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.com
Jan 11, 2013
The Founding Fathers are frequently quoted in the gun control debate, but many of those quotations turn out to be fake.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
Jan 11, 2013
A 14-year battle over the fate of a modern structure at the heart of Gettysburg National Military Park is over.The National Park Service said Thursday that it would begin demolishing the Cyclorama building as soon as February, clearing the site ahead of the 150th anniversary commemoration of the battle.The site will be restored to its 1863 appearance, complete with a period apple orchard and replicas of the wood fences that once crisscrossed the fields, park spokeswoman Katie Lawhon said. The massive painting that the building once housed has been separately preserved....
Source: NYT
Jan 11, 2013
After two years of research, the J. Paul Getty Museum has decided to voluntarily return a terracotta head believed to depict the god Hades to Sicily, where recent excavations have uncovered fragments indicating that the head was illicitly removed in the 1970s from a site of a sanctuary of Demeter.“In keeping with the principle of repatriating works when compelling evidence warrants it, the decision to transfer this head is based on the discovery of four terracotta fragments found near Morgantina in Sicily, similar in style and medium to the Getty head,” the museum said Thursday in a statement....
Source: NYT
Jan 11, 2013
One way to think of it is this: It is a page from the script for the script for “Lincoln.”The script for the script? Historical documents and reference materials served as the basis for the movie’s script, and this is an original document, a 106-word draft of a telegram signed by Abraham Lincoln himself. So it was not polished by the writers in Hollywood.Lincoln wrote it in May 1862, when, as the movie made clear, Lincoln was focusing on the Emancipation Proclamation. Lincoln sent the telegram — to be displayed at the Winter Antiques Show, which opens to the public on Jan. 25 at the Park Avenue Armory — in reply to a 10-page message from Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, who has been described by one historian as Lincoln’s “never-ready” general....
Source: WSJ
Jan 11, 2013
NEW YORK — Philanthropist and former Wall Street money manager Michael Steinhardt began collecting objects of Jewish history and culture three decades ago, eventually amassing a collection of manuscripts, textiles and art worth millions of dollars.Now, the 72-year-old wants to sell his more than 500-piece collection so others can enjoy it.Sotheby's will auction the collection in New York on April 29 after also exhibiting it in Moscow and Jerusalem and offering special presentations in Hong Kong, Singapore, Brazil and several European and U.S. cities....
Source: WaPo
Jan 11, 2013
“Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005, half of all of them in the history of the country.”— Former President Bill Clinton, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jan. 9, 2013A colleague spotted this eye-popping statistic by the former president and wondered if it was correct.... In the highly charged debate over guns, it is important for politicians on both sides to get their facts straight. In this case, the available data shows that Clinton was way off-base in his assertion, making an exaggerated claim — which his office would not even defend. Ordinarily, this might have been a Four Pinocchio claim. Given the fuzziness of the data and questions about definitions, we are going to cut Clinton a bit of slack in the final ruling. But such uncertainty in the data means politicians need to be very careful in making claims about gun violence.
Source: WaPo Answer Sheet
Jan 11, 2013
Why do so many students find history boring? Here’s why, from David Bernstein, a nonprofit executive who lives in Gaithersburg, Md., and has two sons, ages 7 and 15. By David BernsteinWhen I took high school history in the early 1980s, the job of the history teacher was to provide a steady stream of facts, and the job of the student was to commit those facts to memory. Even though I was deeply interested in public affairs, I found both American and World history boring and irrelevant. But later in life, I came to realize, like so many others, that it was impossible to understand modern politics and the interplay of ideas without some grounding in the subject.
Source: WaPo
Jan 10, 2013
Bayard Rustin, an African American scholar from eastern Pennsylvania, was on the front lines of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. He was a key organizer of bus segregation demonstrations in the South, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the March on Washington, where he scheduled the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech and drilled police officers on techniques of nonviolent crowd control.Rustin was also gay. And his story is among those that have inspired an effort to build a national museum in Washington to the history of gay, lesbian and transgender people.Organizers, led by former Smithsonian researcher Tim Gold and his husband, North Carolina furniture magnate Mitchell Gold, are raising money and collecting artifacts to open a national history museum to tell the stories of LGBT Americans at a time when gay rights were frequently a matter of political and cultural debate....
Source: NYT
Jan 10, 2013
When Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave turned professional dressmaker and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, published her memoir, “Behind the Scenes,” in 1868, the response was vitriolic. One Washington reviewer called Mrs. Keckley “treacherous” and asked: “What family of eminence that employs a Negro is safe from such desecration? Where will it end?”What a difference 145 years make.The memoir is now ensconced as a historic literary treasure, and in pop culture’s most recent outbreak of Lincoln fever, Mrs. Keckley is logging significant time onstage, on screen and on the page, where her remarkable life has allowed other writers to explore the complicated intersections of race and power in 1860s America.“She had always prided herself on her integrity and dignity, and to suddenly be dismissed as a lowly servant telling tales was quite a shock,” said Jennifer Chiaverini, whose novel “Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker” is being published by Dutton on Tuesday....
Source: WaPo
Jan 10, 2013
Not for the first time, I’m confused. My search for a gin distillery has led me to a quiet residential street in West London. Can this really be the place? I check my dog-eared A-Z map again. Yeah, this is right: The garage in front of me — little more than a lean-to, really — is the spot.This is the home of Sipsmith, the first copper-pot distillery to open in London in almost 200 years. This is where London’s recent gin revival began....It’s a great story, not least because London, home of the world’s most popular gin style (London Dry), is so inextricably linked to the juniper-infused spirit. The city’s residents have been knocking the drink back in varying quantities ever since the end of the 17th century, when William of Orange arrived from the Netherlands bearing muscular Protestantism and a drink called Jenever. William’s obsequious courtiers soon began drinking Jenever, and his thirsty subjects followed suit. By the middle of the 18th century, everyone was drinking gin, and plenty of people were making it: One house in every four in the City of London reputedly contained distilling equipment.
Source: WaP
Jan 10, 2013
Students at St. Mary’s College of Maryland think they may have found the site of the home of Thomas Gerard, who oversaw thousands of acres known as St. Clement’s Manor when Maryland was still a colony.Despite his land wealth and political influence, Gerard joined a brief rebellion against the Calvert family, which established the colony. The land where Gerard is thought to have lived is now home to Levi and McCue, two American paint horses off Oscar Hayden Road, near Bushwood.The archaeological group of the anthropological research methods class from St. Mary’s College spent several Saturdays digging around the Foxwood Farm in the fall. The landowners, James and Gena Clifton, said they had suspicions 10 years ago that there was a deeper history to the property. They opened their land and home to the students while they worked....
Source: WaPo
Jan 10, 2013
HONOLULU — Herbert Yanamura is an American, born and raised among the coffee farms of Hawaii’s Kona district. Yet the U.S. government branded him an “enemy alien” after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor because he looked like the invaders.So Yanamura volunteered to join the Army to prove his loyalty.Nearly 70 years later, that same government honored him and the thousands of other Japanese-Americans who served in World War II with one of its most elite rewards: the Congressional Gold Medal....
Source: Fox News
Jan 10, 2013
Residents of a town under siege by the Roman army about 2,000 years ago buried two hoards of treasure in the town's citadel — treasure recently excavated by archaeologists.More than 200 coins, mainly bronze, were found along with "various items of gold, silver and bronze jewelry and glass vessels" inside an ancient fortress within the Artezian settlement in the Crimea (in Ukraine), the researchers wrote in the most recent edition of the journal Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia."The fortress had been besieged. Wealthy people from the settlement and the neighborhood had tried to hide there from the Romans. They had buried their hoards inside the citadel," Nikolaï Vinokurov, a professor at Moscow State Pedagogical University, explained....
Source: Fox News
Jan 10, 2013
A long-awaited article on a Coptic papyrus fragment believed to reference the wife of Jesus has been left out of the Harvard Theological Review, furthering doubts about the artifact’s authenticity.The scholarly journal was slated to publish a major article on the finding this month after Karen King, a professor of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), announced in September the discovery of a 4th century fragment of papyrus indicating that some early Christians believed Jesus was married. The text, written in Coptic and likely translated from a 2nd century Greek text, contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to "my wife," whom he identifies as Mary....
Source: MinnPost
Jan 10, 2013
This week in 1933, Minnesota’s charismatic young governor took the oath of office for the second time. In his inaugural speech Floyd Olson embraced a progressive agenda as Minnesotans struggled with high unemployment and foreclosed farm mortgages.Two years earlier, in November 1930, Olson had been elected governor just days after his 39th birthday. That year, Olson and his Farmer Labor Party had prevailed in three-way race with the long-dominant Republicans and the anemic Democrats, just as the Great Depression was tightening its grip. Now, he was beginning his second term while his state was reeling under the Depression’s full force.Olson had run unsuccessfully for governor in 1924, before his newly created party had established a firm political footing in Minnesota. Over the next six years, the Farmer-Labor leader would make a name for himself as a crusading Hennepin county attorney, who battled municipal corruption in City Hall....
Source: Discovery News
Jan 9, 2013
A long lost image from the Hiroshima atomic bombing has been discovered at a Japanese elementary school.The black-and-white photograph shows the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima split into two distinctly separated parts, one on top of the other.The rare image was found at the Honkawa Elementary School in Hiroshima city, in a collection of about 1,000 articles on the WWII atomic bombing. The material was donated by a late survivor, Yosaburo Yamasaki, in or after 1953.According to the Japanese daily Asahi Shimbun, a memo on the back of the photo says it was shot near the town of Kaitaichi, some six miles east of ground zero, two minutes after the bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945....
Source: NYT
Jan 9, 2013
Between them, Senator John Kerry and Chuck Hagel have five Purple Hearts for wounds suffered in Vietnam, shared a harrowing combat experience in the Mekong Delta and responded in different ways to the conflict that tore their generation apart. But in nominating one as secretary of state and the other as defense secretary, President Obama hopes to bring to his administration two veterans with the same sensibility about the futilities of war.Mr. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat who is the president’s choice for the State Department, came home from commanding a Swift boat in Vietnam to throw away his military decorations in a protest at the Capitol, accuse American troops of systematic atrocities and tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Source: NYT
Jan 9, 2013
DRESDEN, Germany — Seventy years ago this winter, Soviet forces surrounded and crushed Hitler’s Sixth Army at Stalingrad. The Germans’ defeat shattered the myth of an unstoppable Nazi war machine and marked a reversal of fortunes in World War II.Now a special exhibition in Dresden returns to that wintry hell on the Volga. It’s being shown in the Military History Museum, once a museum for the Nazi and East German armies. Now run by the German armed forces, the site reopened in October 2011 after a redesign by the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind.Prepared in cooperation with the Stalingrad Battle Museum in present-day Volgograd, the exhibit reveals Germany’s new self-confidence and acceptance of its historical responsibility. The show displays neither the ritual self-flagellation of the German left nor the twisted relativizations of the right....
Source: NYT
Jan 9, 2013
LONDON — The Simon Wiesenthal Center has prompted an outraged debate in Germany after it included a prominent German journalist’s remarks in its annual top 10 list of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs.The Los Angeles-based organization, named for a celebrated Nazi-hunter and dedicated to fighting anti-Jewish bigotry, listed Jakob Augstein, a well-known editor and columnist, among 2012’s top perpetrators of the slurs.It ranked his comments alongside those of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement, racist European soccer fans and Louis Farrakhan....
Source: Yahoo News
Jan 9, 2013
A collector of vintage photography equipment got an extra bonus when he picked up a French camera at an antique store: never-before-seen images circa World War I France.Anton Orlov details the story of the lucky find on his blog the Photo Palace, where all of the eight photos from the Jumelle Belllieni stereoscopic camera can be seen.Orlov writes in his blog that he came across the images completely by accident, as he was cleaning the recently purchased camera. He opened up the film chamber and found the negatives on a stack of glass plates....
