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: The Art Newspaper
Dec 6, 2011
Images documenting the Nazi-sponsored Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (GDK) have been made available to the public for the first time in an online catalogue created by Munich’s Central Institute for Art History. More than 100,000 photographs, categorised by artist, genre, theme and, remarkably, buyer, have shed new light on the annual art exhibition, giving an insight into officially approved art of the Third Reich and the collecting taste of its citizens.“When we started working with the photographs, we realised there was a difference between what the secondary literature has told us about the exhibition and what it was actually like,” says Christian Fuhrmeister, an art historian from the Central Institute. According to Fuhrmeister, previous research relied on exhibition catalogues that listed works but failed to reproduce them....
Source: WaPo
Dec 6, 2011
Around 8 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, Army Private Francis Stueve sat down to breakfast with the rest of the 89th Field Artillery battalion, stationed at Pearl Harbor.“As quiet a day as you’ve ever seen,” Stueve remembers now. “Beautiful sunshine, nothing going on.”Suddenly, not far from his seat in the dining hall: bang, bang, bang.“Somebody says, ‘It’s the Chinese New Year,’ ” he said.But then, a bullet broke through the glass window of the dining hall. Another flew just past Stueve and knocked the butter dish off the table.Japan’s official declaration of war would come a day later, after the loss of 160 aircraft, 12 ships and 2,300 Americans, according to the Library of Congress — 70 years ago on Wednesday. Stueve, now 94, can describe his experience as if it were happening now...
Source: NYT
Dec 6, 2011
HONOLULU — For more than half a century, members of the Pearl Harbor Survivors Association gathered here every Dec. 7 to commemorate the attack by the Japanese that drew the United States into World War II. Others stayed closer to home for more intimate regional chapter ceremonies, sharing memories of a day they still remember in searing detail.But no more. The 70th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack will be the last one marked by the survivors’ association. With a concession to the reality of time — of age, of deteriorating health and death — the association will disband on Dec. 31.“We had no choice,” said William H. Eckel, 89, who was once the director of the Fourth Division of the survivors’ association, interviewed by telephone from Texas. “Wives and family members have been trying to keep it operating, but they just can’t do it. People are winding up in nursing homes and intensive care places.”...
Source: Press Release
Dec 6, 2011
THE ATLANTIC TO PUBLISH A COMMEMORATIVE ISSUE MARKING THE 150TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE START OF THE CIVIL WAR
Special Issue Features an Introduction by President Barack Obama, Plus Classic Stories by Mark Twain, Henry James, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Among Others
The Issue Also Includes Iconic Images From the National Portrait Gallery
Source: Charlotte Observer
Dec 5, 2011
It has been more than six decades since Warren Weaver, a pioneer in automated language translation, suggested applying code-breaking techniques to the challenge of interpreting a foreign language.That insight led to a generation of statistics-based language programs like Google Translate - and, not so incidentally, to new tools for breaking codes that go back to the Middle Ages.Now a team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 1700s....
Source: AP
Dec 5, 2011
NEW YORK – After a year of tough negotiations, Germany has agreed to pay pensions to about 16,000 additional Holocaust victims worldwide -- mostly survivors who were once starving children in Nazi ghettos, or were forced to live in hiding for fear of death.The agreement announced Monday between the New York-based Claims Conference and the German government is "not about money -- it's about Germany's acknowledgment of these people's suffering," said Greg Schneider, the conference's executive vice president."They're finally getting recognition of the horrors they endured as children," he told The Associated Press.Of the new beneficiaries, 5,000 live in the United States....
Source: Huffington Post
Dec 5, 2011
WASHINGTON -- A new film on the life and death of master spy and former CIA director William E. Colby, created by his son, raises the question of whether the man who pioneered U.S. counterinsurgency warfare may have ended his own life -- a question that has divided the intelligence community and Colby's family.Colby developed the strategy of training and arming local troops to assist with counterinsurgency during the Vietnam War -- the same tactic in use today by U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan. But as former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft speculates in the film, "The Man Nobody Knew," Colby's role in the creation of U.S. counterintelligence programs in the Vietnam War may have contributed to his suffering "a tortured soul."If this alleged remorse were real, and had any connection to Colby's death, it could cast a shadow over the early history of U.S. counterinsurgency.When Colby vanished in rough waters on a late-night, solo canoe trip in 1996, local sheriffs ruled out suicide before they even found his body. A lifetime of espionage meant Colby had enemies from Baltimore to Bali, and conspiracy theories about his death still circulate between Georgetown mansions and CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., today, despite an official ruling of accidental death....
Source: BBC News
Dec 5, 2011
A British author is claiming to have unearthed a previously unseen portrait of Pride And Prejudice writer Jane Austen.Dr Paula Byrne, the author of a new book on Austen, was given the portrait by her husband and recognised the long, straight "Austen nose".There are currently just two recognised portraits of Austen - one sketched by her sister Cassandra in 1810.The find is the subject of a BBC Two documentary scheduled for Boxing Day.Byrne - who has previously written books on poet Mary Robinson and author Evelyn Waugh - was presented with the portrait by her husband, Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate, who had bought it at auction....
Source: AP
Dec 5, 2011
NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Almost 70 years after the United States struck Japan in a bold bombing raid that did little damage but lifted the spirits of a Pearl Harbor-weary nation, Thomas Griffin relishes the role he played that day as a navigator in one of Jimmy Doolittle's B-25s."It was risky, but we all wanted to do it," Griffin said. "Everybody was ready to go after Pearl Harbor."Coming just four months after the Imperial Japanese Navy savaged the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, and with U.S. defense of the Philippines crumbling, the April 18, 1942, raid on Japan's home islands electrified a world at war.Griffin, 96 and now living in Cincinnati, and three other survivors of the raid will be featured at a National World War II Museum symposium Wednesday through Friday focusing on the early months of American response to the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor....
Source: CNN.com
Dec 4, 2011
(CNN) -- For 70 years, survivors of the December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor have captivated listeners with their firsthand accounts, recalling buddies who died in their arms or the glasses worn by a low-flying Japanese pilot.They have participated in solemn wreath-laying ceremonies and spoken to civic groups and school children about the infamous day and the need for the United States to remain vigilant.But the gradual loss of the World War II generation has accelerated, and this year, perhaps more than any before it, evidence of a tide change is inescapable.The Pearl Harbor Survivors Association, founded in 1958, is dissolving December 31. The passing of time, the difficulty in finding chapter officers and the health of its 2,700 members have taken their toll....
Source: NYT
Dec 4, 2011
Down, down, down you go, for two and a half hours, jammed with two other people in a tiny submersible, all the way to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean — and all for a glimpse, through a five- or eight-inch porthole, of the ravaged remains of the once-grand ship where the Astors and the Strauses played, dined and, in some cases, died.The trip is not for the claustrophobic, nor the 99 percent: a two-week cruise that includes one dive, lasting eight to 10 hours, costs $60,000.But for fans of the Titanic, no price or privation is too great — especially with the 100th anniversary of the sinking coming up on April 15.“This is the opportunity of a lifetime,” Renata Rojas, a banker in New York City, said of diving more than two miles down to the muddy seabed. “I’ve been obsessed with the Titanic since I was 10 years old.”...
Source: NYT
Dec 4, 2011
Since 2000, Ms. [Mi-Li] Lee has campaigned to generate more interest in the fate of tens of thousands of South Koreans believed to have been forcibly taken to North Korea during the Korean War six decades ago. She has been demanding that the government negotiate for the return of those who may still be alive and the remains of those who are not. Government officials have never made that issue a priority when they have sat down with their North Korean counterparts, treating her campaign as a distraction from what they consider a more important task: persuading the North to abandon its nuclear weapons.But Ms. Lee, 62, is not giving up, and recently she has scored some victories against what she calls “a gigantic darkness and forgetfulness.”...
Source: Old West New West
Dec 2, 2011
Nearly a thousand visitors joined the staff of Palo Alto Battlefield National Historical Park on Nov. 19, 2011 for the official dedication of the Resaca de la Palma Battlefield as a new unit of the park, and to participate in the memorial illumination ceremony held annually at the site.Palo Alto Battlefield NHP near Brownsville, Texas has the distinction of being the only unit in the National Park Service to preserve battle sites from the U.S. War with Mexico.The dedication event marked the culmination of an effort extending back over a decade to preserve the site of the second battle of the U.S. War with Mexico....
Source: WaPo
Dec 2, 2011
RICHMOND, Va. — State grants totaling $1 million are being awarded to organizations working to preserve 530 acres of Civil War battlefields in Virginia, Gov. Bob McDonnell announced Friday.The grants, drawn from a fund created by the General Assembly to preserve Civil War sites, will help preservation groups in nine counties preserve 10 places where North and South forces fought.McDonnell said it makes financial sense to preserve Civil War sites, which attract tourists....
Source: Japan Update
Dec 2, 2011
Archaeologists are ecstatic as they study a 24,000-year-old human bone fragment that’s been discovered on Ishigaki Island in southern Okinawa Prefecture....
Source: Medievalists.net
Dec 2, 2011
The flanks of Ingleborough in the Yorkshire Dales National Park have given up one of their secrets to a team of amateur archaeologists.Members of the Ingleborough Archaeology Group spent weeks investigating a remote site on the side of one of the National Park’s famous Three Peaks to the west of Selside in Upper Ribblesdale.And their work has resulted in the discovery of the first 7th century building to be positively identified in the National Park – and one of the first in the north of England....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Dec 2, 2011
Argentina has proposed sending its athletes to the London Olympics wearing provocative badges declaring the Falklands are Argentine.It wants an image of the islands to be emblazoned on national team clothing at the Games, which will be held just weeks after Britain commemorates the 30th anniversary of the Falklands conflict.Athletes’ shirts would also bear the legend ‘Las Islas Malvinas son Argentinas’ – the Falklands Islands are Argentine. Malvinas is the Spanish name for the islands....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Dec 2, 2011
Almost half the German city of Koblenz is under evacuation orders as experts prepare to defuse a two-ton ‘Blockbuster’ RAF bomb in the Rhine.The 10ft bomb, one of the biggest in the wartime arsenal of Bomber Command, was discovered after 65 years when the river level dropped during the driest November on record.The fuse is badly corroded, and the authorities are evacuating 45,000 of Koblenz’s 120,000 population to leave a security zone of a mile around the bomb - which is capable of destroying an entire city block.The evacuation - the biggest in German postwar history - will involve fleets of buses and 1,000 volunteers helping police and firemen....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Dec 2, 2011
The birthplace of Ringo Starr could be saved from demolition after an intervention by a government minister.
Grant Shapps, the housing minister, has asked Liverpool City Council to halt the planned destruction of 9 Madryn Street, where the Beatles' drummer was born in 1940.
The address was due to be bulldozed under plans by the council to make way for new housing in the city's Welsh Streets estate.
Mr Shapps has called for the demolition to be postponed
Source: Lee White at the National Coalition for History
Dec 1, 2011
On December 1, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) announced $21 million in grants for 215 humanities projects.This funding will support a wide variety of projects, including research fellowships and awards for scholars, the preservation of humanities collections at smaller institutions, traveling exhibitions, and humanities initiatives at historically black colleges, institutions with high Hispanic enrollment, and tribal colleges and universities. The grants awarded will also support training for museum and archive staff to preserve and enhance access to their collections, while NEH Challenge Grants provide support for long-term humanities activities.
