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.
Aug 10, 2005
In Louisa, Va., where Union and Confederate forces once battled, military history buffs assemble on a farm a few weekends each summer to reenact the Vietnam War.
Most of the men and women at the Virginia event were in their thirties and forties -- too young to have experienced the action firsthand but too old to escape the war's grip. Their fathers served in Vietnam, like Robby Gouge's, or they grew up watching it on the news.
As the 90-degree heat and his 50-pound ruck
Aug 10, 2005
David Brooks, in the NYT:
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. I've been trying to figure out why.
A lot of the credit has to go to the people who have been quietly working in this field: to social workers who provide victims with counseling and support; to women's crisis centers, which help women trapped in violent relationships find other places to live; to police forces an
Aug 10, 2005
An Israeli archaeologist says she has uncovered in East Jerusalem what may be the fabled palace of the biblical King David. Her work has been sponsored by a conservative Israeli research institute and financed by an American Jewish investment banker who would like to prove that Jerusalem was indeed the capital of the Jewish kingdom described in the Bible.
Other scholars are skeptical that the foundation walls discovered by the archaeologist, Eilat Mazar, are David's palace. But they
Aug 10, 2005
The rusty iron coffin stubbornly resisted hammer and chisel as researchers in a warm Smithsonian laboratory sought a glimpse of an American who lived more than a century and a half ago.
``This is a person and we want to tell this person's story. She is our primary obligation,'' anthropologist Doug Owsley said as the lid was lifted to reveal a young body wrapped in a brown shroud.
The coffin was found in April by utility workers digging in Washington.
Aug 10, 2005
What's your major? Around the world, college undergraduates' time-honored question is increasingly drawing the same answer: economics.
U.S. colleges and universities awarded 16,141 degrees to economics majors in the 2003-2004 academic year, up nearly 40% from five years earlier, according to John J. Siegfried, an economics professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., who tracks 272 colleges and universities around the country for the Journal of Economic Education.
Aug 10, 2005
"Our end drifts nearer," wrote poet Robert Lowell. "The moon lifts/radiant with terror."
From his precarious Cold War perch, in the poem "Fall 1961," Lowell caught the defining horror of the age in that compact image. Even the moon, under the threat of man's nuclear devastation, takes on a luminous vulnerability. Anything, everything might be destroyed -- and thereby becomes more desperately cherished. Mary McCarthy called the dawn of the nuclear era th
Aug 10, 2005
Only a short decade ago, many descendants of the victims of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre despaired that the nation would ever mature enough to properly honor the memories of their murdered relatives. "The whole truth of Sand Creek needs to be fully understood by the non-Cheyenne as well as the Cheyenne," descendant and tribal historian John Snipes, Jr., told Rocky Mountain PBS in 1996 in an interview for the documentary Tears in the Sand. "And that's something that's real hard and
Aug 10, 2005
Supreme Court nominee John Roberts worked behind the scenes for a coalition of gay-rights activists, and his legal expertise helped them persuade the Supreme Court to issue a landmark 1996 ruling protecting people against discrimination because of their sexual orientation.
Then a lawyer specializing in appellate work, the conservative Roberts helped represent the gay activists as part of his law firm's pro bono work. While he did not write the legal briefs or argue the case before t
Aug 10, 2005
Military masterstroke or crime against humanity? President Harry S. Truman's decision to unleash the horror of nuclear war on Japan in 1945 sparked one of history's most fierce debates. Now, as the 60th anniversary nears of the twin atomic bomb strikes in the final days of World War II, there is new scrutiny of the reasoning that led to the first, and only use in anger of the ultimate weapon.Rea
Aug 10, 2005
Japanese lawmakers on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a resolution that plays down this country's militarist policies in World War II, less than two weeks before ceremonies take place across Asia marking the 60th anniversary of the war's end on Aug. 15.
Though expressing "regret" for the wartime past, the resolution omitted the references to "invasion" and "colonial rule" that were in the version passed on the 50th anniversary.
The action wi
Aug 10, 2005
President Bush is getting the kind of break most Americans can only dream of: nearly five weeks away from the office, loaded with vacation time.
The president departed yesterday for his longest stretch yet away from the White House, arriving at his Crawford ranch in the evening for a round of clearing brush, visiting with family and friends, and tending to some outside-the-Beltway politics. It is the longest presidential retreat in at least 36 years.
The August getaway
Aug 10, 2005
In an unusual collaboration among scientists and humanists, a Cornell University team has demonstrated a novel method for recovering faded text on ancient stone by zapping and mapping 2,000-year-old inscriptions using X-ray fluorescence (XRF) imaging.
The research, carried out at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS), applies a nondestructive chemical analysis technique widely used in geology, archaeology and materials science.
"X-ray fluorescence im
Aug 10, 2005
Earlier this year, though, the foundation that oversees the Herndon Home fired the staff and closed the mansion, a national historic landmark that operated as a museum open to the public.
With no one to care for the building, it now faces another problem: Water damage caused by a leaky roof.
Hardest hit was the music room, one of the most memorable in the two-story 15-room white-columned mansion.
Heavy rains weakened a plaster wall, causing an 18th-century
Aug 10, 2005
Paul Vickery doesn't always like the characters he portrays in this summer's Chautauqua celebration in Greeley.
Take Sen. Joe McCarthy, for example. Vickery, a history professor at Oral Roberts University, does a pretty good job of mimicking the speech pattern, body language and thinking of the late Wisconsin senator who spearheaded the anti-communist movement of the 1950s.
But just because he does a good McCarthy doesn't mean he has to like the man.
&qu
Aug 10, 2005
Almost 30 years after his death, Mao remains the sacred symbol that China dare not touch. His massive portrait still looms above the entrance to the Forbidden City. His face is on every banknote in the country. Yet while he continues to be worshipped in China, a shocking new book has concluded that Mao was the bloodiest mass murderer in history, a sadistic thug who enjoyed torture and was willing to sacrifice half of China's population for his dream of global domination. The biography, based on
Aug 10, 2005
Robert Rankin, a retired Kansas University linguistics professor, is compiling a dictionary and grammar of the Kansa, or Kaw, Indians. With the help of a one-year, $40,000 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Rankin is hustling to finish his Kaw dictionary and grammar manual. “I have about 4,500 entries in the dictionary now,” Rankin said. “I have another 1,000 to 1,500 to get to.”
Source: History Today
Aug 9, 2005
The ancient Bamiyan Buddha statues destroyed by the Taleban regime in Afghanistan could be recreated by lasers. The 140 multicoloured images, powered by wind and solar power, are to be projected onto the four miles of clay cliffs where the 1,600-year-old Buddhas stood before they were pulled down in 2001. The Afghan government has approved of the concept by artist Hiro Yamagata to recreate the images in the Bamiyan Valley Silk Road. The United Nations cultural organisation (Unesco) has to give a
Source: Haaretz
Aug 9, 2005
The State of Israel is in possession of some 1,000 pieces of real estate owned by Jews who died in the Holocaust, Custodian General Shlomo Shahar told a subcommittee of the Law and Constitution Committee on Monday that was discussing the bill for restitution of such property, ahead of its second and third readings.The custodian general said that besides the real estate some 500 other assets of survivors are in his custody, including money and valuables.
In addition, some 3,
Source: LAT
Aug 9, 2005
Workers repairing a sewage pipe in the Old City of Jerusalem have discovered the biblical Pool of Siloam, a freshwater reservoir that was a major gathering place for ancient Jews making religious pilgrimages to the city and the reputed site where Jesus cured a man blind from birth, according to the Gospel of John.The pool was fed by the now famous Hezekiah's Tunnel and is "a much grander affair" than archeologists previously believed, with three tiers of stone stai
Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Aug 9, 2005
A REPORT LAST SPRING arguing that conservative faculty members are less likely to advance in academe has drawn a withering attack in a new paper written by four scholars at the University of Pittsburgh. The authors of the original report, however, take issue with the response. The original report, published in The Forum, a journal of applied research in contemporary politics, was based on a 1999 survey of 1,643 faculty members at 183 colleges in the United States. It found t
