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: Times of India
Aug 12, 2005
Why are parents in Gujarat fuming? The answer lies in textbooks that — despite being full of distortions and language errors — are being taught across the state's classrooms. They say, these books are clearly not teaching students history. So, Bhaven Patel, father of a class IX student in Ahmedabad, is not amused. As the state education department refuses to withdraw the class IX social sciences textbook, ridden with errors and misrepresentations, he feels it will leave a wrong impact on impress
Source: Telegraph
Aug 12, 2005
The publishers of a book that accuses British intelligence of murdering Heinrich Himmler, the chief of the SS in Nazi Germany, say they will not withdraw the work even though its claims are based on forged documents. Himmler's Secret War, by Martin Allen, is not only still on sale in bookshops but until last Friday was advertised on the website of Chrysalis Books as a "staff recommendation" to readers.
Source: Guardian
Aug 12, 2005
The lengths to which the Soviet authorities were ready to go in their efforts to block publication of Boris Pasternak's epic novel about 20th-century Russia, Doctor Zhivago, was revealed by a letter published yesterday. After the book was rejected by the authorities, Pasternak passed his manuscript to the leftwing Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who had it translated and printed in the west. In messages to those involved in what was to be the literary coup of the century, Pasternak c
Source: Wa Po
Aug 12, 2005
A central principle of the future National Museum of African American History and Culture will be that the varied stories of African Americans have broad meaning to all people. "The notion that African American history has limited meaning should be a concern for all of us," said Lonnie G. Bunch, the founding director of the planned museum that will be part of the Smithsonian Institution. For instance, he explained, he's been troubled by a survey in the 1990s in which 81 percent of whit
Source: Jacksonville
Aug 12, 2005
In 1836, a war party burned 21 plantations along the St. Johns River,making off with hundreds of slaves and permanently crippling the North Florida sugar industry. For more than 150 years, most historians believed only Seminole Indians and their free black allies conducted the raids. But a growing, if controversial, body of research points toward a conspiracy between the black warriors -- known as Black Seminoles or maroons -- and the plantation slaves. That would make North Florida the locus fo
Source: BBC
Aug 12, 2005
George Orwell'sdilapidated home in India will soon get a welcome makeover. The writer of dark cult novels like Animal Farm and 1984 was born Eric Arthur Blair in the tiny town of Motihari in the eastern state of Bihar in 1903. More than a century after Orwell's birth, his first home - a crumbling, one-storey building near the abandoned indigo warehouse where his father worked - is home to a local English teacher. Now plans are afoot to build a museum and a stadium and put up a statue of the writ
Source: Wa Po
Aug 12, 2005
In the early 1980s, a young intellectual lawyer named John G. Roberts Jr. was part of the vanguard of a conservative political revolution in civil rights, advocating new legal theories and helping enforce the Reagan administration's effort to curtail the use of courts to remedy racial and sexual discrimination. Just 26 when he joined the Justice Department as a special assistant to Attorney General William French Smith, Roberts was almost immediately entrusted to counsel senior department offici
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Aug 12, 2005
More than 200 academics from the United States, Armenia, Turkey, and elsewhere have signed an open letter to the president of Armenia expressing their "grave concern" at the arrest and detention of a Ph.D. candidate from Duke University. The student, Yektan Turkyilmaz, a Turkish citizen, was arrested on June 17 as he was leaving Armenia for Turkey with about 100 secondhand books he had legally purchased. Mr. Turkyilmaz is a candidate for a degree in cultural anthropology, and his disse
Source: Telegraph
Aug 12, 2005
THE Indian capital should be renamed Dehli to correct a 150-year-old mistake, according to historians in India.
They have launched a campaign to correct the "mis-spelling", which they say happened during British rule because the colonialists could not pronounce Hindi names.
K M L Misra, a former head of history at Agra College, said: "For 800 years Delhi was called Dehli but the British couldn't manage the breathy sound of Hindi and the spelling of the ci
Source: Telegraph
Aug 12, 2005
IN AN attempt to revive interest in the legacy of Charles de Gaulle, a pounds 10 million museum is to be built in his home village.
Colombey-Les-Deux-Eglises, where France's most famous modern statesman lived between 1934 and his death in 1970, has always been viewed as a place of political pilgrimage.
More than 500,000 people a year once visited the village, which is 125 miles east of Paris. But, as a new generation of French men and women lose interest in past reputat
Source: NY Daily News
Aug 12, 2005
You might think Dagwood Bumstead's idea of a 75th-anniversary celebration would be to eat a sandwich that includes four tomatoes, six wedges of cheese, a head of lettuce, two slices of pizza, a bottle of Tabasco sauce and a leg of lamb.
Then lie down on the sofa for a nap.
You might think Blondie Bumstead's idea of an anniversary celebration would be to try on dresses all afternoon at Tudbury's with Tootsie Woodley.
But for their anniversary, they've got bi
Source: Christian Science Monitor
Aug 12, 2005
The most recent effort to assess US actions during the summer of 1945 is Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's "Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan," a landmark book that brilliantly examines a crucial moment in 20th-century history.
Beyond evaluating the American dimension of the story, Hasegawa, a historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, considers two related themes: the "tangled relationship" between the Soviet Union and Japan in the wa
Source: Australian
Aug 12, 2005
A LAW professor banned from taking classes after making alleged racist remarks should be allowed to continue teaching at a Sydney university, Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson says.
The minister tonight weighed into the controversy involving Macquarie University's Associate Professor Andrew Fraser, who was locked out of his classroom today and replaced as a lecturer on the orders of the university's vice-chancellor, Professor Di Yerbury.
Professor Yerbury said Profess
Source: xinhuanet.com
Aug 12, 2005
Canada's military grilled hundreds of immigrants and refugees who settled in the country at the height of the Cold War for valuable information, says a new study by a historian from the University of Toronto. The Joint Intelligence Bureau, a section of the Defense Department which handled secret information on economic and military matters, set up an interrogation unit in 1953 to debrief newcomers from Hungary, Poland and other countries, the Canadian Press (CP) reported Monday, citing a report
Source: NY Sun
Aug 12, 2005
From the Chicago Sun-Times:
In a letter written during the heart of the Civil War in the summer of 1863, the Confederate soldier confidently boasts of heading to Mississippi to take on the Union army.
We "are going to Vicksburg to give the yanks a fight,'' he wrote to his family in Louisiana. "I think that we have the yanks in a trap.''
As it turns out, he was wrong. The city fell to the North after nearly 20,000 soldiers from both sides were killed.
Source: Poynter
Aug 12, 2005
Many news organizations reported that Gerry Thomas, who died July 18, came up with the idea of a frozen turkey meal in 1951 after Swanson execs asked employees how to get rid of 520,000 pounds of surplus turkey. "Great story, but it didn't happen," writes Roy Rivenburg. "One of the dirty little secrets of journalism is that reporters rarely have time to investigate every claim people make about their pasts. If you want to embellish, just fool one reporter for one article, then you
Source: Newsday
Aug 11, 2005
A politically appointed state panel will examine whether slavery and the "physical and psychological terrorism" against Africans in the slave trade is adequately taught in schools and textbooks. The panel called the Amistad Commission was approved by the Legislature and signed into law last week by Gov. George Pataki. It is charged with recommending to the Legislature and governor changes in curriculum and textbooks, which because of New York's buying power could i
Source: Ottawa Citizen
Aug 11, 2005
The cold war between the Japanese and Chinese governments has erupted in Ottawa, with their embassies exchanging accusations over the way each is interpreting history.Bilateral relations have been souring over the past few months over the Japanese textbooks' treatment of that country's involvement in the Second World War, a tension compounded by the fight over oil drilling along disputed sea borders.
Now, with the 60th anniversary of Victory Japan Day on M
Source: LAT
Aug 11, 2005
A little-noticed order issued by President Bush almost four years ago gives White House lawyers the right to block the release of memos written by Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. when he worked for President Reagan.The order, signed by Bush in November 2001, said the "incumbent president" had the right to approve the release of papers from the presidential libraries of his father, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan.
It set off a furor
Source: Pacific News Service
Aug 11, 2005
The intersection at 116th Street and Avalon Boulevard is often referred to as the flash point or epicenter of the 1965 Watts riot, but for Tommy Jacquette, it was simply a place to “kick it.”Forty years ago today, at an apartment complex seemingly untouched by time, Jacquette was hanging out with the other “young bloods” of the block playing Bid Whiz and drinking beer on a blistering summer evening in August. It was an hour or so after the frenetic arrest of 21-year-ol
