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
Oct 23, 2005
The blue-and-white 707 flew seven American presidents more than one million miles over nearly three decades of tumult in the United States and the world. Jimmy Carter took it to Germany to greet the hostages from Iran the day after his administration ended, Richard M. Nixon flew it back home to California after resigning the presidency, and Ronald Reagan took it to Berlin when he told Mikhail S. Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."
So on Friday morning, in a fog-shrouded ce
Source: NYT
Oct 23, 2005
When Harriet E. Miers, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, was moving toward the presidency of the State Bar of Texas in 1992, she enthusiastically supported an effort by the group to guarantee positions on its board of directors to female and minority lawyers, her two immediate predecessors said on Saturday.
The two former presidents said Ms. Miers had recognized the value in making sure the group's leadership reflected the state's diversity.
Ms. Miers's position
Source: NYT
Oct 23, 2005
Forty-two years after the church bombing that killed four little girls and inflamed the civil rights movement, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice helped honor them Saturday by recalling one of the victims as a friend with whom she played with dolls and sang in musicals.
On the second day of a trip to highlight the civil rights era as an example for countries struggling to achieve democracy, Ms. Rice and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain visited the 16th Street Baptist Church,
Source: Korea Times
Oct 23, 2005
Asian nations pledged on Sunday to work together to address an ongoing history dispute as Japanese Premier Junichiro Koizumi's repeat visits to a national shrine that honors Japan's war casualties and a number of war criminals has ratcheted up tension in the region.
At the end of the inaugural assembly of the Parliamentarians' Alliance for Peace in Asia (PAPA), over 60 lawmakers from 11 countries adopted a joint declaration of peace and a charter that calls for joint studies into th
Source: Telegraph (London)
Oct 23, 2005
School inspectors want history to be made compulsory for pupils up to the age of 16, and beyond, to help to foster the country's sense of national identity. They made the call as they voiced their increasing concerns about the poor teaching of history in primary and secondary schools. A damning report, published last week by the Office for Standards in Education, found that history lessons in English schools are leaving children ignorant of key facts.Fears that t
Source: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH (LONDON)
Oct 22, 2005
It was the most striking baroque city in Europe - until Allied bombers flattened it in 1945. Next weekend its restoration will be all but complete. "Try to understand," said Peter, smoothing his ponytail as he sat with his girlfriends on the parapet of Augustus Bridge. "That old town over there" - he gestured with his chin, blowing a pointer of Marlboro smoke south across the River Elbe towards the domes and spires of Dresden's Old Town - "that's for
Source: Haaretz
Oct 22, 2005
A factory in Germany, where the crematoriums for Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps were built, is to be turned into a Holocaust museum, the city of Erfurt said Saturday. The company, Topf und Soehne of Erfurt, also provided a ventilation system for the Auschwitz gas chambers. Topf was mainly a builder of brewery plants with crematoriums as a sideline. It will provide a permanent home for an exhibition that began earlier this year at the Jewish Museum in Berlin.The
Source: NYT
Oct 22, 2005
It is the season of witches - cute little costumed ones crying "trick or treat" and full-grown adult ones laying claim to Halloween and recounting tales of medieval and early modern persecution.
In a search for historical roots and moral legitimacy, some feminists and many adherents of neopagan or goddess-centered religious movements like Wicca have elaborated a founding mythology in which witches and witch hunts have a central role. Witches, they claim, were folk healers,
Source: Hartford Courant
Oct 22, 2005
Critics called Latin a dead language 30 years ago, irrelevant and elitist. Even the Catholic Church, its strongest champion, no longer found it necessary in worship services. But it's been going strong lately, especially in Connecticut. In 2004, 7,297 high school students were enrolled in Latin programs, a 48 percent increase from 1995.
It's doing well nationally, also. Almost 135,000 students took the National Latin Exam this year. That's 4,000 more than last year, and participatio
Source: BBC
Oct 22, 2005
All through the heat of summer archaeologists dug and sifted through the dunes on the edge of Gaza City.
Gradually walls, homes, and the outlines of alleyways emerged from the sand.
These were the bones of the ancient Greek city of Antidon. And they were testimony to the extraordinary richness of Gaza's past.
Not only the Greeks passed this way. The Pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the Persians, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Turks, the British
Source: BBC
Oct 22, 2005
The country estate where it is thought Guy Fawkes plotted to blow up King James I has been bought by the Queen.
The Crown Estate, which manages the Monarch's property interests, has bought Ashby St Ledgers estate in Northamptonshire for close to £10m.
The 2,337 acre estate was the ancestral home of Robert Catesby, the leader of the Gunpowder Plot.
It is 400 years since the 1605 plot to blow up the king whilst he was inside Parliament was foiled.
Source: BBC
Oct 22, 2005
Belfast man Teddy Dixon spent the first two years of World War II patrolling the streets of his home city as an air raid warden.
However, a letter which arrived from across the Atlantic ordering him to report for duty with the US army, changed his life for ever. Teddy was born in New York but when he was still a child his parents returned to Northern Ireland. Within weeks of his call-up, Teddy was transformed from a young lad on Belfast's Cregagh Road to
Source: NYT
Oct 22, 2005
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an unusual evocation on Friday of her own past to make a point about the contemporary world, visited the segregated school that she attended and the university where Gov. George Wallace barred the door to blacks, declaring that Alabama had progressed by "light years" since those days.
It was a dramatic setting for her message, repeated for months in Muslim countries and elsewhere, often in the face of considerable skepticism: it is p
Source: WP
Oct 22, 2005
Bush administration envoy Karen Hughes visited Indonesia on Friday as part of her campaign to repair U.S. standing with the world's Muslims and defended the invasion of Iraq by telling skeptical students that deposed president Saddam Hussein had gassed hundreds of thousands of his own people.
State Department officials later acknowledged that Hughes, tapped by President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to set the record straight on U.S. policies in the Muslim world, had
Source: WP
Oct 21, 2005
Steven Spielberg's voluminous archive documenting the lives of Holocaust survivors has merged with the University of Southern California. The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation officially became part of USC's College of Letters, Arts and Sciences on Thursday after years of negotiations.USC promises to preserve and propagate the archive, which includes 52,000 videotaped life histories, all of them digitized. The university will fund the $5 million annual budget.
Source: Agence France-Presse
Oct 21, 2005
Britain celebrated the 200th anniversary of Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson's victory in the Battle of Trafalgar with thousands of events marking the historic fight. Queen Elizabeth II was to lead the tribute, lighting a beacon at sunset beside Nelson's preserved flagship HMS Victory in Portsmouth, on the southern English coast, upon which the British war hero died during the battle. A total of 1,000 beacons were to be set ablaze across Britain to mark the day the British navy battered a combined Fr
Source: NYT
Oct 21, 2005
It has become fashionable to look at Hitler and Stalin as the twin monsters of 20th-century history. Entire volumes (like Alan Bullock's "Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives" and Richard Overy's "The Dictators: Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia") have examined these two tyrants through the lens of the compare-and-contrast school of history writing, and much ink has been spilled debating which of them was worse - never mind that such debates seem beside the point, indeed offensi
Source: AHA Perspectives (Oct. 2005)
Oct 21, 2005
Elite history departments tend to draw their faculty from elite PhD programs, economist Stephen Wu reports in the July–August 2005 issue of Academe (the magazine published by the American Association of University Professors). That is hardly news to anyone in the profession, but Wu's analysis provides some context by comparing history to five other disciplines. Wu collected degree information for just over 5,000 full-time faculty in six disciplines (chemistry, economics, Eng
Source: USA Today
Oct 21, 2005
France, grappling for decades with its colonial past, has passed a law to put an upbeat spin on a painful era, making it mandatory to enshrine in textbooks the country's "positive role" in its far-flung colonies.
But the law is stirring anger among historians and passions in places like Algeria, which gained independence in a brutal conflict. Critics accuse France of trying to gild an inglorious colonial past with an "official history." At is
Source: NYT
Oct 21, 2005
The Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which was established by Steven Spielberg and has interviewed some 52,000 survivors of the Holocaust to preserve their recollections, is moving to the University of Southern California, with plans to foster similar projects in other cases of genocide and injustice.
One benefit of the move, Mr. Spielberg said, was that the foundation, which will become part of U.S.C., would be "taken more seriously" by potential donors
