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 Townsend in AHA Perspectives (May 2006)
May 1, 2006
Salaries for historians in academia gained a little ground this past year—at least at private institutions—after lagging ever further behind average salaries for the academy over the past few years. The average salary for historians at four-year institutions rose from $61,006 in the 2004–05 academic year to $63,119, according to a new report from the College and University Personnel Association for Human Resources (CUPA-HR).
The report provides information on the nine-month salaries
Source: Press Release -- Siena Research Institute (SRI)
May 1, 2006
At a time when President Bush’s public opinion polls are at an all time low, eight in ten history and political science professors rank President George W. Bush “below average” or “failure,” according to a new expert opinion poll by the Siena College Research Institute (SRI) released today. Furthermore, more than two-thirds of those surveyed think the President has no realistic chance of improving his rating.The findings are the result of an expert opinion poll,
Source: Jonathan Chait in the New Republic
May 1, 2006
The Hamilton Project is a group formed earlier this year by a gaggle of center-left economic worthies, including former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, to promote Clintonesque policy alternatives. The adoption of Hamilton's name, and the inclusion of John Snow's infinitely better-regarded predecessor, seems to carry the implicit message that the country would be in better shape if it had a real Treasury secretary. It was all too much for Snow to bear. He quickly
Source: USA Today
May 1, 2006
An international archaeology team has discovered a royal tomb hidden inside a Maya pyramid in Guatemala.
After clearing debris left by looters, project co-director Hector Escobedo of Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, uncovered the collapsed royal tomb last week at the Maya center of Waka, along with a student, Juan Carlos Melendez.
The tomb likely dates from 200 to 400 A.D., says project co-director David Freidel of Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
Source: Jonathan Dresner at HNN
May 1, 2006
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Storyis an international best-seller, unusual for a work of historical biography, and an aggressively revisionist history of Mao Zedong, unquestionably the single most important person in 20th century Chinese history. There have been quite a few reviews, positive and negative, and some
Source: Louisville Courier-Journal
May 1, 2006
He's sculpted Louisville's 8-foot-tall statue of York, the slave who assisted the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and designed the acclaimed Spirit of Freedom memorial in Washington that honors the Civil War's black soldiers.
Now Louisville's Ed Hamilton is being courted for another artistic challenge: creating a $2 million memorial to Abraham Lincoln at Waterfront Park in time for the Great Emancipator's 200th birthday in 2009.
Source: Sioux City Journal
May 1, 2006
After years of legal wrangling, a federal judge has ordered the National Park Service to pay $4 million to the owners of an observation tower that once stood near Gettysburg National Military Park.
The federal government took the land by eminent domain in 2000 and demolished the steel structure as part of a campaign to restore the area to the way it looked during the Civil War.
"This is a tremendous relief for me, I don't even care about the money anymore," sa
Source: Guardian
May 1, 2006
A dig into the rich past of a tiny isle in the Aegean archipelago could soon answer one of the riddles of prehistoric archaeology: why the remote outcrop produced so many of the flat-faced marble figurines that went on to inspire Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore.
Greek and British archaeologists hope their planned excavation will shed light on whether windswept Keros was a major sanctuary for the mysterious Cycladic civilisation 4,500 years ago. The tantalising suggestion that the unin
Source: physorg.com
May 1, 2006
Separated in history by 100 years, the seafaring Minoans of Crete and the mercantile Canaanites of northern Egypt and the Levant (a large area of the Middle East) at the eastern end of the Mediterranean were never considered trading partners at the start of the Late Bronze Age. Until now. Cultural links between the Aegean and Near Eastern civilizations will have to be reconsidered: A new Cornell University radiocarbon study of tree rings and seeds shows that the Santorini (o
Source: ABC 27 (Harrisburg, PA)
May 1, 2006
A federal judge is ordering the National Park Service to pay $4 million to the owners of an observation tower that once stood near Gettysburg National Military Park. The federal government took the land by eminent domain in 2000 and demolished the steel structure as part of a campaign to restore the area to the way it looked during the Civil War.
Landowner Hans Engrenn, a 77-year-old resident of New Oxford, says he's relieved but he and his wi
Source: NYT
Apr 30, 2006
OGAMA, Japan — This mountain village near the Sea of Japan, withered to eight aging residents, concluded recently that it could no longer go on.
So, after months of anguish, the villagers settled on a drastic solution: selling all of Ogama to an industrial waste company from Tokyo, which will turn it into a landfill.
With the proceeds, the villagers, mainly in their 70's, plan to pack up everything, including their family graves, and move in the next few years to yet un
Source: Tampa Tribune
Apr 30, 2006
Jim said to David, "My nephew caused the shooting.'' He said Terry Norman was toting a camera on campus May 4th but also a gun. He was working as an FBI informant, taking photographs of student protesters. The students figured this out during the protest as he snapped pictures. They hated him. Some rushed him as he was taking photographs. Terry fired a warning shot into the air. Then the Guardsmen volley erupted.
As David was telling me about his conversation with Jim, I thoug
Source: NYT
Apr 30, 2006
When the French look back today, they generally trace the stirrings of national glory to François I in the mid-16th century or perhaps to Louis XIV 150 years later. And when Parisians look around, they see mainly the city reshaped into broad avenues by Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann in the 19th century.
This week, they were reminded of a far earlier Paris, one that was still called Lutetia. On a Left Bank hillside, which carries the name of Sainte-Geneviève, the patron saint of Pari
Source: CBS News
Apr 30, 2006
Since it was published three years ago, Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" has become one of the most popular novels of all time, with more than 30 million copies in print worldwide. With a major movie based on the book due out soon, the book seems assured of a place on the bestseller lists for a considerable time to come. What has attracted readers to "The Da Vinci Code" is its central theme, which Dan Brown claims is not fiction but fact — that a mysterious European society,
Source: Guardian
Apr 30, 2006
Masterpieces snatched by Goering are returned to Jewish collector's family.For the moment, they are still on the walls or in the vaults. The Rembrandts, Van Dycks, Ruysdaels and Cranachs continue to draw visitors to Holland's greatest museums and galleries.
But not for much longer. Under a landmark ruling by the Dutch government, more than 200 pieces, including scores of major masterpieces tracked down by a team of top art detectives, will be stripped from cultural in
Source: Springfield Journal-Register
Apr 30, 2006
PETERSBURG - Archaeologists searching for more evidence of the first building Abraham Lincoln owned have unearthed a slate pencil, a hand-forged iron chain link, window and bottle glass, a shell button, pottery fragments and other items at Lincoln's New Salem State Historic Site."Finding that slate pencil was a real treat. It's as close as we're going to get to a Lincoln artifact," said Robert Mazrim, director of the Sangamo Archaeological Center in Elk
Source: NYT
Apr 30, 2006
AN intelligence leaker is a hero, risking career and more to reveal warrantless eavesdropping, interrogations bordering on torture, prisons out of reach of American law. Or the leaker is a villain, whose treachery endangers the lives of American operatives, exposes intelligence methods and scares off foreign agents.
Or a little bit of both.
In fact, American intelligence leaks have created divisions since the Revolutionary War, when the pamphleteer Thomas Paine publiciz
Source: The Age (Australia)
Apr 30, 2006
A burnt olive tree has helped to resolve a controversy over dating key events in the Mediterranean that took place more than three millennia ago.The new dates would change the chronology of the Minoans, Greeks, Cypriots and others by a century and question Egyptian chronology and the genesis of Classical civilisation.
The rewriting of the history of the Aegean has come, in part, from a study of charcoal and seed samples from sites dated to between 1700BC and 140
Source: Boston Globe
Apr 30, 2006
Built in the late 1920s, the Narkomfin apartment building was designed as the perfect environment for new Soviet Man. A monument to the utopian communist ideals that spilled forth after the Bolshevik revolution, the six-story complex behind the US Embassy was a place where bourgeois decadence was expected to give way to collective existence. Today this decaying, forgotten masterpiece of modernist architecture faces two possible futures: collapse, or conversion into a hotel.
Source: Canoe News (Canada)
Apr 30, 2006
A plan to downplay linguistic conflict in Quebec's high school history lessons is getting a failing grade from some teachers and politicians who feel it offers an "ultra-federalist" view of the past. The proposed changes to compulsory Grade 10 Quebec and Canadian history classes - leaked to media outlets last week - stresses ideas and inclusiveness instead of divisive events."It represents a departure from the traditional framework of history structured aroun
