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
Feb 13, 2006
People everywhere wish they could be proud of every bit of their countries' histories. But honest people understand that's impossible, and wise people appreciate the positive value of acknowledging and learning from painful truths about past misdeeds. Then there is Japan's new foreign minister, Taro Aso, who has been neither honest nor wise in the inflammatory statements he has been making about Japan's disastrous era of militarism, colonialism and war crimes that culminated in the Second World
Source: NYT
Feb 13, 2006
Dave Tatsuno, a Japanese-American businessman and amateur filmmaker whose home movies, shot in secret in the 1940's, offer a rare documentary portrait of life in an American internment camp during World War II, died on Jan. 26 at his home in San Jose, Calif. He was 92.In 1942, Mr. Tatsuno and his family were interned at the Topaz Relocation Center in the Utah desert. Over the next three years, shooting covertly with a contraband camera, he recorded everyday life in his dust-
Source: CBS News
Feb 13, 2006
At 68 years old, Beatrice Goodwin wants to know where she came from, reports CBS News correspondent Trish Regan. Her grandfather, Clarence Tilley, was born in Portsmouth, N.H., in 1870, and she can trace her family as far back as her great-grandmother, who died the day Beatrice was born. "I think sometimes the older you get, the more interested you get in who you are or who you were, where you came from," says Beatrice.
Now, a recent discovery i
Source: Yahoo News
Feb 13, 2006
A team of scientists hopes to crack one of the layers of mystery surrounding 15th-century French heroine Joan of Arc: Could a rib and other fragments recovered after she was burned at the stake be hers? Eighteen experts plan a battery of tests to determine whether the few remains reportedly recovered from the pyre where the 19-year-old was burned alive for heresy — including a rib bone and some skin — really could have belonged to her.
The woman warrior-tu
Source: Press Release--African American Heritage Preservation Foundation, Inc.
Feb 13, 2006
The Virginia Historic Resources Board has approved a new historic highway marker in Prince Edward County, Virginia. The Board meeting was held in June 2005 and voted to authorize a marker to commemorate the birthplace of United States Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce.A dedication ceremony will be held on March 1, 2006 at 12 p.m. for the unveiling of this historical highway marker on the 165th birthday of Senator Bruce. This historical highway marker will be unveiled at the
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 13, 2006
The future of heritage railways is being threatened by new safety requirements, according to steam enthusiasts.Under Health and Safety Executive regulations, volunteers could have to pay bills running into thousands of pounds to keep their cherished schemes alive.
"Many of us feel that nothing would make safety authorities happier than to see us all closed down," David Morgan, the chairman of the Heritage Railway Association," told The Daily Teleg
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 13, 2006
The final masterpiece of the world's greatest clockmaker is to be put through its paces at last, 230 years after it was finished, to see if it fulfils its maker's specifications.The priceless Late Regulator clock took John Harrison, the pioneer of longitude, 36 years to build and he was still calibrating it when he died at his home in London on March 24, 1776, his 83rd birthday.
Harrison believed that the Late Regulator would vary by only a second ev
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 13, 2006
Statues sacred to secretive Kenyan tribes are no longer being erected to mark the deaths of revered elders because corrupt middlemen contracted by Western art dealers are stealing them as soon as they are installed.Hundreds of "vigango" totems have been looted from rural homesteads near Kenya's coast, home to the Mijikenda tribes about which little is known.
The 4ft wooden statues, carved with triangular etchings and believed to incarnate t
Source: Rocky Mountain News
Feb 13, 2006
Historians have long assumed that the reviled Roman emperor Maxentius lived part-time at an 80-acre suburban villa complex until he was killed by his rival Constantine at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge in A.D. 312. But a University of Colorado-led archaeology team has uncovered evidence that the villa's main hall was never occupied. Instead, it appears to have been abandoned before completion, said CU archaeologist Diane Conlin, co-director of the Maxentius project, a five
Source: Independent
Feb 13, 2006
Alarm bells rang last month when newspapers in Massachusetts discovered that the staff of Congressman Marty Meehan had polished his biography by, for instance, deleting his long-abandoned promise to serve only four terms and praising his "fiscally responsible" voting record.Detective work by Wikipedia found that other offices on Capitol Hill had engaged in skulduggery - not all of them with flattering results, such as the false reference to Oklahoma's Tom Coburn be
Source: Mail and Guardian (South Africa)
Feb 13, 2006
Here lies the forgotten history of New York. And here. And over there. All across the city's five boroughs, old cemeteries are tucked away, some visible but ignored by passers-by, some in the shadow of latter-day high-rises, some so remote as to be overlooked entirely.Several, like Sylvan Grove Cemetery in a distant corner of Staten Island, have fallen into disrepair from decades of neglect and vandals who spray-paint their own premature epitaphs on 200-year-old tombst
Source: Independent (South Africa)
Feb 13, 2006
Ancient paintings which allegedly prove that the Chinese invented the game of golf up to 1 000 years ago are to go on display in Hong Kong in February, a news report said on Monday.The pictures from the 13th and 14th centuries show Chinese noblemen hitting balls into holes with clubs that look remarkably similar to modern golf clubs.
The paintings will go on display in an exhibition titled Ancient Chinese Pastimes in Hong Kong's Heritage Museum from March
Source: Der Spiegel
Feb 13, 2006
War crime, payback or a legitimate attack aimed at shortening World War II? The destruction of Dresden on February 13, 1945 is one of the most controversial bombing raids of the conflict. It's now the subject of a new German film that aims to tell the story from several points of view.Germany is remembering the near total destruction of one of its most beautiful cities by Allied bombers in one night 61 years ago with the release of the first feature film about the Worl
Source: Reuters
Feb 13, 2006
German filmmakers have tackled the touchy subject of whether the Allied firebombing of Dresden at the end of World War Two was a "war crime" with a carefully balanced melodrama that got its worldwide premiere on Monday. Showing the German point of view of anything in World War Two is always likely to cause a stir -- and that's precisely what the makers of "Dresden" said they want to achieve.
"Dresden," which premiered at the
Source: The Nation
Feb 13, 2006
Galvanized by a sense that the Iraq War represents a catastrophic policy based on an illegal set of political and military ends, historians and activists will convene in Austin, Texas, this weekend to explore what historical analysis and understanding can contribute to efforts to bring the war to an immediate end. Advance registration indicates that activists so far outnumber academics at the conference, sponsored by Historians Against the War (HAW). The organization w
Source: Sofia News Agency (Bulgaria)
Feb 13, 2006
A Greek farmer has accidentally uncovered an historic find - the largest ancient tomb ever found in Greece.The eight-chamber tomb was found in a field just outside the historic northern city of Pella, birthplace of Alexander the Great. It is rich in painted sculpture dates to the Hellenistic period between the 3rd and 2nd century BC and offers scholars a rare glimpse into the life of nobles around the time of Alexander's death.
It is filled with jewels, co
Source: Wa Po
Feb 12, 2006
The hallways and exhibition galleries of the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center are brightened by glass and limestone walls. The towering doors and enormous round table in the conference room are made of the finest blanched wood. There are rows of plush, immaculate seats in the three theaters.
What's missing from the $75 million complex are visitors. Much of the time, it is virtually empty.With Pope John Paul's endorsement, the center's founders opene
Source: BBC News
Feb 12, 2006
A stone which will form part of a Falklands War memorial arrived in Brecon on Sunday after an 8,500 mile journey from the south Atlantic. The five-tonne rock is a gift from the people of the Falklands to Welsh veterans of the 1982 conflict.
On Sunday it was transported on the last leg of the journey by part-time soldiers from a TA regiment.
It is hoped the stone will form the centrepiece of a veterans' memorial to mark the 25th anniversary of the
Source: The Independent (London)
Feb 12, 2006
Paul McGann, who played Topliss in a1986 BBC drama, has continued to study his life along with a team of historians. And they now believe Topliss wasn't even present at the event that first thrust him into the public spotlight. Topliss specialised in impersonating military officers, to the consternation of the establishment. And he was believed to be the ringleader of a protest by British troops at a training camp at Etaples, France, just before the battle of Pass-chendaele in 1917.
Source: CNN
Feb 12, 2006
Presidents and their wives have been an amorous lot, their White House years coming at the pinnacle of lives entwined. The men pursued and loved these women as intensely as they clawed to power and unleashed armies."Touch you I must or I'll burst," Ronald Reagan wrote to Nancy three years before he became California governor. Lyndon Johnson, then a young congressman from Texas, declared to his valentine, Lady Bird, mere weeks after they had met, "This mo
