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
Sep 4, 2005
China commemorated the 60th anniversary of Japan's World War II defeat on Saturday, saying "the just had prevailed against the evil" back then but denying any military ambitions today. President Hu Jintao used the occasion to emphasize that China's economic and military power is not directed against Japan or the United States, despite a budding rivalry with both countries."China did not seek hegemony in the past, and it will never seek hegemony in the fu
Source: NYT
Sep 4, 2005
HERB PREMINGER, a courteous, soft-eyed man who lives on East 17th Street in Midwood, Brooklyn, has managed well during his professional life as a marketing writer. But for nearly three decades, his overwhelming passion has been for his work as an amateur historian of the vanished New York candy store. Mr. Preminger, a 59-year-old former soda jerk who is married to a television executive, has shared his knowledge and presented his collection of candy store memorabilia at chur
Source: NYT
Sep 4, 2005
Back in the 20th century, when publishers had three-martini lunches and young women fresh out of Bryn Mawr became secretaries, not editors, it was often lamented that the telephone might put an end to literary biography. In lieu of letters, writers could just as easily gab on the phone, leaving no trace. Today, a new challenge awaits literary biographers and cultural historians: e-mail.The problem isn't that writers and their editors are corresponding less, it's that they're
Source: LAT
Sep 4, 2005
Wrapped in canyon lore, the remnants of burned out structures in LA are believed by one local historian to be those of a small, short-lived colony of Nazis. Although no one can say with certainty who lived there or what they did, Randy Young, a former commercial photographer turned book publisher, said his research indicates that it could have been home to up to 40 local Nazis from about 1933 to 1945.
Source: LAT
Sep 4, 2005
As Americans followed in horror the anarchy, looting and mounting death toll in the wake of the New Orleans flooding, California historians compared that city's devastation with another disaster of nearly a century ago: the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.In both cases, they say, cities crucial to the U.S. economy of the era -- San Francisco's financial might and New Orleans' offshore oil reserves -- were hit by a natural disaster: one by an 8.3 magnitude tem
Source: NYT
Sep 4, 2005
When he was a young lawyer in the Justice Department in 1982, John G. Roberts Jr. wrote a memorandum that contained an unusually caustic assessment of a prominent black lobbying group called TransAfrica, according to documents released Saturday by NARA. The memorandum was written in response to a letter to the Justice Department in which TransAfrica's president at the time, Randall Robinson, said he would be providing a free subscription of the organization's policy jo
Source: NYT
Sep 4, 2005
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist died Saturday night of the thyroid cancer he had battled for nearly a year, opening a second Supreme Court vacancy just days before Senate confirmation hearings were to begin to fill the seat being vacated by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.Kathleen Arburg, the court's public information officer, said Chief Justice Rehnquist, 80, had died at his home in Arlington, Va., surrounded by his three children. She said he had been working at the
Source: CNN
Sep 3, 2005
Aerial shots indicate the city jewel -- the French Quarter -- remains intact and relatively dry, he said. Café du Monde, the home of sugar-dusted beignets -- puffy, rectangular doughnuts -- is still there. Just across the street behind Jackson Square, the Cabildo and Presbytre museums still squat beside St. Louis Cathedral. "By and large, the French Quarter seems to be dry," Foreman noted. "That's important. That's home to Preservation Hall.
Source: Financial Times (London)
Sep 3, 2005
In 1939 Polish intelligence offered to the British the German encoding machine, Enigma, plus the keys to keep decoding Wehrmacht secret messages, 80 per cent of which the Poles could read. The British, obsessed with the Empire not Europe, had focused on trying to read Japanese naval codes and showed little interest in the fact the Poles were cracking German codes before the war started.Throughout history, intelligence agencies and secret agents are the most easily mocked of
Source: NYT
Sep 3, 2005
"Every time a new justice comes to the Supreme Court, it's a different court," Justice Byron R. White liked to say, and he had reason to know. During a tenure of 31 years, he saw the arrival of 13 new colleagues. Each one, he said, made the court "a new instrument."Supreme Court history is filled with testaments to the impact of personality and the significance of personal interaction. Prof. Sanford V. Levinson of the University of Texas School of L
Source: NYT
Sep 3, 2005
It was with the appointment in 1993 of James Lee Witt, from Arkansas, that FEMA began to earn respect. Bill Clinton made FEMA a cabinet-level agency. "Witt shaped it into an organization that was not only to respond to disaster but attempt to mitigate disaster by taking actions before they occurred," said Michael Greenberger, a domestic security expert at the University of Maryland and a former Justice Department official
After severe flooding in the Midwest in 19
Source: HNN
Sep 3, 2005
Welcoming in the age of chips, bits and the World Wide Web, American Heritage magazine plans to debut a new website on September 6 which features articles, photographs and blogs. A beta version of the website, features a comprehensive timeline of World War II, an article examining the influences and impact of the Baby Boomer generation, among others.
Source: Network of Concerned Historians
Sep 3, 2005
The Writers in Prison Committee of International PEN reported yesterday that author Orhan Pamuk will be brought before an Istanbul court on 16 December 2005 and that he faces up to three years' imprisonment for expressing an opinion about the Armenian genocide of 1915 and the Kurdish insurrection of 1984-2000. International PEN greets with shock the news that the world-famous Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, will be brought before an Istanbul court on 16 December and that he fac
Source: Advertiser (Australia)
Sep 3, 2005
The Australian War Memorial's principal historian Dr Peter Stanley has released a paper that claims Japan never planned to invade Australia and the "myth" was promoted by Prime Minister John Curtin as a "motivational device"."The invasion myth had remained alive for 60 years, abetted by the seeming need of Australians to dramatise their situation in 1942," he said.
"Why can't we as a nation accept that the war the
Source: WSJ
Sep 2, 2005
A new class of best sellers has arisen--mainly old books, given new life by the Internet, specialty bookstores, librarians and word of mouth--for parents who home-school their children. There is no one book they all read, but each group of home schoolers has its favorites, and some have crossover appeal. Conservative Christians, for example, have flocked to the Elsie Dinsmore books, by Martha Finley, 28 novels that sold millions when they were published between 1867 and 1905. The books tell the
Source: LAT
Sep 2, 2005
Attempts to have library books removed from shelves increased by more than 20% in 2004 over the previous year, according to a new survey by the American Library Assn.Three books with gay themes, including Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," were among the works most criticized.
"It all stems from a fearfulness of well-meaning people," says Michael Gorman, president of the library association. "We believe in parental r
Source: HNN
Sep 2, 2005
This past week hurricane Katrina ripped through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama with New Orleans suffering some of the worst devastation as water levels rose throughout the city, leading to an unprecedented peace-time order to evacuate the entire area.. Students at Tulane University were set to start classes this week. At first the university was hopeful that it would be possible to resume classes on September 1. Soon that date was pushed back to September 7, but with 80 percent of the city f
Source: NYT
Sep 2, 2005
The slogan at the entrance to the new museum of emigration says it all: "Over seven million people departed from here to an unknown world." Emigration House, which opened a few weeks ago, is intended to explain why immigrants left Europe. The spacious, modern building, framed in latticed wood, overlooks Bremerhaven's Old Port, created in 1837 in large part to take advantage of the wave of emigration to America that began around then from Germany.
Source: American Association of Museums
Sep 2, 2005
Preliminary reports have now been assembled on the condition of many of the museums in the path of Katrina. Beauvoir, Jefferson Davis's home, located in Biloxi, was virtually demolished. The Louisiana State Museum has sustained moderate to severe damage. The Old Capitol Museum of Mississippi History lost a third of its copper roof.
Source: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History
Sep 2, 2005
On 2 August 2005, on the eve of the 85th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, President Bush signed P.L.109-49, legislation expressing the "sense of Congress" regarding the role that was played by women suffragists who fought for and won the right of women to vote in the United States. Introduced in the House of Representatives as H. J. Res. 59, by Rep. Shelley Berkley (D-NV), this resolution highlights some of the most important figures in the wo
