his grave. A chaplain commended his soul to God. Three rifle volleys sounded, and taps floated on the Indian summer breeze.
Then it was over, and the young soldiers of the burial detail marched off. The few dozen people who had come to pay their respects at Arlington National Cemet
Source: Toronto Globe and Mail
Sep 27, 2006
Mona Lisa had recently given birth to a baby, a team of Canadian and French scientists announced Tuesday, so her mysterious smile may have expressed the weary joy of a mother with a newborn.
Using infrared technology that allowed them to see beneath a layer of varnish, the researchers found that Leonardo da Vinci's model had a gauzy layer over her dress they say was typically worn by pregnant women of the time, or mothers who had recently given birth. The filmy robe was called a gu
Source: Reuters
Sep 26, 2006
The 17th century punishment for sex crimes was public
humiliation and 1930s Britons pretended to be drunk so they could get away
with sex on the beach.
Historical attitudes to sex in Britain will be laid bare for all to see
this week in archives which reveal a nation rich in sexual experience and
enthusiasm.
The historical documents, to be given a public outing by the Center for
Archive Studies at Liverpool University, include Britain's first ever sex
survey, conducted 57 years
Source: Guardian
Sep 26, 2006
An intimate pen and ink drawing of Sir Thomas More at home with the family is returning to Britain for the first time since it was given as a present to the humanist scholar Erasmus almost 500 years ago. The inclusion of the Hans Holbein drawing has generated excitement at Tate Britain, which opens its autumn blockbuster, Holbein in England, on Thursday.
It was made in 1526 and became an 8ft by 13ft painting which ended up hanging on the walls of a castle in what is now the Czech R
Source: AP
Sep 26, 2006
LOSTWITHIEL, England (AP) -- Watercolors and sketches attributed to Adolf Hitler sold for twice their estimated price at an auction Tuesday -- but the sale in a tranquil English town was interrupted by a noisy protest by two self-styled ''comedy terrorists.''
The works, reputed to have been created by Hitler as he served in the German military during World War I, sold for $220,000 after security staff removed the gatecrashers -- one of whom dressed as the Nazi leader and shouted ''T
Source: ISI website
Sep 26, 2006
FINDING 1: America's colleges and universities fail to increase knowledge about America's history and institutions, [according to a new study by the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute].
If the survey were administered as an exam in a college course, seniors would fail with an overall average score of 53.2 percent, or F on a traditional grading scale.
Though a university education can cost upwards of $200,000, and college students on average leave campus $19
