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: CNN
Aug 29, 2005
North Carolina hopes that history will draw tourists -- from die-hard Civil War buffs to the merely curious -- to points around the state, each identified by a roadside marker. It's part of the Civil War Trails program, a mission in three states -- Virginia, North Carolina and Maryland -- to mark 700 historic points from the Civil War. And so, by the end of the year, state officials plan to have more than 150 roadside markers in place across North Carolina, forming a trail across the state. They
Source: Newsweek
Aug 29, 2005
Molly O'Shea wanted to learn about her dead father, but she didn't turn to a Ouija board. Instead, she took an old letter to a graphologist. Analysis of 550 different handwriting variables showed a man who was straightforward, diplomatic and intelligent but had problems with anger. "It really helps me get a handle on who Dad was," says O'Shea.Slants, loops and spacing are providing info from beyond the grave. According to Barbara Vines Little of the National
Source: WP
Aug 28, 2005
Historians have teamed up with politicians to commemorate the War of 1812, parts of which were fought up and down the Chesapeake Bay. Congress is considering legislation that would designate as a national historic trail a 290-mile path winding through Virginia, Maryland and the District to link the war's battle sites. The Star-Spangled Banner Trail would begin in Southern Maryland near St. Leonard Creek and loop up to such sites as Alexandria, Washington, Bladensburg and Bal
Source: Sacramental Bee
Aug 28, 2005
As his approval numbers sink during these dog days of August, President Bush might take solace by reflecting on the roller-coaster ride through history taken by one of his predecessors. In April 1951, shortly after he removed Gen. Douglas MacArthur from command of U.S. troops in Korea, Harry Truman hit an all-time low in presidential popularity: Only 23 percent of his countrymen approved of the Missourian's job performance. Yet today, Truman regularly shows up as a top 10 president in scholarly
Source: Guardian
Aug 28, 2005
A CODE-BREAKING book which aims to change the image of William Shakespeare and reveal him as a subversive who embedded dangerous political messages in his work is to be published in Britain. Far from being an ambitious entertainer who played down his Catholic roots under a repressive Elizabethan regime, Shakespeare took deliberate risks each time he took up his quill, according to Clare Asquith's new book Shadowplay.She argues that the plays and poems are a network of
Source: LAT
Aug 28, 2005
Given the pharaoh's mammoth celebrity, Tut's divine ka would eventually find itself holding down an unexpected job. Culture is a soft instrument in promoting a nation's interests in commercial, political and strategic fields, and Tut has been doing that work with skill and finesse for more than 30 years. He has shuttled around the world since the 1970s, first as a player in the Cold War and now, improbably, during the war on terrorism. The dead boy king was reborn as Ambassador Tut, Egypt's most
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Aug 28, 2005
Playa Giron, Cuba: For Cubans, however, this pleasant beach is more than a garden spot for holidays. Forty-four years ago, it was the scene of a raging 60-hour battle in which Fidel Castro's newly minted revolution vanquished a band of Cuban exiles armed and trained by the CIA and sent to sweep the upstart Communist leader's regime out of Cuba. "All Cubans come here," said Ivan Torres, 30, a construction worker who recalls making trips to Playa Giron and the nearby Bay of Pigs as a sch
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Aug 28, 2005
The computerized three-dimensional image of Washington at age 19, as well as images as he appeared as a Revolutionary War general at 45 and president at 57, are the result of a yearlong multidisciplinary effort led by University of Pittsburgh anthropologist Jeffrey Schwartz.No one ever painted or sculpted a likeness of Washington when he was an unknown frontier surveyor; in fact, no portrait of him before age 40 exists. But Schwartz said the new images are
Source: Boston Globe
Aug 28, 2005
ARE COLLEGE HISTORY professors too busy writing books, chasing the tenure bus, and expanding the minds of elite 18-year-olds to care about the problem of high-school graduates who don't know what century the Civil War was fought in? That's the charge leveled by a damning article in the latest issue of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the American Historical Association (AHA), the nation's most prominent organization of history professors.Th
Source: BBC
Aug 28, 2005
One of the last surviving St Kilda islanders has returned to see his homeland, 75 years after its evacuation. Norman John Gillies only spent the first five years of his life on the islands, but his childhood memories remain clear.
Far out into the Atlantic, the islands are the most remote part of the British Isles ever inhabited.
Islanders lived there for thousands of years, until the last left in 1930.
On the anniversary of the 75th
Source: NYT
Aug 28, 2005
When the Portuguese arrived in Brazil five centuries ago, they encountered a fundamental problem: the indigenous peoples they conquered spoke more than 700 languages. Rising to the challenge, the Jesuit priests accompanying them concocted a mixture of Indian, Portuguese and African words they called "língua geral," or the "general language," and imposed it on their colonial subjects. Elsewhere in Brazil, língua geral as a living, spoken tongue died off long ago. But in SÃO GA
Source: NYT
Aug 28, 2005
After Senator Trent Lott was deposed as the Republican leader in December 2002 because of a racially charged remark, he slipped into the background, quietly rebuilding his power and career. But Mr. Lott is quiet no more, with a new memoir and an accompanying national book tour in which he is providing a behind-the-scenes view of his more than 30 years representing Mississippi in Congress and his admittedly inept handling of a furor that began with words of praise for Senator Strom Thurmond at hi
Source: NYT
Aug 28, 2005
Today is the 50th anniversary of the killing, an occasion for a new documentary film, re-examinations of the story in the news media and updates on the progress of a reopened investigation. The Clarion-Ledger, a newspaper in Jackson, Miss., reported last week, for example, that the body federal agents exhumed from Emmett's grave near Chicago in June had been positively identified through DNA. But little has been said about the photographs of Emmett taken at his open-coffin viewing, which were fi
Source: Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
Aug 27, 2005
At a June 10 press conference at the Hotel Washington, Liberty survivors presented details of a “Report of War Crimes” brief filed by James R. Gotcher, general legal counsel for the USS Liberty Veterans Association (USS-LVA). On June 8, the anniversary of the attack, Gotcher submitted the 35-page, carefully footnoted report to Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey, who acts as executive agent for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. After receiving this report, which presents evidence allegedly impl
Source: CNN
Aug 27, 2005
Was there a black cat aboard the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor, placed inside a cannon by a superstitious but desperate sailor as the vessel was sinking? Conservators had hoped to verify the legend as they worked this month to extract concrete-like sediment from two cast iron, smooth-bore cannons salvaged from the ship's turret.A crewman who had survived the sinking off the North Carolina coast more than 140 years ago maintained that he stuffed the feline into
Source: Newsday
Aug 27, 2005
The body of Jumhour el-Zergany was found dumped alongside the road. Zergany had been tortured, his arms broken, before his tormentors finally put three bullets in his head. His crime, according to another professor who studied under him, was that he had converted years before from Shia to Sunni Islam and had dared to hire religious Sunni professors in the history department that he chaired.A police van was seen by witnesses to have stopped Zergany's car at the time of
Source: BBC
Aug 27, 2005
A replica of Nelson's HMS Victory has been set alight in front of thousands of spectators to mark the Battle of Trafalgar's 200th anniversary. The Torrington Cavaliers fund-raising group, of Devon, hoped to raise £57,000 - the cost of the original Victory - with the event in the town.
The group spent two years building the 100ft-long half-size mock-up.
Hattie Hill, 11, and her sister Katie, nine, of Welcombe, lit the fire after their godfather wo
Source: BBC
Aug 27, 2005
Crime author Patricia Cornwell has taken out full-page ads in two national newspapers to deny she is obsessed with Jack the Ripper. Cornwell claimed artist Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper in a book in 2002. Ripper experts rejected that theory.
In Saturday's Guardian and Independent, Cornwell stands by her claim and calls on others to disprove it.
The ads are thought to have cost more than £10,000 each. An updated edition of her book will appear
Source: WP
Aug 26, 2005
Thieves broke into a documentation center at Adolf Hitler's one-time retreat in the German Alps near the town of Berchtesgaden early Friday, stealing a weapon along with Nazi-era badges and photos, police said.
Officers found a broken window at the Obersalzberg center when they arrived at the scene, alerted by the center's burglar alarm. Display windows inside the building had also been smashed and exhibits stolen.Police in the nearby town of Traunst
Source: Wa Po
Aug 26, 2005
When John G. Roberts Jr. prepared to ghostwrite an article for President Ronald Reagan a little over two decades ago, his pen took a Civil War reenactment detour. The article, which was to appear in the scholarly National Forum journal, was called "The Presidency: Roles and Responsibilities." Roberts was writing by hand a section on how the congressional appropriations process had evolved. A fastidious editor of other people's copy as well as his own, Roberts began with the words "
