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: Cedar Rapids Gazette
Mar 7, 2006
A federal appeals court on Tuesday upheld a lower court ruling revoking the citizenship of a former Nazi concentration camp guard. The U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a federal district judge was correct in revoking the citizenship of John Hansl, 81, who lives in Des Moines.The U.S. Department of Justice filed a complaint against Hansl in July 2003, claiming he hid his military service when he applied for a visa to come to the United States in 1955. He was grant
Source: The Australian
Mar 7, 2006
A textbook widely used in Victorian high schools describes the Crusaders who fought in the Holy Land in the Middle Ages as terrorists, akin to those responsible for the September 11 attacks. The Year 8 textbook Humanities Alive 2 says that the Crusaders, like Muslim terrorists, "believed they were giving their lives for a religious cause".
"Like the Crusaders ... they were told they would go straight to heaven when they died," the book says.
Source: NYT
Mar 7, 2006
In some ways, art history is like an episode of "The Sopranos." A relatively small number of artists are welcomed into the family of the famous, their works immortalized in museums and on postcard racks — in other words, they are made. But hit men, otherwise known as critics and scholars, are lurking around every corner, waiting to whack even the most sterling reputation.Almost no one is safe. Not even, as it turns out, Whistler's mother.
This month, t
Source: AP
Mar 6, 2006
ST. LOUIS - Little is known about Dred Scott's wife, Harriet, other than she was likely the force behind the St. Louis slave couple's unsuccessful legal quest for freedom, which helped trigger the Civil War.
Now, new insights about Harriet Scott uncovered here recently are helping to fill in the gaps of her story. Historians also hope the findings will ignite more research into the couple's life."It's not about what I have done here," said Ruth A
Source: NYT
Mar 6, 2006
Not far from the Greco-Roman courthouse in Downtown Manhattan made familiar by the television show ''Law and Order'' is the place once called the Negroes Burial Ground.From about 1640 to 1795, historians say, perhaps 15,000 slaves were buried there in a forgotten wasteland. Many had died before the age of 12. Some had died within two years of arriving in chains.
The federal government announced plans last week for an $8 million memorial and visitor c
Source: Hobart Mercury
Mar 6, 2006
THE notorious Sandakan track, where more than 1000 Australian and British prisoners of war died during World War II, will be opened to the public as a war tourism site to rival the Kokoda Trail. Lost behind impenetrable jungle in Borneo for the past 60 years, the 250km Sandakan death march track has been rediscovered through painstaking detective work.
The track was the scene of one of the darkest episodes of World War II.
Of 2438 Australian a
Source: Tom Mangold in the Guardian
Mar 6, 2006
Good Night, and Good Luck, the story of US TV journalist Edward R Murrow's victorious battle against McCarthyism in the mid-50s, is a cogent reminder of how badly British television subsequently failed to honour the higher principles of news and current affairs broadcasting.Far from maintaining the courage and intellectual rigour of the campaigning standards then adopted by CBS's legendary news division, first through Ed Murrow's See It Now, (his principal attack vehicle aga
Source: Australian
Mar 6, 2006
Education -- and specifically education that values knowledge for its own sake -- is the subject of Alan Bennett's play The History Boys, which Hytner directed for the National Theatre and has now brought to Sydney. Since its premiere in London in 2004, The History Boys has become one of the most talked-about new plays -- it won awards for director and playwright -- not only because it comes from Bennett's pen, but because it pushes some very contemporary buttons.''You
Source: Yahoo News
Mar 6, 2006
A team of Egyptian and German archaeologists has unearthed six statues of the lion-headed war goddess Sekhmet during restoration work at an ancient temple in the southern city of Luxor, officials said. The team found the artifacts in the Kom Hitan area on the location of the 18th dynasty (1580-1314 BC) temple of pharaoh Amenhotep III on the west bank of the Nile, said Egyptian antiquities boss Zahi Hawas.
The black granite statues show Sekhmet sittin
Source: National Geographic News
Mar 6, 2006
On the volcanic plains east of Naples, Italy, archaeologists have made an unusual discovery: thousands of prehistoric footprints in a layer of volcanic ash. On the volcanic plains east of Naples, Italy, archaeologists have made an unusual discovery: thousands of prehistoric footprints in a layer of volcanic ash.
These footprints are just one of several archaeological finds indicating that the still-active Vesuvius is capable of far worse eruptions than an
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 6, 2006
The European Commission announced on Thursday that it planned to make at least six million books, documents, and other cultural works available online by 2010 via the European equivalent of the Google Library Project.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Mar 6, 2006
Faculty salaries rose 3.4 percent this year, just a little more than last year, according to a survey by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.Salaries at private institutions increased 3.7 percent, while those at public institutions rose 3.1 percent. A year ago, faculty salaries increased 3.2 percent over all.
Unlike the salary survey done by the American Association of University Professors, the CUPA-HR survey does not r
Source: Romanesko
Mar 6, 2006
That's what former presidential adviser David Gergen says. "This administration has engaged in secrecy at a level we have not seen in over 30 years," he tells Howard Kurtz. "Unfortunately, I have to bring up the name of Richard Nixon, because we haven't seen it since the days of Nixon. And now what they're doing -- and they're using the war on terror to justify -- is they're starting to target journalists who try to pierce the veil of secrecy and find things and put them in the ne
Source: Yahoo News
Mar 6, 2006
Archaeologists generally downplay the Indiana Jones side of their discipline, full of derring-do and unexpected discoveries. But every once in a while, an amazing find surprises even the most experienced researchers. And that's just what happened two years ago when Boston University's Kathryn Bard reached into a hole in the sand at the edge of the Egyptian desert and found the first of six caves. Her research team of Italians and Americans now knows those caves hold the most ancient ship stores
Source: KATC3
Mar 6, 2006
Civil War submarines known to once be in Shreveport but unseen since that conflict continue to elude searchers."The submarines look like they will stay an enigma for a while," said Ralph Wilbanks, the diver who led underwater efforts that found the Confederate submersible Hunley off Charleston Harbor in 1995. "We have looked in the bayou and we didn't see anything we didn't see last time."
Wilbanks, together with fellow Hunley discovere
Source: BBC News
Mar 6, 2006
Sandwiched between two of London's best-known tourist attractions is a house so humble in appearance it is overlooked by the mass of passing sightseers. Its fascinating history is the subject of a new book. "Here lived Sir Christopher Wren during the building of St Paul's cathedral," proclaims an ornate ceramic plaque on the house on the south bank of the river Thames.
"Here also, in 1502, Catherine Infanta of Castile and Aragon, afterwards
Source: Lawrence Downes in the NYT
Mar 6, 2006
The Coke-bottle glasses of hindsight can leave even profound historical miseries all blurry with sentimentality. That's one way to explain the Savannah Irish Festival, a two-day celebration of the Great Famine's great contribution to this lovely Southern city — the migration of thousands of starving laborers who toted barges, lifted bales, dug ditches and cellars, and put down roots here in the mid-1800's.Their descendants crowded the Savannah Civic Center for th
Source: scotsman.com
Mar 5, 2006
NEWLY-RELEASED papers show the scale of suspicion and fear around the British High Command during the Second World War.
It has emerged that intelligence chiefs faced a dilemma over how many aristocrats with Nazi sympathies they should arrest, amid fears that interning too many would inflate their importance. Documents released today at the National Archives in Kew show MI5 spied on a god-daughter of the late King George V, Dowager Viscountess Doroth
Source: scotsman.com
Mar 5, 2006
FOR AT least two years, Britons nervously watched the seas and skies of the English Channel for a Nazi invasion fleet that never came.
But remarkable, newly-released British secret service documents reveal that Hitler planned an invasion of an entirely different kind from the extreme north of Scotland. Instead of ships, troops and tanks, the Nazi dictator wanted to introduce lethal bacteria to Shetland, from where they would spread death and panic a
Source: NYT Magazine
Mar 5, 2006
In 1625, a carpenter named Pieter Fransz built a house on the outskirts of Amsterdam. He was young, ambitious and lucky enough to belong to one of history's greatest generations: his life spanned the course of his country's golden age, when tiny Holland became an empire and Amsterdam grew into Europe's wealthiest city. Fransz walked the streets with Rembrandt; he saw a forest of masts grow in the harbor, as ships returned from the East Indies laden with pepper and nutmeg, a sack of which could m
