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
Nov 11, 2011
From Gibbon to "Gladiator," it might seem like we know a lot about Ancient Rome, but our view of this civilization is a skewed one. The Romans lived in one of the most stratified societies in history. Around 1.5% of the population controlled the government, military, economy and religion. Through the writings and possessions they left behind, these rich, upper-class men are also responsible for most of our information about Roman life.The remaining people – commoners, slaves and others – are largely silent. They could not afford tombstones to record their names, and they were buried with little in the way of fancy pottery or jewellery. Their lives were documented by the elites, but they left few documents of their own.
Source: The Republic
Nov 11, 2011
RICHMOND, Va. — Archaeologists at the College of William and Mary have uncovered what's believed to be a Civil War-era well and other artifacts, a discovery that opens a window into a part of history largely overshadowed by the school's close association with the Colonial era.Crews doing archaeological studies ahead of a planned utility project on the oldest part of the Williamsburg campus recently uncovered the well, as well as minie balls, or lead bullets first used in the Civil War. They also found remnants of what could be a brick wall, along with pieces of bottle glass and pottery that date to the period when federal troops occupied school grounds."The Civil War is definitely a period where there was concentrated activity," said Joe Jones, director of William and Mary's Center for Archaeological Research.William and Mary was among many Southern colleges that closed during the 1861-1865 war. In the war's run-up, William and Mary students overwhelmingly supported Virginia's secession, thinking doing so could help create a new nation where their state would be at the forefront, said historian Sean Heuvel, a leadership and American Studies instructor at Christopher Newport University....
Source: LiveScience
Nov 11, 2011
Middle- and high-school students are preparing to help conserve recently exposed shipwrecks from the last major battle of the Revolutionary War in Virginia's York River.The Virginia students, from Point Option High School in Newport News, the Williamsburg Montessori Middle School, and Peasley Middle School in Gloucester, are traveling to the Waterman's Museum in Yorktown, near the shipwrecks, on field trips.
Source: HuffPo
Nov 11, 2011
A recent report says Texas K-12 standards in history are inadequate, ineffective and "fail to meet the state's college readiness standards," and the report's authors are pointing the finger at Gov. Rick Perry's State Board of Education.In the report, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board and the Social Studies Faculty Collaborative say that Texas' K-12 system is "founded upon an inadequate set of standards." Keith Erekson, the author and history professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, analyzes in the report the entire process of Texas' history standards -- from board approval to the curriculum itself.The report notes that the Fordham Institute gave the state's history standards a grade of "D," calling it a "politicized distortion of history," that is "both unwieldy and troubling" while "offering misrepresentations at every turn."
Source: Yale Daily News
Nov 10, 2011
Using a new technology known as optically stimulated luminescence (OSL), a team of Belgian scientists and Professor John Coleman Darnell of Yale have determined that Egyptian petroglyphs found at the east bank of the Nile are about 15,000 years old, making them the oldest rock art in Egypt and possibly the earliest known graphic record in North Africa.The dating results will be published in the December issue of Antiquity (Vol. 85 Issue 330, pp. 1184–1193).The site of the rock art panels is near the modern village of Qurta, about 40km south of the Upper-Egyptian town of Edfu. First seen by Canadian archaeologists in the early 1960s, they were subsequently forgotten and relocated by the Belgian mission in 2005. The rediscovery was announced in the Project Gallery of Antiquity in 2007.
Source: Discovery News
Nov 10, 2011
Archaeologists digging in Rome's Palatine Hill have found the remains of a large house that they believe might be the birthplace of Rome's first emperor, Augustus.Announced at the end of a 10-year excavation, the finding was partly uncovered in 2006, when a team led by Clementina Panella, a professor at the University of Rome La Sapienza, unearthed part of a corridor and other fragments of "a very ancient aristocratic house" near the Arch of Titus on the northeastern side of the Palatine.Extensive excavation in the past five years (founded by the Sapienza University and the Banca Nazionale delle Comunicazioni) and historical cross-checks have provided further weight to support the hypothesis that the house belonged to Gaius Octavius, Augustus' father."We have unearthed more than 10 rooms, beautiful mosaic floors and frescoed walls," Panella told Discovery News....
Source: NYT
Nov 10, 2011
For 11 hours of secret grand jury testimony 36 years ago, Richard M. Nixon, a disgraced former president, fenced with prosecutors over his role in the Watergate scandals, bemoaned politics as a dirty business played by both sides and testily — as he described his own demeanor — suggested he was the victim of a special prosecutor’s office loaded with Democrats.The testimony, which Nixon presumably thought would always remain secret, was released by the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, Calif., on Thursday in response to an order by a judge. The transcripts offered a remarkable portrait of Nixon after he left office: bitter at his disgrace and cynical about politics. He presented himself as a victim of governmental abuses by his enemies during his long career in politics, and said that prosecutors, with an eye to ingratiating themselves with the Washington media “and the Georgetown set,” were out to destroy him.“In politics, some pretty rough tactics are used,” he said. “We deplore them all.”
Source: NYT
Nov 10, 2011
CHÂTEAU-THIERRY, France — The remains of some of the last American doughboys of World War I to be identified were found just a few years ago, buried in a vegetable garden in this little town, wine bottles clasped in their crossed arms. They had died of their wounds in a field hospital set up in an adjoining farmhouse.Because dog tags rusted so quickly, soldiers created their own unofficial method for future identification: They wrote a note identifying the dead, with the date and manner of death, and two comrades of higher rank signed it as witnesses. They then stuck the note in an empty bottle, corked it and buried it in the arms of the corpse, said David Atkinson, superintendent of the sweeping Aisne-Marne American Cemetery, at the foot of the hill where the Battle of Belleau Wood was fought, a site sacred to the Marine Corps.
Source: ABC News
Nov 10, 2011
Rome is ground zero for what could be a global financial catastrophe.
Italy’s financial mess is massive. The country is $2.5 trillion in debt, bigger than its entire economy. So the Italian government is looking for ways to fund its debts and everything is on the table, including some of the country’s iconic landmarks.
Who can forget Michelangelo’s David or that leaning tower in Pisa. In the past few years, some of these monuments have become billboards. From the Roman Colosseum to the canals of Venice, nothing appears to be off limits.
The money-making deal wrapping the Bridge of Sighs earned more than 2 million dollars from companies like Bulgari. The advertisement was recently removed.
Source: BBC
Nov 10, 2011
The US National Archives has released the grand jury testimony of former President Richard Nixon, made after the Watergate scandal forced him to resign. Jurors asked about almost 19 missing minutes of a key conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff. The former president swore it was an accident that tapes had been erased, saying "I practically blew my stack." The secret testimony was given in June 1975 and released by order of a US judge following a historian's request....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 10, 2011
In her heyday she helped destroy a German battleship, supported the D-Day landings and survived a blast from an enemy mine. But HMS Belfast sank without trace this week when she was airbrushed out of official London Olympic posters because she ‘got in the way’.Veterans expressed their disgust at the step yesterday, saying it insulted the memory of those who died in the war in the run-up to Remembrance Sunday and reflected embarrassment at our military past....
Source: AFP
Nov 10, 2011
Infamous Australian outlaw Ned Kelly has had his final wish granted 131 years after being executed, with officials agreeing to release his remains so he can be buried with his family.Anthony Griffiths, a grandson of Kelly's sister, said Wednesday that Victorian state attorney general Robert Clark had decided to return his bullet-ridden bones to his descendants so they could meet his last request."That's very welcome news indeed," Griffiths told reporters."Our family, like every family, likes to be able to bury their own family members. Our aim is to give him a dignified funeral, like any family would."...
Source: Civil War Librarian (Blog)
Nov 9, 2011
President Barack Obama Tuesday signed an executive order making Fort Monroe in Hampton, Va., which closed as a military base in September, a National Monument. Fort Monroe "was the site of the first slave ships to land in the New World," Obama said during the Oval Office signing. "But then in the Civil War, almost 250 years later, Fort Monroe also became a refuge for slaves that were escaping from the South, and helped to create the environment in which Abraham Lincoln was able to sign that document up there -- the Emancipation Proclamation."Obama said the National Monument designation would bring millions of dollars to the region and create 3,000 jobs. "There's a strong economic component to this. We think we're going to see additional jobs in Virginia as a consequence of this. But for those members of Congress who are here, I still need some action from Congress on the American Jobs Act and other steps," the president said.
Source: Science Insider
Nov 9, 2011
When engineers rebuilding a beach near Lewes, Delaware, in 2004 began finding bits of Colonial-era pottery mixed in with the sand, archaeologists quickly realized they had found a historic shipwreck. Soon, researchers were carefully excavating the wreck, which historians believe is the British vessel Severn, sunk in a storm in 1774.They've recovered more than 45,000 "world-class artifacts … nowhere else on the continent do we have this kind of stuff from this period," says David Clarke, the state archaeologist for the Delaware Department of Transportation (DelDOT), which received money for the dig from a special pot created by federal highway-building legislation. That pot, officially known as the Transportation Enhancements (TE) program, "has pumped a lot of money into our field," he says.More than $51 million, to be exact. But Clarke and other archaeologists are now watching anxiously as Congress debates whether to renew the enhancements program. Many lawmakers are calling for modifying the program, which has funneled funds to some 200 archaeology projects since 1992, and some want to kill it, calling it wasteful and unnecessary....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Nov 9, 2011
The UK military's long march out of Germany begins on Thursday when the Ministry of Defence announces details of a pullout that will eventually cover all 20,000 British troops there.Under the plans, 1,800 will leave by next January, and then there will be a steady return home of another 8,200 by 2015. The rest will be back in the UK before the end of the decade – 15 years earlier than first proposed.The pullout has been accelerated as part of the cuts announced in last year's Strategic Defence and Security Review, which was an attempt to streamline the armed forces at a time when billions were being taken out of the defence budget.The British bases in Germany still represent the biggest deployment of UK forces overseas. With civilians, families and children, the British contingent in the country stands at more than 43,000....
Source: BBC
Nov 9, 2011
An excavation at the site of a 1941 Spitfire crash in a bog in the Irish Republic uncovered huge, remarkably preserved chunks of plane and six Browning machine guns. After 70 years buried in peat could they be made to fire? They certainly could, writes Dan Snow.It was June in Donegal, when we stood on a windswept hillside in hard hats and high-vis surrounded by a crowd of locals and watched by an Irish army unit while we filmed an archaeological excavation.This was the place where, in 1941, Roland "Bud" Wolfe, an American pilot flying a British RAF Spitfire, paid for by a wealthy Canadian industrialist, had experienced engine failure while flying over the neutral Republic of Ireland....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 9, 2011
The mysterious deaths gripped the nation back in the 1920s and 30s.More than 20 people linked to the opening of Tutankhamun's burial chamber in Luxor in 1923 died in bizarre circumstances, six of them in London.A frenzied public blamed the 'Curse of Tutankhamun' and speculated on the supernatural powers of the ancient Egyptians.But a historian now claims the deaths in Britain were the work of a notorious satanist, Aleister Crowley....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 9, 2011
An unpublished story by Charlotte Bronte is expected to sell for £300,000 at auction next month.The 4,000-word piece is handwritten on 19 pages each barely larger than a credit card and needs a magnifying glass to be read properly.Written in 1830 when she was only 14, Bronte's story contains scenes which bear a striking resemblance to Jane Eyre, her novel published 17 years later....
Source: History.com
Nov 9, 2011
Recently, the famed astronomer Edwin Hubble has been accused of strong-arming a translator into trimming key findings from a competitor’s paper more than 80 years ago. Did he really use censorship to secure all the credit for discovering that the universe is expanding? Not according to astrophysicist Mario Livio, who describes the detective work he undertook to exonerate Hubble in the current issue of Nature.Who first determined that the universe is expanding? Traditionally, the credit goes to the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who in 1929 reported that other galaxies appeared to be speeding away from us. He also described a correlation between their distances from Earth and the velocities at which they were moving, which is determined by a cosmic expansion rate now known as the Hubble constant (H). Hubble, who died in 1953, never received a Nobel Prize for one of history’s most significant astronomical discoveries, but he remains a legend in his field and in 1983 was honored with a namesake telescope.
Source: National Geographic
Nov 8, 2011
Last month, part of a major wall came tumbling down in Pompeii, the ancient Roman city frozen in time by a first-century eruption of Mount Vesuvius. It was only the latest in a spate of collapses at the site, which experts say is in critical condition.Though the site is said to be safe for tourists, the disintegration is alarming enough to have spurred the European Union to pledge 105 million euros (145 million dollars) for preservation.
