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: NYT
Mar 11, 2012
NIHONMATSU, Japan — Nobody knows whether Hiroshi Yokoyama’s elderly parents tried to outrun the tsunami that engulfed their home in Namie on the Fukushima coast a year ago.But Mr. Yokoyama does know that he would have looked for them high and low, if not for a second disaster that unfolded at the nuclear power plant just a few miles away, forcing him to abandon his search.As grieving families across the nation gathered Sunday to mark the anniversary of Japan’s 3/11 disasters — an earthquake and tsunami that ravaged the northeastern coast, killed almost 20,000 people and caused a huge nuclear radiation leak — some communities are still coming to terms with the calamity’s scale, complexity and lasting effects, and painful new revelations have shed light on how some of the victims died.
Source: NYT
Mar 11, 2012
To her many admirers, Elizabeth Bartlett Grannis was a humanitarian, social reformer and pioneering suffragist. To the First Church Disciples of Christ, which Grannis had attended faithfully for five decades, she was a “disturber of the peace.”Translation: she didn’t think the pastor — a popular and successful rainmaker for the congregation — ought to be making unwanted advances on women. Or men. And Grannis further believed that a young girl whom she had informally adopted ought to be welcomed at Sunday worship. Unfortunately, the year was 1906. And the child was not only squirmy: she was black.For these offenses, the congregation dismissed Grannis from its rolls after a trial conducted by church elders. Grannis scorned the inquiry as a “high-handed, star-chamber proceeding, illegal in every respect.” Until her death in 1926, however, she never stopped attending services, even though she was not formally a member of the church. (Public relations may have been in its infancy, but church leaders understood that physically barring an old woman from taking her place in a pew on Sundays would not create the best impression.)...
Source: USA Today
Mar 10, 2012
Vanished cities abound in Iraq —Babylon, Nineveh and Ur just for starters — so much that archaeologists joked that the only advice needed to uncover history is "just dig."War and international sanctions closed these locations off to the world and to scholars. The ruins of ancient Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq, have mostly seen visits from looters for the last two decades.But that may be changing. A U.S. archaeology team that was one of the first to visit Iraq in more than two decades, has just returned from a dig there. They are now among a growing list of other archaeologists returning to the war-ravaged nations.
Source: LiveScience
Mar 10, 2012
The first comprehensive map of the Titanic wreck site has been created as researchers pieced together some 130,000 photos taken by underwater robots in the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean.Resembling the moon's surface, the map shows debris and parts of the ship scattered across a 15 square-mile patch of ocean floor.The detailed images might provide new clues about what happened after the "unsinkable" luxury liner hit an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, killing more than 1,500 of the 2,200 passengers and crew on board....
Source: The Evening Sun (PA)
Mar 10, 2012
The students came from Delaware to witness the history up close, to tour the Gettysburg Battlefield and to see where President Lincoln gave his famous address.And like so many visitors, they stopped by the bookstore in the visitor center for something by which to remember their visit.A historic map of the hallowed ground of Gettysburg? Perhaps a print of the Great Emancipator?Or maybe a bobblehead of Lincoln's assassin, John Wilkes Booth....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Mar 9, 2012
Iconic naturalist Charles Darwin has finally been cleared of stealing ideas that helped shape his theory of evolution more than 40 years after historians first accused him.Researchers assumed Darwin kept a letter from fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, also with theories about natural selection, for two weeks - enabling him to revise elements of his own theory of evolution, before announcing it to the world in July 1858.However, scientists turned detective have now vindicated Darwin from the accusations by tracing historical shipping records to prove he received the letter a month later than previously thought.Historians already know Wallace had a ‘eureka’ moment while living in Indonesia - discovering natural selection independently of Darwin....
Source: Irish Central
Mar 9, 2012
Five murdered Irish immigrants cast into a mass grave in 1832 at Duffy’s Cut near Philadelphia will be reburied in a full Catholic ceremony today.Four laborers and one female, a washerwoman, will be reburied.Irish Ambassador Michael Collins will be among the dignitaries as the five men, likely killed by local vigilantes, will be laid to rest.They will be buried in West Laurel Hill Cemetery in a service that will include bagpipers and a grave site marked with a 12 foot high Celtic Cross donated by Immaculata University....
Source: LiveScience
Mar 9, 2012
On Sunday, most Americans will wake up only to realize they've lost an hour of their weekend to daylight saving time — the price we pay for eight months of well-lit evenings.Unless you live in Arizona or Hawaii, which don't observe daylight saving, you're probably used to this routine by now. But the history of daylight saving time has been anything but peaceful, from its first wartime introduction to its ongoing controversy today.Bright ideaBen Franklin gets credit for thinking up the idea of daylight saving time, albeit with his trademark wit. As ambassador to Paris, Franklin wrote a letter to the Journal of Paris in 1784 of his "discovery" that the sun gives light as soon as it rises, and needling Parisians for their night-owl, candle-burning ways....
Source: ThinkProgress
Mar 9, 2012
During a speech at Wesleyan University last night, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia offered a strange revision of the time he joined with four of his conservative colleagues to make George W. Bush president:At the end of the speech, Scalia took questions from the audience. One person asked about the Bush-Gore case, where the Supreme Court had to determine the winner of the election.“Get over it,” Scalia said of the controversy surrounding it, to laughter from the audience.“Scalia reminded the audience it was Gore who took the election to court, and the election was going to be decided in a court anyway—either the Florida Supreme Court or the U.S. Supreme Court.It was a long time ago, people forget…It was a 7-2 decision [the decision was actually 5-4]. It wasn’t even close,” he said....
Source: Troy Times Union
Mar 9, 2012
TROY — The Union's Civil War battleship USS Monitor rode low in the water, a dark and menacing slash of metal with sides and decks fortified with tons of half-inch iron plates rolled at two mills in South Troy.Nobody had ever seen an armored naval vessel like it, more submarine than ship, with just 18 inches of freeboard visible above the waterline and a round gun turret protruding from the deck.Slack-jawed onlookers called the Monitor a "tin can on a raft."But the Monitor revolutionized naval warfare in the Civil War, tipped the balance of power for the Union Navy and carried hometown pride for Troy's indefatigable workers who met a brutal deadline as the War Between the States raged....
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 9, 2012
Google has been quietly slowing down its book-scanning work with partner libraries, according to librarians involved with the vast Google Books digitization project. But what that means for the company's long-term investment in the work remains unclear.Google was not willing to say much about its plans. "We've digitized more than 20 million books to date and continue to scan books with our library partners," a Google spokeswoman told The Chronicle in an e-mailed statement.Librarians at several of Google's partner institutions, including the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin systems, confirmed that the pace has slowed. "They're still scanning. They're scanning at a lower rate than the peak," said Paul N. Courant, Michigan's dean of libraries....
Source: Lee White for the National Coalition for History
Mar 8, 2012
The Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State has announced the release of its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series in a new e-book format that is readable on popular electronic devices such as the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad.The e-book edition combines many of the benefits of print and web publications in a new form that is portable and extremely convenient. During the pilot phase of the FRUS e-book initiative, five selected FRUS volumes will be offered on the Office of the Historian’s e-book homepage: http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/ebooks.The public is invited to download the new e-books and provide feedback to help improve the FRUS e-book edition. At the conclusion of the pilot phase later this year, the Office will work to offer e-book versions of many more FRUS volumes both through the Office website and on a wide array of e-bookstores. The Office will continue to expand and enhance its e-book offerings, as part of the ongoing FRUS digitization effort.For questions about the FRUS e-book initiative or feedback about the “beta” FRUS e-books released today, please contact history_ebooks@state.gov.
Source: NYT
Mar 8, 2012
As a presidential candidate, he was awkwardly disconnected, a wealthy Republican who struggled to earn the trust of the conservatives in his party.Now, two decades later, that candidate, the elder George Bush, is serving as a kind of political object lesson for a kindred spirit, Mitt Romney.As Mr. Bush tried to do, Mr. Romney is working to bridge two worlds inside the Republican Party: an establishment wing with which he feels comfortable and a rabble-rousing wing that has a big influence over policy and ideology.Mr. Bush managed to reconcile and unite both of those sometimes opposing forces, but not until he sought the White House as a sitting vice president in 1988. And those same divisions and suspicions from conservatives helped scuttle his re-election campaign four years later.Mr. Romney now faces some of the same challenges.
Source: BBC News
Mar 8, 2012
The oldest surviving film featuring a Charles Dickens character has been discovered, in the year of the 200th anniversary of the author's birth.The Death of Poor Joe, which dates back to March 1901, was discovered by British Film Institute (BFI) curator Bryony Dixon, in February.Until now the earliest known Dickens film was Scrooge or Marley's Ghost, released in November 1901."It's wonderful to have discovered such a rare and unique film," Ms Dixon said....
Source: Raleigh News and Observer
Mar 8, 2012
KURE BEACH -- There are hundreds of shipwrecks along North Carolina's treacherous coast, and some, like those of the ironclad USS Monitor or the Blackbeard flagship Queen Anne's Revenge, are famous.But that of the hapless Civil War blockade runner Modern Greece, which sits just beyond the surf near Fort Fisher, is in many ways the most important.The wreck, which was excavated 50 years ago, led to the creation of the state underwater archaeology unit that studies the other wrecks. It led to a state law to protect historic wreck sites from pilfering. It yielded such a large trove of artifacts that many have been used in experiments that advanced the tricky science of how to preserve historical treasures found underwater.As the first of about 30 blockade runners sunk along the coast near Wilmington while trying to bring arms and vital commodities to the Confederate states, the Modern Greece has an iconic status in North Carolina and maritime history.And this week -- just in time for events marking the 150th anniversary of its sinking -- thousands of artifacts from the Modern Greece were recovered from underwater....
Source: Science Daily
Mar 8, 2012
ScienceDaily (Mar. 8, 2012) — Archaeologists from the University of Bristol have unearthed a unique slave burial ground on the remote South Atlantic island of St Helena. The excavation, which took place in advance of construction of a new airport on the island, has revealed dramatic insights into the victims of the Atlantic slave trade during the notorious Middle Passage.The tiny island of St Helena, 1,000 miles off the coast of south-west Africa, acted as the landing place for many of the slaves, captured by the Royal Navy during the suppression of the slave trade between 1840 and 1872. During this period a total of around 26,000 freed slaves were brought to the island, most of whom were landed at a depot in Rupert's Bay. The appalling conditions aboard the slave ships meant that many did not survive their journey, whilst Rupert's Valley -- arid, shadeless, and always windy -- was poorly suited to act as a hospital and refugee camp for such large numbers. At least 5,000 people are likely to have been buried there.
Source: NYT
Mar 8, 2012
DUBLIN — In what seems like a surreal subplot from a Dan Brown novel, a number of irreplaceable religious relics have disappeared from churches across the country, the Irish police and a senior cleric say.The latest in a series of such thefts involved the removal of the preserved heart of St. Laurence O’Toole, Dublin’s 12th-century patron saint, from the city’s historic Christ Church Cathedral. As there was no sign of forced entry to the cathedral itself, the dean of Christ Church, Dermot Dunne, initially believed the thief had probably hidden in the building when it closed on Friday evening, taken the artifact overnight and simply walked out the next morning.“Maybe someone stole it to order; it certainly seems plausible,” Dean Dunne said Monday in an interview at Christ Church. “Or maybe a religious fanatic wants the relic and paid somebody to steal it.”...
Source: Fox News
Mar 8, 2012
WASHINGTON – Wounded in both legs and wearing a U.S. Army field coat peppered with bullet holes, 1st Lt. Robert Schmitt led a desperate U.S. hilltop assault against advancing Chinese forces in one of the bloodiest battles of the Korean War. He never returned.The hunt for thousands of fallen American troops like Schmitt, missing from a conflict fought six decades ago, is about to resume in North Korea as tensions ease between the wartime enemies.A decade of search operations that led to the recovery and identification of 92 troops was suspended seven years ago, with the U.S. citing worries about the security of its personnel. That ended the only cooperation between the militaries of the two nations, which formally remain at war because the 1950-53 conflict ended with a cease-fire and armistice, not a formal peace treaty....
Source: BBC News
Mar 7, 2012
As the Nazis tightened their grip on power in the late 1930s, Jews in Germany and Austria began to fear for their safety. Many fled abroad using well-documented methods such as the Kindertransport. But less well known is the story of thousands of Jewish women who fled to the UK by getting jobs as domestic servants.When Natalie Huss-Smickler arrived in England in 1938 as a 26-year-old, she found her new job as a domestic servant something of a shock compared with her secretarial work back home in Vienna."My first job in England was very, very hard," she says. "I had to work from 8am to 11pm with an hour's break, cleaning and scrubbing and looking after the house, with half a day off a week."After a few weeks I complained, saying it's a bit too hard. The lady of the house said, 'If it's too much for you, I'll send you back to Hitler.'"...
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
Mar 7, 2012
The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin announced today that it has acquired the papers of yet another significant contemporary literary figure: the novelist and short-story writer T.C. Boyle. The author of 22 books of fiction, including The Road to Wellville, Tortilla Curtain, World’s End, and When the Killing’s Done, Mr. Boyle is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. At Texas, his papers will join those of David Foster Wallace, Don DeLillo, Denis Johnson, Jayne Anne Phillips, and Bruce Sterling, among many others whose archives are housed at the center.
