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
Jun 27, 2006
When two of the Smithsonian Institution's pre-eminent museums reopen on Saturday after six years of renovation, visitors may be stunned to learn that they were once competing installations with little more in common than the subdued building that housed them.
The American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, joint tenants of the venerated United States Patent Office, now share an interior reimagined with wider exhibition space, brighter light, soaring arches and common entr
Source: Norwich Bulletin
Jun 27, 2006
NORWICH — The final two candidates for the Norwich city historian position have been named.
Maria Jolicoer, 50, and Sarah Murphy, 59, have applied for the position, which serves as the town’s authority on Norwich history, promotes and researches Norwich history and advises the City Council on historical matters.
Jolicoer is a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution and speaks often at local meetings. She said that experience has given her information on local
Source: CBS
Jun 27, 2006
The National Archives — where the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are safe under glass — was shut down because the moat surrounding the building on Pennsylvania Avenue had flooded, spokeswoman Susan Cooper said. All records and national treasures were "safe and dry," she said.
The archives will remain closed Tuesday, just days before the Fourth of July weekend.
Flooding also closed IRS headquarters, the Commerce Department and the Justice Depart
Source: BBC
Jun 27, 2006
Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger rebels have expressed "regret" over the assassination of former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi 15 years ago. Top rebel negotiator Anton Balasingham told private Indian channel NDTV that Mr Gandhi's killing by a suicide bomber was a "monumental tragedy".
Correspondents say it is the closest the rebels have come to admitting they were responsible for the murder.
India was the first country to ban the Tigers as a result of
Source: AP
Jun 27, 2006
A new visitors center will be ready for the 50th anniversary of the desegregation battle at Central High School in Little Rock.
Central High was the nation's first major battleground for school desegregation after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that black children were entitled to the same education as whites. For three weeks in September 1957, Gov. Orval E. Faubus blocked nine black students from enrolling at all-white Central High, forcing a historic confrontation between state and
Source: Boston Globe
Jun 27, 2006
Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson don't bestride American history with the grandeur of George Washington. They aren't credited with giving new life to the American Dream, like Abraham Lincoln.With their granny glasses and watch fobs, they seem the product of an era of affectation; and, indeed, few political leaders cultivated their images more vainly than did Roosevelt and Wilson.
But this year, with the coming of the Fourth of July, it is T.R. a
Source: Carnival of Bad History
Jun 27, 2006
The Carnival of Bad History #6 has been posted. The CoBH is a blog carnival, a roundup of posts on the subject of historical error, misunderstanding and misuse. There's Holocaust Denial, fiction, long-standing errors, satire, bad journalism, and general ignorance in great quantity.
Nominations of posts for future editions, which will now be monthly, can be submitted
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Jun 27, 2006
It’s possible that Ward Churchill may never again teach a class at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The interim chancellor at Boulder on Monday issued a “notice of intent to dismiss” the controversial professor, citing findings of serious and repeated research misconduct. Churchill still has appeal rights — and has 10 days to take his case to a faculty review committee. After any appeal, a final decision rests with the president of the University of Colorado System and the Boa
Source: Sofia Echo
Jun 26, 2006
A gold Thracian breastplate found near the village of Golemanite, Veliko Turnovo municipality, has proven pivotal to the re-construction of the Thracian Calendar. Using a mathematical model, Ventseslav Tsonev of the Regional Historical Museum in Veliko Turnovo presented his findings at a conference on Treasures and Sacred Typography, held recently in Sliven.
“In the Thracians’ calendar, there are three seasons and 60 main holidays.
A year consisted of 12 months with 360 days, five
Source: The Art Newspaper
Jun 26, 2006
The US State Department is funding a programme to provide specialised training for Iraqi museum professionals from Baghdad and Kirkuk at six American institutions. The initiative is the first US-sponsored museum exchange since 1991 when the United Nations imposed trade sanctions against Iraq following its invasion of Kuwait. The embargo remained in place until the US-led offensive in 2003. According to Edward Able, president of the American Association of Museums
Source: asahi.com
Jun 26, 2006
At 84 years of age, Toyo Ishii wants to set the record straight about a period in the immediate aftermath of World War II that is almost forgotten.
Ishii, who worked as a nurse for the Imperial Japanese Army at a medical college in Tokyo, told health authorities about sites in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ward that she says contain the remains of soldiers killed in the war as well as foreign nationals.
Ishii said the burial sites are in the ward's Toyama district, where a number
Source: National Coalition for History
Jun 26, 2006
In spite of the recent bad news that the House of Representatives cut the overall budget for the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) by $8 million, there also was some good news. Lawmakers restored funding for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) -- $5.5 million for grants and $2 million for administration related costs, for a total of $7.5 million. This is the same figure that the NHPRC was appropriated in 2006 and hence, in FY 2007, the House is
Source: Rick Stengel in Time Magazine
Jun 26, 2006
History must not be treated as something set off by itself," said Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, and that could well be the motto of our Making of America series. I'm Rick Stengel, and I'm delighted that my first issue as managing editor of TIME is our fifth annual Making of America issue. One of the great missions of TIME since we started 83 years ago has been explaining the challenges of the moment in the context of history--and relating the values of our history to the challenges of the moment
Source: Historian Tom Chaffin in Time Magazine
Jun 26, 2006
From the air, the 46,000 lunging, rolling, curving, tangled miles of America's Interstate Highway System sprawl across the continent like some outsized Rorschach pattern. These multi-laned, guard-rail-clad corridors by now seem timeless, like pre-Cambrian mountains bolted to the landscape. So it's hard to believe that America's freeway system turns 50 this summer — a chronological blip on the tectonic plates too slight for a spectrometer, but in the life of our republic, a golden anniversary.
Source: Boston Globe
Jun 26, 2006
About 40 descendants of Nathaniel Hawthorne gathered in Concord on Monday to watch as the remains of the author's wife and daughter, which have been buried for more than a century in England, were interred in the family plot at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery alongside fellow influential American writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson."It's greatly significant to see the family reunited," said Alison Hawthorne Deming, 59, of Tuscon, Ariz., Hawthorne's great
Source: Sunday Herald
Jun 25, 2006
Twenty centuries after the invading Roman legions robbed all the gold they could find in the ancient kingdom of Dacia, treasure hunters using state-of-the art technologies are hot on the trail of the fabulous treasure trove King Decebalus hid in 106 AD and the Romans never found.
The French archaeologist Jerome Carcopino, a world-renowned Dacian expert, has estimated that Decebalus’s hidden treasure amounted to 165,000kg of gold and 350,000kg of silver. The value of the treasure ha
Source: Time
Jun 25, 2006
Roosevelt's legacy shapes U.S. of today.
At home and abroad, he was the locomotive president, the man who drew his flourishing nation into the future.
Just short of a century after he left the White House, in 1909, the collective memory of Theodore Roosevelt's strength and intellect and charisma still lingers.
Today, when the Justice Department goes after Microsoft or Enron, when the Environmental Protection Agency adjusts mileage standards or the Fed tweak
Source: Wa Po
Jun 25, 2006
It is a pleasure to celebrate the reopening of the great building after six years of closed doors, behind which a $298 million makeover was occurring. Well, not so much a makeover as a make-again -- the renovation architects did a splendid job, bringing the building's diverse interior spaces back to their former glory while equipping them for life in the 21st century. (Originally a three-year fix-up was planned, but fund-raising issues and philosophical questions arose that contributed to the ex
Source: NYT
Jun 25, 2006
For 18 years, Dr. Aubin Heyndrickx has tended the sealed jars containing strands of hair and scraps of clothing he gathered from a dead woman's body.
Collected in Halabja, one of many Kurdish towns in northern Iraq that were attacked with chemical weapons by Saddam Hussein's army in 1988, the jars have been stored in a blue plastic drum in his lab ever since, waiting.
Now, as prosecutors prepare to try Mr. Hussein in Baghdad on charges of genocide against the Kurds, Mr.
Source: NYT
Jun 25, 2006
Over the past few years, hundreds of hand-painted theater curtains that once hung on small stages in Vermont's opera houses and in its town and Grange halls have been found and are being revived thanks to a statewide preservation effort, the Vermont Painted Theater Curtain Project.
The project began in 1998, when the Vermont Museum and Gallery Alliance tried to inventory the state's theater curtains, asking all 251 of the state's town and city clerks for help.
