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
Mar 1, 2006
Channel 13, the PBS station serving New York, has dropped plans to show a controversial panel discussion that includes two people who raise doubts about whether the killing of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was genocide, a spokeswoman said yesterday. The spokeswoman, Stella Giammasi, said the station had made the decision after reviewing the half-hour program, which was to follow a new one-hour documentary, "The Armenian Genocide," scheduled to be broadcast April 17 at
Source: NYT
Mar 1, 2006
The New York Public Library is expected to announce today that it has purchased the Burroughs archive for its Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. The acquisition will make the Berg Collection, which also includes Kerouac's literary and personal archive, perhaps the premier institution for the study of the Beats. Burroughs is best known as the author of the hallucinogenic, drug-addled novel "Naked Lunch," which was
Source: Daily News
Mar 1, 2006
SOME 20,000 AFRICANS buried in a long-hidden 18th century cemetery in lower Manhattan were given one of America's highest honors yesterday, as the White House designated the sprawling grave site a national monument.The burial ground, a 5-acre area near City Hall, was uncovered more than 14 years ago when construction workers broke ground to build a new federal office tower at Duane and Elk Sts.
Rep. Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) said President Bush's signing of the
Source: Archaeology (March-April 2006)
Mar 1, 2006
Sometime before 600 B.C., a surgeon in the settlement of Abdera on the north coast of the Aegean faced a difficult case. Standing back from his patient, a young woman in her late twenties lying on the table before him, he examined the wound cautiously. Normal practice required that the healer ask how an injury occurred, but here it was clear from the broken flesh and hair matted with blood. A stone or lead missile, hurled from a sling by one of the native Thracians intent on the colony's destruc
Source: post-gazette.com
Feb 28, 2006
The first signs of the destruction wrought by vandals came into view just after dawn. Almost simultaneously, several calls came into the National Park Service office at Gettysburg National Military Park.That was 12 days ago and the park service since has calculated the cost to repair and restore the monuments at just over $61,000. It was the worst case of vandalism at the park in 93 years.
A coalition of Gettysburg-area groups and individuals has put
Source: History Today
Feb 28, 2006
Researchers from Utrecht University believe the medieval great plague caused Europe’s temperatures to fall, making humanity’s impact on climate change earlier than previously thought. The team from the Netherlands estimated land use changed around 1347, when the Black Death arrived, which would have caused an agricultural crisis; trees then flourished on land no longer being cultivated. Tests on pollen and leaves in the southeast Netherlands suggest these millions of trees w
Source: UPI
Feb 28, 2006
Archeologists say they have found the remains of a "unique" ancient Phoenician temple in Sicily. "You have to go all the way to Amrit in Syria to find a similar one," Lorenzo Nigro of the Rome University archeology team told the Italian news agency ANSA. The temple was discovered last year when part of a lagoon near the Phoenician city of Motya -- now called Mozia -- was drained.
The "monumental" temple was found on the
Source: USA Today
Feb 28, 2006
The statue crowning the U.S. Capitol is called "Freedom." Yet it was a black slave who figured out how to coax apart the 19½-foot, 15,000-pound plaster statue so it could be cast in bronze and rejoined atop the dome.Slaves, in fact, helped build much of the building and grounds of Congress, their owners earning $5 per month for their work. Ed Hotaling, a retired TV reporter in Washington, was among the first to widely publicize this in a report in 2000.
Source: NYT
Feb 28, 2006
One of history's most violent volcanic eruptions blasted the island of Sumbawa in the East Indies in 1815. The sulfurous gases and fiery ashes from Mount Tambora cast a pall over the entire world, causing the global cooling of 1816, known as the "year without a summer." It left 117,000 people dead. A team of American and Indonesian scientists has now found remains of what it says is the "lost kingdom of Tambora."
Source: NYT
Feb 28, 2006
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Feb. 27 — In February 1962, it was the hub of the space program, the center where controllers counted down and then watched tensely from their consoles as John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth.
Today the Mercury Control Center stands empty and all but abandoned, half hidden by thick Florida vegetation. Its 10-foot-wide NASA emblem, warped by high winds, flaps even in a light breeze. A trash can on the floor of the hollow control room seems to be t
Source: NYT
Feb 28, 2006
LEXINGTON, Ky. (AP) -- A former high school student barred from her prom because she wore a dress styled as a Confederate battle flag has reached a settlement with the school district, her attorney said.Jacqueline Duty filed a lawsuit after Greenup County school officials called the dress too controversial and kept her out of Russell High School's May 1, 2004 prom.
Duty claimed the district violated her First Amendment right to free speech and to celebrate her h
Source: Inside Higher Ed
Feb 28, 2006
Andrew Everett, a student senator and senior at the University of Washington, says he had little idea that introducing a resolution in support of building a campus memorial to Col. Gregory “Pappy” Boyington, a 1934 graduate of the institution and a World War II Medal of Honor winner, would result in rampant partisan bickering on campus. But, thanks to words and actions by both liberals and conservatives on campus and elsewhere, the lens of politics has now framed a debate that he and others say
Source: Civil War Preservation Trust
Feb 28, 2006
A once sleepy crossroads town in Pennsylvania where the blood of 50,000 Americans was shed, a fertile valley in Virginia where armies clashed for four long years, and a little-known New Mexico battleground known as the "Gettysburg of the West," were today announced as some of the nation's most endangered Civil War battlefields.At a news conference this morning, the Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT) unveiled its annual report on the status of the nation's hi
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 28, 2006
A kind of Hindu civil war that wasn't always civil erupted in a Sacramento hearing room Monday over what California middle school students should be taught about ancient India. An emotional four-hour hearing ended with a few angry members of the overflow audience shouting at a subcommittee of the state Board of Education after it rejected changes they sought in six new social studies textbooks for California middle school students. A security guard eventually cle
Source: WOAI San Antonio
Feb 28, 2006
Soon, hip-hop artifacts will be taking their place in American history alongside Archie Bunker's chair and the dresses worn by various first ladies. The National Museum of American History says it will start collecting items like vinyl records, turntables and boom boxes. They will be included in an exhibit called "Hip-Hop Won't Stop: the Beat, the Rhymes, the Life." The project is expected to cost as much as two (m) million dollars and take up to five years to comp
Source: Bloomberg
Feb 28, 2006
Scientists excavating at the site of the world's biggest recorded volcanic eruption on an Indonesian island have found human remains and artifacts in an area they said may be the ``Pompeii of the east.'' The discoveries were made near Tambora, on Sumbawa Island, which erupted in 1815. The volcano produced 150 cubic kilometers of ash that fell as far as 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) away. Tambora lies about 1,300 kilometers to the east of Indonesia's capital, Jakarta.
Source: WREX 13 Rockford, IL
Feb 28, 2006
Effa Manley became the first woman elected to the baseball Hall of Fame when the former Newark Eagles co-owner was among 17 people from the Negro Leagues and pre-Negro Leagues chosen Monday by a special committee."This is a historic day at the Hall of Fame," shrine president Dale Petroskey said. "I hoped that someday there would be a woman in the Hall. It's a pretty proud moment."
This year's Hall class - 18, including former reliever B
Source: Reuters
Feb 28, 2006
Deep in the territory of the old Confederacy, a new glass and stone edifice will soon begin rising -- the first national museum in the United States devoted to the subject of black slavery.Builders will soon start sinking foundations for the 2,700 sq meters United States National Slavery Museum that organisers hope to open to the public in early 2008.
The structure, 37 meters high, will be built on a 15 hectares site on donated land overlooking the Rappahannock
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Feb 28, 2006
The first signs of the destruction wrought by vandals came into view just after dawn. Almost simultaneously, several calls came into the National Park Service office at Gettysburg National Military Park. That was 12 days ago and the park service since has calculated the cost to repair and restore the monuments at just over $61,000. It was the worst case of vandalism at the park in 93 years.A coalition of Gettysburg-area groups and individuals has put up a reward totali
Source: The Gazette
Feb 28, 2006
Three account books found in the cupboard of an old house on the Quebec-Vermont border reveal what the first Loyalist settlers of two centuries ago - along with a handful of freed black slaves from the United States - bought, sold, worked at, and even went to jail for.Handwritten in black ink on bond paper embossed with the British royal insignia, the ledgers were kept at the local inn of Missisquoi Bay, now Philipsburg, a village founded on Abenaki Indian ancest
