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: CBS News
May 23, 2012
Every year, the Library of Congress designates 25 sound recordings "cultural and historic treasures" and it preserves the best available copy for future generations. This year's choices, announced Wednesday, include an 1888 hand-cranked recording of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"; Prince's "Purple rain," "A Charlie Brown Christmas"; and one that caught our ears….Edward R. Murrow was the narrator for "I Can Hear It Now," a Columbia Records recording that was selected by the Library of Congress as a cultural and historical treasure, announced May 23, 2012.
Source: NYT
May 22, 2012
FLORENCE -- The decision to suspend Greece from the common currency became inevitable when it emerged that Athens had fiddled with the accounts yet again amid chronic economic weakness, forfeiting what credibility in the international arena it still had left.That was in 1908.After diluting the gold content in its coins, Greece left the Latin Monetary Union, whose founding members included France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland. More than a century later, history may repeat itself, albeit in vastly different circumstances.From the dual currency economy of 14th-century Florence to the monetary union of Austria-Hungary and Argentina's abandoned dollar peg, the past is littered with examples of countries' weighing the costs and benefits of different monetary regimes....
Source: AP
May 22, 2012
LONDON (AP) — A Channel Islands auction house says it's selling a vial that allegedly contains blood residue from Ronald Reagan — a move denounced Tuesday by the late U.S. president's family and his foundation.The vial being auctioned online was used by the laboratory that tested Reagan's blood when he was hospitalized after a 1981 assassination attempt in Washington, the PFCAuctions house said.Reagan's son Michael condemned the auction but said he was confident it was not his father's blood....
Source: BBC News
May 22, 2012
A Worcestershire woman is campaigning for the restoration of eight memorials throughout the county.Amateur historian Sandra Taylor has spent the past 13 years researching more than 10,000 names on local war memorials, many of which are decaying.Ms Taylor is part of a group that is trying to fund restoration work in time for the centenary of the outbreak of World War I in two years time....
Source: Jezebel
May 21, 2012
On the season finale of NBC's Who Do You Think You Are, Paula Deen discovered that her great great great great-grandfather, John Batts, was a slave owner. Deen, who was born, raised and still lives in Georgia, found that Batts, a politician and plantation owner, was very wealthy — and a hefty portion of his assets were slaves.Dr. Bob Wilson, a professor of history at Georgia College, showed Deen a document showing that Batts was part of a movement trying to get Georgia to support Democratic candidate John Breckenridge for president. Breckenridge was running on a pro-slavery platform; whereas Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, was against the expansion of slavery. Dr. Wilson showed Deen 1860 census records, showing that Batts was incredibly rich for his time. Deen also perused a Slave Inhabitants document, which detailed how many slaves John Batts owned: Thirty-five, some of them 8 and 11-year-old children....
Source: Discovery News
May 21, 2012
A powerful quake hit northern Italy on Sunday, killing seven people, injuring dozens, and leaving at least 5,000 homeless.The magnitude 6.0 quake to hit the country since 2009, when a tremor in the Abruzzo region killed nearly 300 people, the magnitude-6.0 earthquake was followed by more than 100 aftershocks in 24 hours.The quake struck at around 4 a.m. local time in the flatlands of the Emilia Romagna region, hitting an area between the historic cities of Bologna, Modena and Ferrara, a Unesco World Heritage site....
Source: Discovery News
May 21, 2012
On May 21, 1965, NASA released the Gemini 4 press kit. It opened with the standard mission description, in this case for a four-day orbital flight that would send commander Jim McDivitt and pilot Ed White around the Earth 62 times to evaluate "the effects of extended spaceflight on crew performance and physical condition."Then there was an intriguing page that hinted at something bigger: "No decision has been made whether in the Gemini 4 mission the crew will engage in extravehicular activity... A decision to undertake the extravehicular test can be made as late as the day before the launch." The possibility of an EVA on Gemini 4 came as a surprise not only the American people that day, but to many within NASA as well.EVAs, colloquially known as spacewalks, were one of the three main program goals for NASA's Gemini program designed to support the Apollo program. If NASA was going to send men all the way to the moon, there was no point in having them sit inside and look out the window. They were going outside....
Source: AP
May 21, 2012
Pity the War of 1812. Its bicentennial is at hand and events are planned for all over North America, from Canada and the Great Lakes to the Mid-Atlantic and the South. But good luck finding someone who can explain in 10 words or less what the war was about.Some historians see the war as a last gasp by England to control its former colonies, and it's sometimes called the Second War of Independence. At the time, Americans viewed the war "as an opportunity for us to throw off Britain once and for all," said Troy Bickham, author of a new book out in June called "The Weight of Vengeance: The United States, the British Empire and the War of 1812."But in Canada, the War of 1812 is seen as an attempted land grab by the U.S. The U.S. invaded Canada and at one point controlled Toronto, but the British, seeking control of the Great Lakes, won Detroit and other important ports....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
May 21, 2012
The notion of “Queen’s English” is usually applied to our pronunciation. Taking the term at its most literal, our monarch’s own sounds are enlightening when it comes to language change during her reign. Phoneticians have noted subtle but distinct changes in Her Majesty’s voice over the past 60 years, amounting to a more democratic style of pronunciation. Evidence from a detailed acoustic analysis of royal Christmas broadcasts suggests that Estuary English, a term coined in the Eighties to describe the apparent spread of London’s sound patterns to counties adjoining the river, might well have had an influence on Her Majesty’s vowels.If in 1952 the royal complaint may have been “I’ve lorst thet bleck het”, then today those o’s and a’s would undoubtedly be more rounded. In the same way, “orf” was left behind and “off” ushered in, “veddy” became “very”, and a y sound no longer followed the s in such words as super. Such conservative sounds, once the norm, are almost never heard these days, except in caricatures of formal old-fashioned speech. It is the Queen’s English that even the Queen no longer speaks....
Source: WaPo
May 20, 2012
CARROLLTON, Ark. — On the wildflower-studded slopes of the Ozarks, where memories run long and family ties run thick, a little-known and long-ago chapter of history still simmers.On Sept. 11, 1857, a wagon train from this part of Arkansas met with a gruesome fate in Utah, where most of the travelers were slaughtered by a Mormon militia in an episode known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hundreds of the victims’ descendants still populate these hills and commemorate the killings, which they have come to call “the first 9/11.”Many of the locals grew up hearing denunciations of Mormonism from the pulpit on Sundays, and tales of the massacre from older relatives who considered Mormons “evil.”...There aren’t many places in America more likely to be suspicious of Mormonism — and potentially more problematic for Mitt Romney, who is seeking to become the country’s first Mormon president. Not only do many here retain a personal antipathy toward the religion and its followers, but they also tend to be Christian evangelicals, many of whom view Mormonism as a cult....
Source: WaPo
May 20, 2012
The smashed bullet that killed Lt. Henry H. Waite of the 6th Maine regiment is there. So is the one that claimed Pvt. James Bainham of the 125th New York. And the one that killed Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States.
Scores of deformed slugs pulled from the flesh of the Civil War’s victims sit like grimy jewels in these glass cases, not far from trays of splintered bones and punctured skulls damaged in the conflict.
There’s more than war in the Defense Department’s refreshed and relocated National Museum of Health and Medicine, which will celebrate its grand reopening in Silver Spring on Monday.
The arthritic skeleton of Peter Cluckey sits in its wooden chair, as it has for decades, a macabre but longtime feature of the 150-year-old museum of medical oddities and scientific history....
Related Links
Jeffrey S. Reznick: Remember the Army Medical Library and Discover the National Library of Medicine
Source: NYT
May 20, 2012
Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person convicted in the 1988 bombing of an American jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, has died in Libya, family members told news agencies on Sunday, nearly three years after Scotland released him on humanitarian grounds, citing evidence that he was near death with metastatic prostate cancer. He was 60. .The death of Mr. Megrahi, who always insisted he was innocent, foreclosed a fuller accounting of his role, and perhaps that of the Libyan government under Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, in the midair explosion of Pan Am Flight 103, which killed 270 people, including 189 Americans.
Source: BBC News
May 19, 2012
A stone discovered by chance on the Isle of Canna is Scotland's first known example of a bullaun "cursing stone", experts have revealed.Dating from about 800 AD, the stones are associated with early Christian crosses - of which there is one on the isle.It was found in an old graveyard by a National Trust for Scotland (NTS) farm manager.The stone is about 25cm in diameter and engraved with an early Christian cross....
Source: NYT
May 19, 2012
WHEN and how did the first people arrive in the Americas?For many decades, archaeologists have agreed on an explanation known as the Clovis model. The theory holds that about 13,500 years ago, bands of big-game hunters in Asia followed their prey across an exposed ribbon of land linking Siberia and Alaska and found themselves on a vast, unexplored continent. The route back was later blocked by rising sea levels that swamped the land bridge. Those pioneers were the first Americans.... In the past five years, however, a number of discoveries have posed major challenges to the Clovis model. Taken together, they are turning our understanding of American prehistory on its head.
Source: NYT
May 18, 2012
Two delegations of Japanese officials visited Palisades Park, N.J., this month with a request that took local administrators by surprise: The Japanese wanted a small monument removed from a public park.The monument, a brass plaque on a block of stone, was dedicated in 2010 to the memory of so-called comfort women, tens of thousands of women and girls, many Korean, who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II.But the Japanese lobbying to remove the monument seems to have backfired — and deepened animosity between Japan and South Korea over the issue of comfort women, a longstanding irritant in their relations....
Source: Discovery News
May 18, 2012
A Bronze Age version of Facebook has emerged from granite rocks in Russia and northern Sweden, revealing a thousands-of-years-old timeline filled with an archaic version of the Facebook "like."Using computer modeling, Mark Sapwell, a Ph.D. archaeology student at Cambridge University, analyzed some 3,500 rock art images from Nämforsen in Northern Sweden and Zalavruga in Western Russia."Although this rock art has been documented from the early 1900s, the modeling has allowed a unique look at the interesting way these images have been arranged and accumulated over time," Sapwell told Discovery News....
Source: NYT
May 18, 2012
WASHINGTON — It says something about American politics that it has come to this: For the record, Bill Clinton does not actually support Mitt Romney for president no matter how many times Mr. Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee, cites him in his speeches.And for that matter, just for clarity, Ronald Reagan certainly would not be supporting President Obama, either.
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
May 17, 2012
The historians of 100 years ago had an idea what the future should know about them. And they hid it on May 20, 1912, in the cornerstone of the new Confederate Memorial Institute on the Boulevard.The building, soon to be known as Battle Abbey, and the Confederate Memorial Association that built it were subsumed over the years into the Virginia Historical Society....Then the 100th anniversary of the building inspired some research by Nelson D. Lankford, vice president of the society and editor of its Virginia Magazine of History and Biography. He discovered a list of items placed in a box in the cornerstone.Did they still exist?Absolutely....
Source: Tablet Magazine
May 17, 2012
In 1996, then-International Olympic Committee President Juan Antonio Samaranch discussed the recent war in the Balkans, and the need to rebuild Sarajevo. What he didn’t commemorate, or even mention—and what, the IOC announced today, won’t be commemorated, or even mentioned, in any official capacity at this summer’s Games in London on the 40th anniversary—is the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Despite an official Israeli request, the IOC will not do, well, anything, except, in the words of President Jacques Rogge, to offer the following thoughts: “What happened in Munich in 1972 strengthened the determination of the Olympic Movement to contribute more than ever to building a peaceful and better world by educating young people through sport practiced without discrimination of any kind and in the Olympic spirit.”...
Source: Salon
May 17, 2012
Dan Walsh’s incredibly rich Palestine Poster Project Archives includes much in the way of protest, but it also contains a trove of rare Zionist/Israeli posters from the 1920s through the ’50s, largely before partition. The ones excerpted here are from the Mahmoud Darwish Memorial Gallery, which includes a collection of Zionist Worker agency posters calling for increased development of Palestine. The affairs of the workers of Eretz Israel should be in the hands of the workers of Eretz Israel, 1935.
