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: AP
Sep 18, 2012
WASHINGTON — The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is installing a covered wagon from its collection to show more of its objects on the museum floor in Washington.On Wednesday morning, visitors will have a chance to see curators prepare and clean the 1800s-era Conestoga wagon to prepare it for exhibit....
Source: Fox News
Sep 18, 2012
The first ever Etruscan pyramids have been located underneath a wine cellar in the city of Orvieto in central Italy, according to a team of U.S. and Italian archaeologists.Carved into the rock of the tufa plateau -- a sedimentary area that is a result of volcanic activity -- on which the city stands, the subterranean structures were largely filled. Only the top-most modern layer was visible."Within this upper section, which had been modified in modern times and was used as a wine cellar, we noticed a series of ancient stairs carved into the wall. They were clearly of Etruscan construction," David B. George of the Department of Classics at Saint Anselm, told Discovery News....
Source: NYT
Sep 18, 2012
A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife ...’ ” The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.” The finding was made public in Rome on Tuesday at the International Congress of Coptic Studies by Karen L. King, a historian who has published several books about new Gospel discoveries and is the first woman to hold the nation’s oldest endowed chair, the Hollis professor of divinity.
Source: NYT
Sep 17, 2012
Inspired by a pillar of antiquity, the Library of Alexandria, Brewster Kahle has a grand vision for the Internet Archive, the giant aggregator and digitizer of data, which he founded and leads.“We want to collect all the books, music and video that has ever been produced by humans,” Mr. Kahle said. As of Tuesday, the archive’s online collection will include every morsel of news produced in the last three years by 20 different channels, encompassing more than 1,000 news series that have generated more than 350,000 separate programs devoted to news....
Source: NYT
Sep 17, 2012
MERIDIAN, Miss. — Across the street from a barbershop and upstairs from a post office sits a big empty room where Mississippi once began to face up to itself.Even on a steamy humdrum Thursday afternoon, this city’s stately federal courtroom looks like the kind of place where momentous things could happen, as they once did. The legal campaign to integrate the University of Mississippi got under way here in May 1961, and it was here that a local posse of Klansmen who murdered three civil rights workers faced justice at the hands of their neighbors, the first time that had happened in Mississippi.The court has remained in use over the decades since, though with a lower profile. Soon, however, it will be shut down for good, a victim of its quietness and the fiscal urgencies of Washington....
Source: NYT
Sep 17, 2012
KETRZYN, Poland — For nearly three years, Hitler commanded the Third Reich from a vast network of bunkers and buildings hidden in the forest here, guiding his genocidal war effort from an encampment called the Wolf’s Lair.But while Poland went to great lengths to preserve the memory of Nazi death camps like Birkenau, the significance of this historic outpost was largely lost. Under lease to a private company, the Wolf’s Lair was transformed into a place to take pottery lessons and play paintball. Although most people still come here for the historic value, there is little in the way of educational materials, and at least one nod to the past is more kitschy than thoughtful: visitors can pose for photos wearing Nazi uniforms.
Source: LiveScience
Sep 17, 2012
A giant poolside mosaic featuring intricate geometric patterns has been unearthed in southern Turkey, revealing the far-reaching influence of the Roman Empire at its peak.The mosaic, which once decorated the floor of a bath complex, abuts a 25-foot (7-meter)-long pool, which would have been open to the air, said Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska, Lincoln art historian and director of the mosaic excavation. The find likely dates to the third or fourth century, Hoff said. The mosaic itself is an astonishing 1,600 square feet (149 square meters) — the size of a modest family home. "To be honest, I was completely bowled over that the mosaic is that big," Hoff told LiveScience. [See Photos of the Roman Mosaic]
Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune
Sep 17, 2012
A new museum celebrating the history of blacks in Minnesota failed to open as scheduled last weekend, the third time in the past year it has missed its own deadline for opening to the public.The doors were locked Monday at the Minnesota African American Museum and Cultural Center at 1700 3rd Ave. S. in Minneapolis on Monday, and construction work had stopped. Inside, wires were hanging from wall outlets....Mahmoud El-Kati, professor emeritus at Macalester College and a member of the museum board, said he was aware the museum was not going to open last Saturday. But El-Kati said he was not privy to information about negotiations between the museum and the bank that holds the museum's mortgage....
Source: AP
Sep 17, 2012
Hundreds on Monday marked the 150th anniversary of the Civil War Battle of Antietam amid patriotic music and cannon fire, recalling the mind-boggling carnage and an ensuing Confederate retreat that Abraham Lincoln considered divine approval for abolishing slavery.Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation five days after the 1862 battle in Maryland, "a decision that transformed and redefined the purpose of the Civil War and ignited the modern Civil Rights movement," National Park Service Associate Director Stephanie Toothman said at the commemoration.More than 23,000 men were reported killed, wounded or missing in the dawn-to-dusk clash at Antietam, making the battle of Sept. 17, 1862, the bloodiest day of combat on U.S. soil....
Source: CS Monitor
Sep 17, 2012
They lay undetected for more than a century, a hidden legacy of the highest, most forbidding battlefield of World War I.But last month, as Italy sweltered through one of the hottest summers on record, a cache of more than 200 rusted explosives emerged from beneath a melting sheet of ice in the Dolomite range in the country’s north.......The explosives – probably stored in an ammunition dump carved into what was once a massive glacier – were discovered by mountain-rescue experts during a routine border-police patrol.They emerged from the 3,200 meter (10,500 ft.) high Ago di Nardis glacier in the Trentino region of northern Italy, which during the First World War was bitterly contested by Italian troops fighting the opposing forces of the Austro-Hungarian empire....
Source: NYT
Sep 17, 2012
Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. Those elaborate pictographs were the elite script for recording the lives and triumphs of pharaohs in their tombs and on the monumental stones along the Nile. But almost from the beginning, people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs.These were the words of love and family, the law and commerce, private letters and texts on science, religion and literature. For at least 1,000 years, roughly from 500 B.C. to A.D. 500, both the language and the distinctive cursive script were known as Demotic Egyptian, a name given it by the Greeks to mean the tongue of the demos, or the common people.Demotic was one of the three scripts inscribed on the Rosetta stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphs, enabling European scholars to decipher the royal language in the early 19th century and thus read the top-down version of a great civilization’s long history....
Source: LA Times
Sep 16, 2012
The fighting that killed or wounded 21,000 Americans in the rolling hills of western Maryland was over in about 12 grisly hours.But a century and a half after the bloodiest day in American military history, the struggle to preserve the ground where Union and Confederate soldiers fought the Battle of Antietam only now appears close to a declaration of victory.As Americans gather to honor the sacrifice of those who fell Sept. 17, 1862 — as they are doing this weekend and Monday on the 150th anniversary — they will do so at one of the nation's best-preserved Civil War sites....
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Sep 16, 2012
A firestorm has erupted over the state’s decision to sharply curtail public access to the Georgia Archives.The announcement late Thursday quickly became a cause celebre for academics and family genealogists alike as thousands signed online petitions and Facebook pages through the weekend.Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp said even he was unhappy — and it was his decision.“To reduce public access to the historical records of this state was not arrived at without great consternation,” Kemp said. “I will fight during this legislative session [starting in January] to have this cut restored so the people will have a place to meet, research and review the historical records of Georgia.”...
Source: WaPo
Sep 16, 2012
It is true, Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged the other night, that the “we the people” extolled in the Constitution 225 years ago did not include people who looked like him.But the Declaration of Independence did, he contended, and that was something that a black kid growing up in Savannah, Ga., was told early on.“There was always this underlying belief that we were entitled to be a full participant in ‘we the people,’ ” Thomas told a crowd at the National Archives last week.“That’s the way we grew up. It was the way the nuns, who were all immigrants, would explain it to us — that we were entitled, as citizens of this country, to be full participants. There was never any doubt that we were inherently equal. It said so in the Declaration of Independence.”...
Source: LiveScience
Sep 14, 2012
Archaeologists say they've identified the oldest known Roman military fortress in Germany, likely built to house thousands of troops during Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul in the late 50s B.C. Broken bits of Roman soldiers' sandals helped lead to the discovery.Researchers knew about the large site — close to the German town of Hermeskeil, near the French border — since the 19th century but lacked solid evidence about what it was. Parts of the fort also had been covered up or destroyed by agricultural development."Some remains of the wall are still preserved in the forest, but it hadn't been possible to prove that this was indeed a Roman military camp as archaeologists and local historians had long suspected," researcher Sabine Hornung, of Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz (JGU), said in a statement....
Source: Foreign Policy
Sep 14, 2012
Presidential Decision Directive 59 -- presented here on Foreign Policy's National Security channel and on the National Security Archive's website for the first time -- was one of the most controversial nuclear policy documents of the Cold War, yet until now it's never been made public in its entirety.Signed by President Jimmy Carter on July 25, 1980, the directive (titled "Nuclear Weapons Employment Policy") aimed to give presidents more flexibility in planning for and executing a nuclear war -- that is, options beyond a massive strike. Leaks of the document's Top Secret contents, within weeks of its approval, gave rise to front-page stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, alleging that its changes to U.S. strategy lowered the threshold of a decision to go nuclear.
Source: CS Monitor
Sep 13, 2012
An 1869 ruling used by a Pennsylvania state judge in August to uphold a tough new voter ID law is providing some new and startling historical context to deliberations by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, as it mulls whether to block the controversial law before the Nov. 6 presidential election.Looking specifically at the tumult and vagrancy of 19th century city life in Philadelphia, the so-called 1869 Patterson v. Barlow decision, which in part allowed election officials to consider a voter’s “virtue” before being allowed to cast a ballot, formed the backbone of Judge Robert Simpson’s decision last month that the new law was constitutional and could go into effect immediately. The original Patterson ruling was written by state Supreme Court justices, whose legal descendants are now weighing the voter ID law.
Source: National Archives
Sep 13, 2012
Washington, DC. . . As part of the celebration of the document’s 225th anniversary, the National Archives will for the first time exhibit the so-called “Fifth Page” of the Constitution of the United States. It will be on display from Friday, September 14, through Wednesday, September 19, 2012, in the East Rotunda Gallery in the National Archives Building in Washington, DC. Museum hours are 10 a.m. until 5:30 p.m. daily, but the museum will open late at 11:30 a.m. on Monday, September 17 (Constitution Day).The fifth page is also known as the transmittal page of the Constitution and the Resolutions of the Constitutional Convention. This document, signed by George Washington, who presided over the Constitutional Convention, describes how the Constitution was to be ratified and put into effect.
Source: CBS News
Sep 13, 2012
(CBS News) Movies usually get teased with a trailer and introduced at a premiere. But in the case of Steven Spielberg's upcoming film "Lincoln," the full-length trailer received an online premiere Thursday, teased by a short trailer released earlier this week.The trailer premiered during a Google+ hangout with the film's director, Spielberg, and cast member Joseph Gordon-Levitt."Lincoln" stars Daniel Day-Lewis and chronicles the last few months of the president's life, as he works to end the Civil War and abolish slavery.The film also stars Sally Field, David Strathairn , James Spader, Hal Holbrook and Tommy Lee Jones. The screenplay, written by Tony Kushner, is based on the book "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" by Doris Kearns Goodwin....
Source: Yahoo News
Sep 13, 2012
A family in Guatemala has discovered an ancient Mayan mural on the walls of its home.National Geographic explains that Lucas Asicona Ramírez made the discovery while renovating his home five years ago in the village of Chajul.The painting has been uncovered for the first time in centuries, and archaeologists are scrambling to document the images, which are fading quickly after exposure to air and light."We don't get a lot of this type of artwork; it's not commonly preserved in the New World," said Boston University archaeologist William Saturno."It'd be neat to see who the folks were who painted on the wall and why."...
