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: Deutsche Welle
Dec 27, 2005
An education watchdog asked history teachers in the UK to expand their teaching about German history beyond the current concentration on Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.
The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), a non-departmental public body, which maintains and develops the national curriculum in the UK, found "widespread disquiet over what is seen as the gradual narrowing and 'Hitlerization'" of history teaching in Great Britain. In its widely t
Source: NYT
Dec 27, 2005
CAPE COAST, Ghana - For centuries, Africans walked through the infamous "door of no return" at Cape Coast castle directly into slave ships, never to set foot in their homelands again. These days, the portal of this massive fort so central to one of history's greatest crimes has a new name, hung on a sign leading back in from the roaring Atlantic Ocean: "The door of return."
Ghana, through whose ports millions of Africans passed on their way to plantations in the
Source: CNN
Dec 27, 2005
The documentary "Hoop Dreams" and footage of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake are among the 25 movies picked this year for the National Film Registry, a compilation of significant films being preserved by the Library of Congress.
Fictional films chosen by Librarian of Congress James H. Billington range from Buster Keaton's last comedy, "The Cameraman," to the Christmas classic "Miracle on 34th Street" to the 1982 teen comedy "Fast Times at Ridgemo
Source: Boston Globe
Dec 27, 2005
ANNA, Ill. -- The tiny Camp Ground church cemetery includes among its dead some of the earliest settlers from this part of southern Illinois -- Germans whose weathered sandstone grave markers date to the 1800s.
Still, a mystery lingers about others who might be buried on this solemn ground: Is the graveyard the final resting place of Cherokee Indians who died here during the winter of 1838-39 as they were forced westward on the infamous Trail of Tears to what now is Oklahoma?
Source: CNN
Dec 27, 2005
The impeachment of former President Clinton is in a gray area of history, too long ago to be a current event, too recent to be judged in perspective.
Yet history is already judging Clinton in the place where millions of students get their information about him -- textbooks.
Seven years after he was impeached in a scandal of sex, perjury and bitter politics, Clinton has become a fixture in major high school texts.The impeachment is portra
Source: Weekly Standard
Dec 26, 2005
Former President Jimmy Carter, in an interview for the January issue of GQ magazine, reveals how, on the recommendation of then-CIA director Stansfield Turner, he once authorized a psychic to make targeting decisions--while "in a trance"--for America's satellite surveillance system:
GQ: One of the promises you made in 1976 was that if you were elected, you would look into the [UFO] reports from Roswell and see if there had been any cover-ups. Did you look into that?
Source: BBC News
Dec 26, 2005
One of the UK's most popular monuments opened on Boxing Day for the first time in a decade.
English Heritage said it was responding to visitor demand and opened Stonehenge to the public on 26 December and wi.ll do the same on New Year's Day.
The ancient monument will be open, for the first day of 2006, from 1000 GMT with last admissions at 1600 GMT. Peter Carson, Stonehenge director, said: "We normally stay closed during the festive hol
Source: Wa Po
Dec 26, 2005
Partisan political calculations are shaping a clash of visions of how New Orleans should be rebuilt, says presidential historian Douglas Brinkley, who heads the Theodore Roosevelt Center at the city's Tulane University.
Bush's decision "to keep Katrina under the radar screen" and "dribble out aid" is driven by a fear of overseeing a costly foreign war and a massive domestic initiative simultaneously, Brinkley said, just as Vietnam and the Great Society program c
Source: NYT
Dec 26, 2005
A Turkish court has opened a case against an Armenian-Turkish journalist for his comments on a six-month sentence it gave him earlier for denigrating Turkish identity, lawyers involved in bringing the case said Sunday.
The Istanbul court was acting after a group of nationalist lawyers asked the court to file a case against Hrant Dink, editor in chief of the bilingual Turkish and Armenian weekly Agos, and three Agos journalists, saying that the journalists ''tried to influence the j
Source: NYT
Dec 26, 2005
PORTO. A chance discovery in recent months during renovations of a building in this Atlantic port city has revealed a dark secret from Portugal's past: a 16th-century synagogue.
Built when Portugal's Jews had been forced to convert to Catholicism or risk being burned at the stake, the house of worship was hidden behind a false wall in a four-story house that the Rev. Agostinho Jardim Moreira, a Roman Catholic priest, was converting into a home for some older parishioners.
Source: NYT
Dec 25, 2005
While David Horowitz insists his campaign for intellectual diversity is nonpartisan, it is fueled, in large measure, by studies that show the number of Democratic professors is generally much larger than the number of Republicans. A survey in 2003 by researchers at Santa Clara University found the ratio of Democrats to Republicans on college faculties ranged from 3 to 1 in economics to 30 to 1 in anthropology. In a debate with Mr. Horowitz last summer, Russell Ja
Source: NYT Book Review
Dec 25, 2005
Bowing to domestic and international pressure, the Brazilian government has begun releasing intelligence files compiled by the former military dictatorship on government opponents, including victims of torture and those who disappeared. A preliminary list of people whose activities were monitored by military intelligence during the dictatorship, which ruled from 1964 to 1985, has already been made public. As of Jan. 1, those people will be allowed to examine thei
Source: NYT
Dec 25, 2005
The Islamist organization that is the largest de facto opposition group in Egypt's Parliament said Saturday that its leader had not meant to say that the Holocaust never happened when he called it a myth this week.
The office of Muhammad Mehdi Akef, the supreme guide of the group, the Muslim Brotherhood, said that his initial remark, on Thursday, had been intended to make a point about Western attitudes toward democracy and the Palestinians. In that message, Mr. Akef said, "Wes
Source: Wa Po
Dec 25, 2005
STURBRIDGE, Mass. -- Historical fact: In the 1830s, many rural New Englanders followed a religion so strait-laced that they did not celebrate Christmas.
Accordingly, at Old Sturbridge Village -- an outdoor museum where an 1830s town has been re-created down to the cider mill and the Gloucester Old Spots pigs -- they used to ignore the holiday as well.
Used to. Until, in the past few years, attendance started to slip. "How many times can you tell the story, 'They
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
Dec 24, 2005
The U.S. National Slavery Museum this week provided Fredericksburg officials with more information about studies funded with a $1 million city payment.
Vonita W. Foster, the museum's executive director, also indicated some documentation already has been filed with the city.
Meanwhile, a Fredericksburg City Council member seeking more details about how the museum spent the $1 million signaled yesterday that the council might hold a closed-door discussion of matters by c
Source: LAT
Dec 24, 2005
Louse-borne diseases such as typhus and trench fever devastated Napoleon's army during his ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812, killing nearly a third of his army, according to a study by French researchers. Napoleon invaded Russia with half a million men that summer but escaped with only a few thousand. Twenty-five thousand French soldiers escaped to Vilnius, Lithuania, during the retreat, but only 3,000 survived to continue the retreat. The rest were buried in
Source: LAT
Dec 24, 2005
The last paragraph of a letter discovered by a Newport Beach attorney sheds new light on Upton Sinclair. "This letter is for yourself alone," it read. "Stick it away in your safe, and some time in the far distant future the world may know the real truth about the matter. I am here trying to make plain my own part in the story."
The story was "Boston," Sinclair's 1920s novelized condemnation of the trial and execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanze
Source: Chicago Sun Times
Dec 24, 2005
Truman K. Gibson Jr., a Chicago attorney who had been the last surviving member of the World War II-era "black Cabinet" of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman, died Friday at Mercy Hospital after an illness of five weeks. He was 93.
As an advocate for African- American soldiers in the War Department from 1940 through 1945, Mr. Gibson fought tirelessly to break down the segregation that ruled the U.S. Army, to persuade the military leadership to commit black
Source: NYT
Dec 24, 2005
The 112 families led by Chief Little Shell lost their North Dakota homeland to the government in 1892 when a chief of the Pembina Chippewa signed away their rights to it, without their authority and in their absence. The Little Shell had left home, in the Turtle Mountain area, to go hunting, and an Indian agent forced the other Chippewa to accept the Ten Cent Treaty - so called by Indians because it bought about 10 million acres of Chippewa land, including that of the Little Shell, for a million
Source: NYT
Dec 24, 2005
The attorney general should be immune from lawsuits for ordering wiretaps of Americans without permission from a court, Samuel A. Alito Jr., President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, wrote in a memorandum in 1984 as a government lawyer in the Reagan administration.
The memorandum, released yesterday by the National Archives, made recommendations concerning a lawsuit against former Attorney General John N. Mitchell over a wiretap he had authorized without a court's permission in 1970.
