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: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 6, 2011
They are a hidden maze of tunnels where a bloody underground war was played out in terrifying darkness and where the bodies of 28 heroes lie entombed forever. Now, after lying practically undisturbed since troops laid down their arms in 1918 and just days before Remembrance Sunday, the secrets and tragedies of the labyrinth are finally being revealed thanks to work by archaeologists.Since January, the Anglo-French La Boiselle Study Group has been working with historians to open up and explore the tunnels to discover more about the lives of the men lost in them....
Source: WSJ
Nov 6, 2011
LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. — Robert Flacke Sr. can remember the days when Fort William Henry's multimedia exhibit consisted of two Kodak carousel-style color slide projectors that kept breaking down.The history-heavy tourist attraction on the southern end of Lake George upgraded years ago to a video display, an improvement that looks positively futuristic amid all the aging, dusty exhibits sprinkled throughout the privately owned reconstructed French and Indian War fort and museum. Many of the displays look like they haven't changed since the place was built more than a half-century ago.In an effort to boost numbers of visitors, museum and historical sites around the country are searching for new ways to update old exhibits amid a time of economic uncertainty and declining support for museums in general and history museums in particular."History is tough to sell," said Flacke, president of the Fort William Henry Corp....
Source: Alexandria Free Press (MN)
Nov 6, 2011
From preserving historic buildings to installing interpretive history markers along roadsides, Minnesotans now have access to more than $10 million for the cause of history and historic preservation through the Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grants.The Minnesota Historical Society, the organization responsible for administering the grants, recently announced 49 recipients from across the state, of the September Small and Structured Grants of up to $7,000. The Society also announced the next deadline for Small and Structured Grants is January 13, 2012. The Grants Manual is available at www.mnhs.org/legacygrants with all applications being accepted only through the Society’s new grants portal at www.grants.mnhs.org.Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grants are made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with passage of the Clean Water, Land and Legacy Amendment by the vote of Minnesotans on Nov. 4, 2008. The amendment supports efforts to preserve Minnesota land, water and legacy, including our state’s history and cultural heritage....
Source: Gadling
Nov 6, 2011
The Kingdom of Makuria is the quintessential forgotten civilization. Very few people have even heard of it, yet it ruled southern Sudan for hundreds of years and was one of the few kingdoms to defeat the Arabs during their initial expansion in the 7th century AD. Makuria was a Christian kingdom, born out of the collapse of the earlier Christian kingdom of Axum. Makuria survived as a bulwark of Christianity in medieval Africa until it finally collapsed in 1312. Now excavations of some of its churches at Banganarti and Selib have revealed that this kingdom was a center of pilgrimage, attracting people from as far away as Catalonia, in modern Spain. The 2,300 mile journey from Spain to southern Sudan is a long one even today, but imagine when it had to be done on horseback, walking, and boats powered only by sails and oars. Yet an inscription records that one Catalan named Benesec made the journey almost a thousand years ago, probably to pray for a cure to an illness. "Benesec" was a popular Catalan name in the 13th and 14th centuries....
Source: Business Report
Nov 6, 2011
Germany's Quandt family, a major shareholder in car manufacturer BMW, has pledged more than 5 million euros (6.9 million dollars) to a memorial for forced labourers in Nazi Germany, media reported Sunday.The Quandt family, which is one of Germany's richest, benefited under Nazi rule from using forced labour in its factories, including Jews rounded up in concentration camps....
Source: LA Times
Nov 6, 2011
Reporting from Carnac, France—St. Cornelius, known as Cornély in France, opens his arms in blessing from a niche above the old stone church in Carnac. Legend has it that he was persecuted by Rome for his opposition to animal sacrifice and chased by soldiers all the way to the Brittany coast. Trapped, he turned around and changed them into 3,000 rough-hewn stones that still stand in military rows on a chain of fields just north of here. There are other hypotheses about the Carnac boulders, carbon dated to 4000 to 2000 BC. They mark one of Caesar's camps during the Gallic Wars from 58 to 50 BC. Or they were snake worship sites for ancient Celts whose territory included parts of England and Ireland as well as Brittany. Or maybe they were goblin lairs and fairy treasures. But St. Cornelius works for me.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 6, 2011
For Star Trek, it truly was the final frontier.More than 40 years after it was filmed, an episode of the famous show in which Spock and Captain Kirk dress up as Nazis has been shown in Germany for the first time.The Patterns of Force episode was never screened in 1968 because it was little more than two decades after the downfall of Hitler's regime.Although broadcaster ZDF showed it for the first time, it was not on until after 10pm - and viewers were warned that no-one under the age of 16 should see it.In the episode the Starship Enterprise visits planet Ekon where the citizens have begun behaving like Nazis. The swastika is displayed throughout the episode....
Source: Guardian (UK)
Nov 5, 2011
The late Muammar Gaddafi was fond of insisting on the links between his republic and sub-Saharan Africa. He was less interested, however, in celebrating the black African civilisation that flourished for more than 1,500 years within what are now Libya's borders, and that was barely acknowledged in the Gaddafi-era curriculum.Now, however, researchers into the Garamantes – a "lost" Saharan civilisation that flourished long before the Islamic era – are hoping that Libya's new government can restore the warrior culture, mentioned by Herodotus in his Histories, to its rightful place in Libya's history.For while the impressive Roman ruins at Sabratha and Leptis Magna – both world heritage sites – are rightly famous, Libya's other cultural heritage, one that coexisted with its Roman settlers, has been largely forgotten....
Source: Independent (UK)
Nov 5, 2011
A hundred years ago, Captain Scott led his men in an ill-fated race towards the South Pole. But it is only now that his personal photographs of that legendary expedition can be revealed....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 4, 2011
When a workman at Kensington Palace scrawled an obscene remark on a piece of concealed timber more than a century ago, he must have thought his crime would never be detected.However, a £12 million restoration project of the royal residence has discovered the culprit’s handiwork in pristine order, providing a glimpse of the banter between palace staff at the turn of the 20th century.Either a proud boast by the author or an insult about a colleague, the piece of graffiti adorns a post supporting the ceiling beside the palace’s front door....
Source: Fox News
Nov 4, 2011
Republican lawmakers and conservative activists are expressing outrage after the Obama administration announced its objection to adding President Franklin Roosevelt's D-Day prayer to the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C. The objection was noted during a congressional hearing on Rep. Bill Johnson's, R-Ohio, bill -- the "World War II Memorial Prayer Act of 2011." "It is unconscionable that the Obama administration would stand in the way of honoring our nation's distinguished World War II veterans," Johnson said. "President Roosevelt's prayer gave solace, comfort and strength to our nation and our brave warriors as we fought against tyranny and oppression." Roosevelt asked the nation to join him in prayer as U.S. and allied troops launched the invasion that led to the defeat of Nazi Germany. He asked God to give the allied troops courage and faith, saying, "With thy blessing we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy."...
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Nov 3, 2011
It was found among possessions belonging to Welsh surgeon Sir John Williams, a chief suspect in the Victorian murders.Sir John, known to his family at the time of the killings as "Uncle Jack" was the surgeon to Queen Victoria who lived in London at the time of the slayings.He fled the capital after the murders and later founded the National Library for Wales in Aberystwyth.One of his distant relatives has now unearthed the old black-handled surgeon's knife, which he used for operations, and believes it could be the murder weapon....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 3, 2011
Astonishing drawings of Adolf Hitler and his henchmen sketched in 1931 by a British artist who was allowed into the dictator's lair have emerged.Helen McKie was the only woman allowed to sketch in Hitler's Munich headquarters, called Brown House, and she produced 17 chilling pictures of the Nazi monster and his inner-sanctum.Drawn two years before Hitler came to power and eight years before the start of World War Two, the images are a glimpse into the early stages of Nazism....
Source: LiveScience
Nov 3, 2011
A miniature photograph of the moon, beard hairs whose owner has been dead for centuries, a shaving of Egyptian mummy bone, flowerlike patterns constructed from butterfly scales and algae called diatoms, and engravings of biblical text.During a good part of the 19th century, called the Victorian times, a peek through a microscope could reveal very different sights than ones we'd expect to see today. In the mid- to late-1800s, microscopes were not only instruments of scientific discovery, but they were tools for popular entertainment, particularly in Britain. And an industry of inventive slide makers sprung up to feed the public appetite for this new way of seeing.
Source: LiveScience
Nov 3, 2011
Frontier settlers, who "live on the edge," may be more likely to have larger families than those who stay snuggled at the core of a settlement, based on new research of how the French settled Quebec centuries ago.A study of Quebecois records determined that the women among the families at the outskirts of the population were about 15 percent more fertile than those who lived in more-established settlements, and consequently their families contributed much more to Quebec's modern gene pool....
Source: CBS News
Nov 3, 2011
This is a remarkable story of one of the enduring tragedies of the Holocaust: the shattering of so many families. Parents, brothers and sisters vanished -- their fates unknown.
Seven decades later, as CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason reports, there's now an effort to piece together the stories before they're lost forever.
Pulled from the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington are photos of children -- more than 1,100 of them who were orphaned or displaced by the Nazi persecution.
These portraits were taken by aid workers trying to reunite the children with surviving families.
"Most of them were in hiding during the war and after the war, they were put into children's homes all over Europe," said Lisa Yavnai, who heads a new project called "Remember Me."
Source: Press Release
Nov 3, 2011
WASHINGTON, D.C./PROVO, Utah, November 3, 2011 – The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Ancestry.com announced that material from four Museum collections containing information on more than 30,000 victims of Nazi persecution is now available online at Ancestry.com and can be searched at no cost. The collections contain information on thousands of individuals including displaced Jewish orphans; Czech Jews deported to the Terezin concentration camp and camps in occupied Poland; and French victims of Nazi persecution.
Source: CNN.com
Nov 2, 2011
Washington (CNN) -- Nearly seven decades after the attack on Pearl Harbor, thousands of Japanese-American World War II veterans were honored Wednesday at a Congressional Gold Medal ceremony held at the U.S Capitol.In a rare moment of unity, Democratic and Republican Senators and members of the House of Representatives praised Japanese-American soldiers of the 442nd Regiment Combat Team and the 100th Infantry Battalion and veterans of the Military Intelligence Service for their contribution to the war."Aloha and welcome," said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, at the start of the invitation-only event inside the Capitol's Emancipation Hall. About 1,000 people witnessed the ceremony in person, including several aging Japanese-American honorees and their families who waited years for this day....
Source: WTVR
Nov 2, 2011
When President Obama designates part of Fort Monroe as a national monument Tuesday, it won't be the first time a prominent piece of Hampton Roads real estate has had its destiny transformed by the stroke of a presidential pen.Using the powers conferred by the Antiquities Act of 1906, President Herbert Hoover created Colonial National Monument in 1930, linking parts of Jamestown, Yorktown and Williamsburg into a protected federal preserve that became Colonial National Historical Park in 1936.
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Nov 2, 2011
The SS indulged their bloodlust on men, women and children alike. While homes and shops blazed around them like some hellish inferno, women were violated and those who were pregnant were stabbed in the guts. Small babies were bayoneted in their cribs. The village priest was beheaded.By the time Hitler’s men had left the Greek village of Distomo near the ancient town of Delphi on that bloody day in June 1944, 218 people were dead.The Waffen-SS was pleased with its work: the local partisans who had dared to attack a German unit had been taught a bitter lesson in revenge.The slaughter at Distomo was such an outrage that, in 2003, even a German Federal Court judge described it as ‘one of the most despicable crimes of World War II’....
