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: BBC
Oct 7, 2005
A manuscript believed to have been written by a doctor who examined Napoleon Bonaparte's body could put an end to the theory he was murdered.
Many historians have claimed the French Emperor was poisoned with arsenic, although the official cause of his death in 1821 was stomach cancer. The document found in a Scottish cottage seems to confirm the official theory of his death while in exile. It will be auctioned by Thomson Roddick & Medcalf of Carlisle
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Oct 6, 2005
John Marshall is widely revered as "the great Chief Justice," but before joining the Supreme Court in 1801 he had never served a day in judicial robes and lost the only case he argued at the high court.
Earl Warren had worked for 18 years as a prosecutor and was three times elected governor of California. But he had no prior judicial experience. Nor did William Rehnquist, Felix Frankfurter, and Louis Brandeis. Who is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court is a determination made
Source: BBC
Oct 6, 2005
The White House has dismissed as "absurd" allegations made in a BBC TV series that President Bush claimed God told him to invade Iraq.
"He's never made such comments," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
The comments were attributed to Mr Bush by the Palestinian negotiator Nabil Shaath in the upcoming TV series Elusive Peace: Israel and the Arabs.
Mr Shaath said that in a 2003 meeting with Mr Bush, the US president said he was &q
Source: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Oct 6, 2005
The National Park Service (NPS) has selected a new location for the Hamilton Grange, the NPS administered New York residence of Alexander Hamilton. After existing for over one hundred years at Convent Avenue and 141st Street in New York City, Hamilton’s residence is being moved to St. Nicholas Park. By relocating the house the NPS hopes to reveal the true front and back of the structure and would permit the original porches to be reattached and enhance the visitor experience.
Source: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Oct 6, 2005
The National History Center, an initiative of the American Historical Association, has appointed Miriam E. Hauss as its Administrative Officer effective 1 August 2005. Ms. Hauss, who hold a Master’s degree in Modern European History from the American University and a B.A. with honors in Modern European History from the University of Kentucky, has worked for the American Historical Association since October 1999, first as Special Projects Coordinator and more recently as Marketing and Development
Source: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Oct 6, 2005
The National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) has released a report on the automatic declassification of 25-year-old documents of various executive branch agencies. Submitted to President Bush, the report indicates that most of the agencies are on track to meet the 31 December 2006 deadline, though a handful still remain at risk of coming up short.The report states that an estimated 155 million pages of textual records
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
Oct 6, 2005
FOR SOMEONE BOTH HERALDED AND FEARED as a potentially conservative voice on the U.S. Supreme Court, President Bush's nominee, Harriet E. Miers, has played a key role in exposing college students to some unmistakably liberal ideas. In the late 1990s, she helped create a lecture series in women's studies at Southern Methodist University whose inaugural speaker was Gloria Steinem.In the late 1990s, as a member of the advisory board for Southern Methodist University's law school
Source: Inside Higher Education
Oct 6, 2005
Recreating exactly what happened, and why, is difficult, because most of the parties are reluctant to talk about it — and in fact agreed not to as part of the mediated settlement reached over the summer. But it went something like this:
Last March, the University of California Press published Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin, an assistant professor of sociology at Penn, and Maria Kefales, an assistant professor at Saint Joseph’s Uni
Source: Jerusalem Post
Oct 6, 2005
In a surprise move, an advisory body to California's board of education rejected a sixth-grade history program that Hindu and Jewish groups blasted as biased, erroneous and culturally derogatory.
During a two-day hearing last week before the state's curriculum development and supplemental materials commission, Jewish critics lambasted the Oxford University Press textbook and related materials for subjecting early Jewish history to a more rigid standard of proof than Christian or Mus
Source: The New Zealand Herald
Oct 6, 2005
Shakespeare's plays were not written by the bard but rather a politician descended from King Edward III and John of Gaunt, remarkable new evidence suggests.
British Shakespeare scholar Brenda James and historian Professor William Rubinstein of the University of Wales propose the real Shakespeare was English courtier and diplomat Sir Henry Neville.Shakespeare's plays were not written by the bard but rather a politician descended from King Edward III and John of G
Source: The Baltimore Sun
Oct 6, 2005
That dancing "N" signature at the end of the letter seeking supplies for officers encamped at Valley Forge in 1778 belongs to Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, George Washington's quartermaster.
George Washington signed "GWashington" to a bill of lading for 10 barrels of shad and 40 of herring at Mount Vernon on May 29, 1788, connecting the G and W with a flourish and crossing his t with a trademark curlicue.
These letters are among the treasures in the Ed
Source: NYT
Oct 6, 2005
Over the years, Sondra Mose-Ursery received blank looks from neighbors in response to her questions about a nearly forgotten 19th-century community of fugitive slaves. "You'd ask people about Ramptown, and no one had heard about it," said Ms. Mose-Ursery, a local historian. That was before a team from the anthropology department at Western Michigan University verified the existence of the community with the discovery of the first archaeological evidence of fugitive slaves in Michigan,
Source: AFP
Oct 6, 2005
The World Monument Fund (WMF) announced that it was adding New Orleans and the rest of the hurricane-devastated US Gulf Coast to its list of the world's 100 most endangered sites. "We recognize that heritage preservation is a secondary concern as extraordinary humanitarian relief efforts continue throughout the Gulf Coast region," said WMF president Bonnie Burnham."But we also know from experience that there are things we can do now to prevent further loss lat
Source: US Newswire
Oct 6, 2005
A new U.S. government report refers to Holocaust-deniers as "scholars and researchers," prompting the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies to call for the report to be recalled from circulation and corrected."Holocaust-deniers are not scholars or researchers -- they are bigots who try to hide their anti-semitism behind the mask of fake scholarship," said Wyman Institute Director Dr. Rafael Medoff. "For a U.S. government report t
Source: American Heritage
Oct 5, 2005
Is the great Orson Welles possibly not all that great? Is there something coarse and generic about one of our most beloved war memorials? Which of our Founding Fathers deserves better of us? Which of our painters? For the eighth year in a row historians and journalists assess the ever-shifting reputations of people and events, and once again affirm that history is never history—that it is the most volatile, passionate, and living of pursuits.
Source: NYT
Oct 5, 2005
Who will be the author of Algeria's history?
Will it be a former member of the Islamic Salvation Front, Nassiridin Turkman, who says that Islamic militants played no role in the massacres that left more than 100,000 innocent civilians dead in the 1990's?
Will it be the president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who maintains that the state's security institutions played no role in the disappearance of more than 6,000 people?
Or will it be the member of Parliament who
Source: NYT
Oct 5, 2005
The United States Mint plans to introduce a new design for the nickel with the image of Thomas Jefferson shown facing forward, rather than in profile, for the first time in history. The nation's circulating coins have featured a side view of presidents for nearly a century, beginning with Abraham Lincoln on the penny in 1909. Officials at the mint said the new nickel, based on an 1800 Rembrandt Peale painting of Jefferson, would begin circulating early next year.
Source: NYT
Oct 5, 2005
Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans.The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using t
Source: NYT
Oct 5, 2005
Forty years ago, the antiquities market in Europe and the United States was flooded with looted artifacts from the Petén rain forest of Guatemala. Their artistic style and inscriptions suggested to scholars that the monumental stones came from an abandoned seventh-century Maya city at some unidentified remote place, which became known as Site Q.
Now, archaeologists think the mystery has been solved in the little-known ruins of a place called La Corona. Last week they reported findin
Source: Boston Globe
Oct 5, 2005
Scientists have made from scratch the Spanish flu virus that killed as many as 50 million people in 1918, the first time an infectious agent behind a historic pandemic has ever been reconstructed. Researchers say it may help them better understand -- and develop defenses against -- the threat of a future worldwide epidemic from bird flu.Like the 1918 virus, the current avian flu in Southeast Asia occurs naturally in birds. In 1918, the virus mutated, infected peo
