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: Robert J. Samuelson, WaPo
Aug 24, 2006
The origins of today's credit culture date to the 1920s and the advent of installment lending for cars and appliances (stoves, refrigerators, radios), says economist Martha Olney, author of"Buy Now, Pay Later." Attitudes changed. In the 19th century,"it was thought that only irresponsible families bought on credit," she says."By the 1920s, it was only foolish families that didn't buy on credit and use it while they were paying for it." In the mid-1920s, 60 to 70 percent of cars were sold on one-
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Aug 23, 2006
In Black Jack, Mo., (pop. 6,792), the city council wrangled last week over precisely how to define a family. In West Virginia, religious conservatives are getting ready to do battle with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) over the use of a law that aims to bolster marriage by outlawing "lewd and lascivious cohabitation."
In North Carolina, a state judge in July ruled unconstitutional a law that states it's illegal for unmarried couples to live together.
Source: Guardian (London)
Aug 23, 2006
A Chinese court has ordered two Japanese historians to pay damages of 1.6m yuan (£110,000) to a survivor of the Nanjing massacre after they accused her of fabricating her account of the 1937 atrocity.Although the ruling will be impossible to enforce across national boundaries, the defamation lawsuit opens up a new front in a conflict over wartime history that has recently prompted a spate of trials, street demonstrations and a deterioration in relations between Asia's two mo
Source: Ralph Luker (blog)
Aug 23, 2006
An internal investigating committee at the University of Cincinnati has found Don Heinrich Tolzmann guilty of plagiarism in his book, The German-American Experience. After reviewing charges first made three years ago on H-Ethnic, the committee has recommended that Tolzmann be dismissed as a faculty member in the Un
Source: Washington Times
Aug 23, 2006
For tourists and residents who enjoy lolling among the trinkets and treasures of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the building's closure next month for a two-year renovation may be a disappointment.
But curators say history buffs still can enjoy objects which range from "the famous to the unexpected" when officials open a temporary exhibit Nov. 17 at the National Air and Space Museum."The renovations we're doing is mainly goi
Source: CNN
Aug 23, 2006
Skeletons found at an unearthed site in Mexico show Aztecs captured, ritually sacrificed and partially ate several hundred people traveling with invading Spanish forces in 1520.Skulls and bones from the Tecuaque archeological site near Mexico City show about 550 victims had their hearts ripped out by Aztec priests in ritual offerings, and were dismembered or had their bones boiled or scraped clean, experts say.
The findings support accounts of Aztecs capturing a
Source: NYT
Aug 22, 2006
After the 18,000-year-old bones of diminutive people were found on the Indonesian island of Flores, the discoverers announced two years ago that these were remains of a previously unknown species of the ancestral human family. They gave it the name Homo floresiensis.Doubts were raised almost immediately. But only now have opposing scientists from Indonesia, Australia and the United States weighed in with a comprehensive analysis based on their own first-hand exam
Source: Ottawa Citizen
Aug 22, 2006
One of the greatest archeological mysteries in Canadian history — the precise whereabouts of French explorer Jacques Cartier’s 1541 settlement near present-day Quebec City — has been solved after experts matched the shard of a broken plate found at suburban Cap Rouge with an identical, 465-year-old porcelain treasure held by the famed Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The startling discovery of Cartier’s short-lived Fort Charlesbourg-Royal, announced Friday by Quebec Premi
Source: NYT
Aug 22, 2006
“I may be the only person, the only presidential candidate who never carried the state in which he was born,” President Bush said Monday.
Uh, no, Mr. President. There have been quite a few, actually. Some are known only to historians, while others are famous. You might even call one a household name, Mr. President, depending on which household.... Al Gore, for instance. History buffs will remember that he failed to carry Tennessee in 2000. But while Tennessee is
Source: Boston Globe
Aug 22, 2006
Loreta Janeta Velazquez sounded like a mythical figure: a Cuban-born woman raised in New Orleans, where she masqueraded as a male soldier and fought in the Civil War. With a fake mustache, beard, and a soldier's uniform, the Latina enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford , without her husband's knowledge.
``When I heard about Loreta, I was like, ` Why would a Cuban woman join the Confederacy? What is a Velazquez doing in 19th - century America?' "
Source: CNN
Aug 21, 2006
ANNAPOLIS, Maryland (AP) -- A national black Republican group is running a radio advertisement accusing Democrats of starting the Ku Klux Klan and saying the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was a Republican, a claim challenged by civil-rights researchers.
Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the black Republican nominee for Maryland's open Senate seat, disavowed the ad Thursday as "insulting to Marylanders." He said his campaign asked the Washington-based National Black Republican Associa
Source: NYT
Aug 21, 2006
Ten years after a Republican Congress collaborated with a Democratic president to overhaul the nation’s welfare system, the implications are still rippling through policy and politics.
The law, which reversed six decades of social welfare policy and ended the idea of free cash handouts for the poor, was widely seen as a victory for conservative ideas. When it was passed, some opponents offered dire predictions that the law would make things worse for the poor. But the number o
Source: Montreal Gazette
Aug 21, 2006
Doesn't the British government have anything more pressing to attend to? It plans to make the wrong-headed and pointless gesture of giving pardons to 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers executed for desertion or cowardice in the First World War.
The government of Britain has promised to consult Canada, because 23 of those on the list were Canadians. Greg Thompson, our veterans affairs minister, should do the same thing his Liberal predecessor Ron Duhamel did in 2001, the last tim
Source: Australian
Aug 21, 2006
THE states are continuing to claim the Howard Government is bullying them into reinstating traditional history teaching in schools, despite having been officially invited to contribute to last week's history summit in Canberra.
The Australian has learned that federal Education Minister Julie Bishop wrote to all states and territories last month to seek their input to the summit.
''I am very willing to work with the states and territories ... to further strengthen the p
Source: NYT
Aug 21, 2006
Facing a charge of genocide for trying to annihilate Iraq’s Kurdish minority, Saddam Hussein defiantly refused to enter a plea as his second trial began today, and insisted that he was still president of the country.
Mr. Hussein sat stone-faced in a courtroom in the fortified Green Zone of Baghdad, listening as prosecutors gave a detailed account of how Mr. Hussein and six co-defendants embarked on an eight-stage military campaign in 1988 to eliminate the Kurds from swaths of their
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Aug 21, 2006
Retired Chronicle photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won the Pulitzer Prize and international acclaim for his soul-stirring picture of the World War II flag-raising on Iwo Jima, died Sunday in Novato.
Rosenthal, 94, retired from The Chronicle in 1981 after a distinguished 35-year career and many professional honors, but the flag-raising picture was his masterpiece for which he will always be remembered.
The Pulitzer Committee in 1945 described the photo as "depicting
Source: Wa Po
Aug 21, 2006
The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Sec
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Aug 21, 2006
The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has promised to donate 82 works by the English Impressionist painter Walter Sickert to Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, The Art Newspaper reports. The collection, which the British newspaper says is worth millions of dollars, was assembled while Ms. Cornwell was writing a controversial book in which she concludes that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. The book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, was published in 2002.
Source: Middle East Times
Aug 21, 2006
A team of Peruvian and US archaeologists have discovered prehistoric stone tools and weapons some 10,000 years old in an Andean town, the National Institute of Culture announced Friday.
Stone axes, spearheads, and weapons were found in the main square of San Pedro de Chavin de Huantar, an Andean town some 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of Lima, officials said.
"This discovery represents exceptional evidence of the presence of inhabitants in the Pleistocene era,
Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
Aug 21, 2006
In the wake of the new disclosure that Mel Gibson has been involved with a Holocaust-denial group in Australia, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies is urging Jewish and other organizations that recently extended speaking invitations to Gibson to withdraw them.
Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff said: "Holocaust-denial is a form of antisemitism, and Gibson's involvement with Holocaust-deniers in Australia indicates that his apology for his recent antisem
