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
Nov 27, 2005
LASSE HALLSTROM recently shot a film that retells a decades-old story some of the players would rather forget. Speaking by phone from New York, Mr. Hallstrom, the highly regarded Swedish director, was clear about one thing: to make a movie about Clifford Irving isn't necessarily to love him.
Mr. Irving is still remembered as the writer who nearly pulled off one of the most audacious scams in publishing: an "autobiography" of Howard Hughes, based on in-person interviews of
Source: NYT
Nov 27, 2005
Remember Earl Mazo? He was the co-author with Stephen Hess of a biography of Richard Nixon.
Regina Wicks Schatz and Earl Mazo were married this past weekend by Rabbi George B. Driesen at the Pooks Hill Marriott in Bethesda, Md.
Mr. Mazo, 86, retired as the head of the Joint Committee on Printing of the United States Congress, for which he supervised all official publications. Before that he was a political reporter for The New York Herald Tribune
Source: NYT
Nov 27, 2005
As Princeton admitted a growing number of minority students, Concerned Alumni charged repeatedly that the administration was lowering admission standards, undermining the university's distinctive traditions and admitting too few children of alumni. "Currently alumni children comprise 14 percent of each entering class, compared with an 11 percent quota for blacks and Hispanics," the group wrote in a 1985 fund-raising letter sent to all Princeton graduates.
Among the group'
Source: NYT
Nov 27, 2005
On Wednesday, Sotheby's is to auction two such images, known by the names of early owners: the Constable-Hamilton Portrait and the Munro-Lenox Portrait. They are being offered by the New York Public Library as part of a broader sell-off that has drawn some criticism, and are expected to fetch, respectively, from $10 million to $15 million and $6 million to $8 million. So what makes one Washington more valuable than another?
"When we were assessi
Source: NYT
Nov 27, 2005
On Dec. 12, the Federal District Court in Los Angeles will hear a lawsuit filed by a consortium of Christian high schools against the University of California system for refusing to credit some of their courses when their students apply for admission.
Among those courses are "Christianity's Influence in American History" and "Christianity and American Literature," both of which draw on textbooks published by Bob Jones University of Greenville, S.C., which describ
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Nov 27, 2005
Urban sprawl, we've learned in Atlanta, is one of the great evils of modern life. But a new book argues that sprawl is neither evil nor even modern.
"Sprawl: A Compact History" says that cities have sprawled for thousands of years: Indeed, outside the walls of ancient Rome was a place the Romans called suburbium, literally "below the walls" --- a place for businesses that couldn't operate within the city and for people who couldn't afford to live there.
Source: David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies,
Nov 27, 2005
In response to a protest by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Teen People magazine, which is owned by Time Inc., has removed from its web site an article that whitewashed a neo-Nazi teenage singing duo."It was irresponsible for Teen People to post an article describing these neo-Nazis as 'white separatists' without ever acknowledging that they are racists, admirers of Hitler, and Holocaust-deniers," said Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the Wy
Source: NYT
Nov 27, 2005
Most of the recent parallels to our withdrawing from Iraq do not seem to offer much encouragement for a confounded superpower that wants to save face as it cuts its losses and returns home. Among them are the wrenching French pullout from Algeria, the ill-fated French and American adventures in Vietnam, the Soviet humiliation in Afghanistan and the disastrous American interventions in Beirut and Somalia.
Still, there are a few stories of inconclusive wars that left the United States
Source: Library of Congress
Nov 27, 2005
The color photographs of the Farm Security Administration-Office of War Information Collection include scenes of rural and small-town life, migrant labor, and the effects of the Great Depression. A significant number of the color photographs concern the mobilization effort for World War II and portray aircraft manufacturing, military training, and the nation's railroads. The 1,600 color photographs produced by the FSA and OWI photographers are less well known and far less extensive than the 164,
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 26, 2005
A French historian has caused uproar by claiming Napoleon provided the model for Hitler's Final Solution with the slaughter of more than 100,000 Caribbean slaves.
In The Crime of Napoleon, Claude Ribbe accuses the emperor of genocide, gassing rebellious blacks more than a century before the Nazis' extermination of the Jews.His accusations refer to the extreme methods used to put down a ferocious uprising in Haiti at the start of the 19th century. The
Source: NYT
Nov 26, 2005
Paul Revere Williams, who designed the Morris Landau House, could not have lived in the tony Holmby Hills section of Los Angeles when the home was built there.
Williams was black, and in 1936, the year he completed the red brick English-country-style residence, African-Americans were barred by restrictive covenants and prevailing biases from owning property in the best parts of the city.Williams, a pre-eminent Southern California architect, lived ins
Source: Boston Globe
Nov 26, 2005
On Saturday, relatives and survivors lit 33,000 candles in Kiev as Ukrainians marked the anniversary of the Great Famine in 1932-1933 that the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin provoked as part of his campaign to force Ukrainian peasants to give up their land and join collective farms. During the height of the famine, which was enforced by methodical confiscation of all food by the Soviet secret police, cannibalism was widespread. The Soviet-era forced famine killed up to 10 million Ukrainians.
Source: Guardian (UK)
Nov 25, 2005
The fireman's hall on Primorska Street, a crimson and white building with a large Croatian flag, is a centre of Pozega's community life, rented out for wedding parties and operettas.
On Christmas Day 64 years ago the hall was not a place to party. Around 150 of this country town's Jews were rounded up, penned here, robbed of their valuables, and put on cattle wagons bound for the concentration camps of fascist Croatia's Ustasha state. They all perished, along with hundreds of other
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 25, 2005
When Gertrude Bell died in 1926, thousands of Iraqis lined the streets to watch the funeral parade of the woman described in obituaries across the world as "Mesopotamia's uncrowned queen".
Miss Bell, a renowned archaeologist, brilliant linguist and Arabist, had drawn up the new state's borders and become the confidante of the country's first Hashemite monarch, King Faisal.
She wrote to her father: "As we rode back through the [Baghdad] suburb where all th
Source: Seattle Post Intelligencer
Nov 25, 2005
On George Hageman's iPod: the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, the Foo Fighters, the Rolling Stones and a backup of all his schoolwork.
On more than 2,000 other iPods: George's Military History Podcast. And those are just the subscribers through iTunes.
His Web site has recorded more than 15,000 downloads since he debuted his weekly show on Labor Day weekend: "Bringing you the strangest anecdotes, most
Source: Lawrence Journal-World
Nov 25, 2005
The 1918 flu obtained its Spanish nickname because Spain was the first European nation to highly publicize the outbreak in that country. Other European nations also had outbreaks, but because of the war, newspapers were giving little, if any, publicity to bad news.
Most historical accounts, however, say the flu originated in Kansas, at Fort Riley’s Camp Funston. The first reports of soldiers getting sick occurred in March. Historians also think American soldiers sent to Europe were
Source: Newsday
Nov 25, 2005
The cemetery, in the eastern district of Weissensee, has deteriorated so badly that it would take about $48 million to restore many of the 115,000 graves and elaborate tombs, most of which predate World War II, said Albert Meyer, chairman of the Berlin Jewish community.
"This is the last chance. Nature is reclaiming the site; much of it looks like a jungle. If we don't do anything now, we won't be able to save it," said Meyer, adding that many tombs already were almost bey
Source: Guardian
Nov 25, 2005
On Christmas Day 64 years ago around 150 of Croatia's Jews in the town of Pozega were rounded up, penned here, robbed of their valuables, and put on cattle wagons bound for the concentration camps of fascist Croatia's Ustasha state. They all perished, along with hundreds of other local Jews and Serbs. By 1942 the town's entire Jewish community, the oldest in the central and eastern part of Croatia called Slavonia, were wiped out.
The police chief in what was then a small town of 7,
Source: BBC
Nov 25, 2005
Poland's new defence minister has announced he is declassifying the country's Warsaw Pact files. Radoslaw Sikorski said the files, which had remained secret until now, will be open to historians at the state-run Institute of National Remembrance.
The institute investigates war crimes in the Communist era. The archive reveals details about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 and the imposition of martial law in Poland in 1981.
Source: AP
Nov 25, 2005
Dwight D. Eisenhower had been dead for more than a decade before scholars began calling him one of the greatest presidents in American history. Now planners have chosen one of Washington's most prominent sites for a grand memorial to the humble man from Abilene, Kan.The plaza-style memorial across the street from the National Mall would honor Eisenhower's legacy of public service, joining the collection of nearby monuments to Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Delan
