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: WaPo
Oct 13, 2011
While the National Women’s History Museum waits for authorization from Congress, its organizers are launching a series of lectures on scholarly topics.The subjects are a window into the range of materials a museum might cover and a pointed way of reminding the public the museum remains a vital effort.“The Past, Present, and Future of U.S. Women’s History” kicks off October 18 with a talk by Dr. Vicki Ruiz, the dean of the School of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine. Ruiz, a social historian and professor of History and Chicano/Latino Studies, will discuss milestones of Latino history in the U.S....
Source: USA Today
Oct 13, 2011
American history is dotted with popular movements like the "Occupy Wall Street" protest -- particularly during times of great economic hardship.Several movements from the Great Depression of the 1930s and the major economic crises in the 1890s seem to parallel the "Occupy Wall Street" phenomenon, Iowa historians said.In each case, they said, average people united and called on the federal government to ease financial hardships or correct what they perceived to be structural inequalities caused by the concentration of wealth. Here are a few of them:Coxey's Army: The protest known as Coxey's Army may hold the strongest parallels to the Occupy movement, said University of Iowa history professor Shelton Stromquist.The movement, led by Ohio populist Jacob Coxey, united unemployed workers in a march to Washington, D.C., in 1894 to demand that Congress inflate the U.S. currency and use the newly created wealth to create public-works jobs for the unemployed....
Source: NYT
Oct 13, 2011
LAKE HAVASU CITY, Ariz. — When Arizona executes prisoners, it uses lethal injection — not drawing and quartering, hanging or beheading, all of which have fallen out of favor since they were used with some regularity in Europe centuries back.But for a brief period this week, the state will be simulating that gorier era, when the most notorious outlaws have their heads put on stakes and displayed for all to see. Red food dye will take the place of real blood, of course, and plastic mannequin heads will be used instead of actual skulls.Forty years have passed since Robert P. McCulloch, an Arizona real estate developer with a penchant for pie-in-the-sky ideas, bought the actual London Bridge that once spanned the Thames, dismantled it, transported it halfway around the world and had it rebuilt, stone by stone, in this desert oasis near the California line....
Source: Reuters
Oct 12, 2011
BERLIN (Reuters) - The newly published diary of an indignant small-town official in Nazi Germany has stirred the sensitive debate over how much ordinary Germans knew of atrocities committed under Hitler, creating a wave of interest at home and abroad.The diary of Friedrich Kellner "'All Minds Blurred and Darkened' Diaries 1939-1945" came to prominence thanks to the intervention of the elder former U.S. President George Bush.Filled with scathing commentaries on events, newspaper clippings and records of private conversations, Kellner's 940-page chronicle gives an insight into what information was available to ordinary Germans.Kellner, a mid-ranking court official who was in his mid-50s when he started writing, vents his anger at Hitler, hopes his country will be defeated in the war and laments reports of mysterious deaths at mental homes and mass shootings of Jews....
Source: Fox News
Oct 12, 2011
After nearly six decades, a Korean War veteran in California received a Purple Heart for rescuing a wounded Marine during a fierce firefight -- one in which he was injured, too, and then returned to the fight only to be hurt again, The Mercury News reported.
Source: NYT
Oct 12, 2011
After the Black Death reached London in 1348, about 2,400 people were buried in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, in a cemetery that had been prepared for the plague’s arrival. From the teeth of four of those victims, researchers have now reconstructed the full DNA of a microbe that within five years felled one-third to one-half of the population of Western Europe.The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, is still highly virulent today but has different symptoms, leading some historians to doubt that it was the agent of the Black Death.Those doubts were laid to rest last year by detection of the bacterium’s DNA in plague victims from mass graves across Europe. With the full genome now in hand, the researchers hope to recreate the microbe itself so as to understand what made the Black Death outbreak so deadly.So far, the evidence points more toward the conditions of the time than to properties of the bacterium itself. The genome recovered from the East Smithfield victims is remarkably similar to that of the present-day bacterium, says the research team, led by Kirsten I. Bos of McMaster University in Ontario and Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany....
Source: Shoreline Times
Oct 12, 2011
ESSEX – A “ship’s knee” found in the mud of the Connecticut River may have come from the wreck of an American ship that was run aground by the British Navy some 200 years ago, marine historians say.And, the discovery of this mystery relic may help the Connecticut River Museum with their quest to get their property designated a national historic battle site and to get the state to name Essex (more specifically, the peninsula where the town is located), a state historic battle site.While this discovery was made in June, the artifact has only been on display at the Connecticut River Museum the past two weeks.At the museum, the old ship’s knee is kept in a tank of fresh water that is changed every two weeks to leech the salt water out, in an effort to preserve the aged wood, according to Jerry Roberts, director of the museum. Once the 200-year-old ship’s knee was taken out of the water and exposed to the air, salt would only damage the wood, crystallizing on its surface, turning the wood sponge-like, he adds.“The salt water is very dangerous to the wood,” he says....
Source: WaPo
Oct 12, 2011
After spending 90 minutes debating his rivals for the Republican presidential nomination, Rick Perry decided to go over to the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house and talk a little history and states’ rights, a favorite topic of the 10th amendment enthusiast.NBC’s Carrie Dann reported that Perry suffered a “head-slapping gaffe” after the debate when he answered a young woman’s question by saying that one of the “reasons we fought the revolution in the 16th century was to get away from the kind of onerous crown.”But as most history buffs know, the American revolution was fought in the 18th century....
Source: UPI
Oct 12, 2011
WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 (UPI) -- The transcript of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon's testimony to the Watergate grand jury will be made public Nov. 10, a man who pushed for the release said.Historian Stanley Kutler told The Washington Post the Nixon Presidential Library and Archives in California will release a series of recordings and documents in addition to the grand jury transcript.Kutler was among a group of historians who sued to make the materials available to the public.Previously Nixon's testimony had been redacted under laws that shield grand jury materials.Steven Aftergood, who directs the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, called the upcoming release "a missing piece or the puzzle about the Nixon administration."...
Source: CNN
Oct 11, 2011
Don McCullin is best known for the unwavering gaze of his war photography.For thirty years he traveled to places most people run from, depicting horror unflinchingly and with enormous compassion for the people he captured in unimaginable situations.Considered one of the greatest war photographers, McCullin's pictures chart conflicts in Vietnam, Bangladesh, the Congo, El Salvador, Biafra, Cambodia and the Middle East, including the Six-Day War in June 1967.McCullin came away having taken some of the most powerful photographs of his career -- but he was left suffering combat stress, much like the soldier in his photograph.....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 11, 2011
Spain may exhume the remains of dictator Francisco Franco from the vast mausoleum erected using the forced labour of political prisoners in the hills near Madrid and convert the site into a museum of reconciliation.Under proposals to be considered by the Spanish government the dictator's corpse could be transferred from the controversial Valley of the Fallen to the El Pardo cemetery in central Madrid and buried alongside his wife, Carmen Polo.The remains of Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Franco's Falangist party, which currently lie next to the late dictator, would be removed from the basilica and placed in a separate grave within the complex.The proposals have been made by a commission of experts tasked with deciding the fate of a memorial that even 36 years after the death of the General still casts a dark shadow over Spain....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
Oct 11, 2011
Two weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Japanese submarine shot a torpedo at an American oil tanker just off the California coast, sinking the ship and sending three million gallons (11.36 million litres) of crude to the ocean bottom.All 38 people on board were rescued in what remains an overlooked chapter of World War II - it was one of several attacks by Japanese and German forces on the U.S. mainland during the war.The SS Montebello has sat mostly intact 900 feet below the surface with the oil remarkably still on board after seven decades.A mission to see how much of the oil remains in the hold of the 440-foot ship launches this week to help officials determine how to prevent the crude from leaking and marring the celebrated central California coastline.A catastrophic release, such as an earthquake, could crack the hull of the wreck and send the crude spewing into the ocean....
Source: AP
Oct 11, 2011
A modern wedge of glass, concrete and steel rips through a 135-year-old former armory building for the armies of Kaiser Wilhelm I, its silvery shimmer and stark lines contrasting sharply with the neoclassical building that it now bisects.American architect Daniel Libeskind knew when he won the bid to redesign Dresden's Museum of Military History that he wanted to create a radical departure — something symbolic of Germany's rigid authoritarian past giving way to the liberal democracy of today."He said from the beginning that we must transform the building," said Libeskind's project leader Jochen Klein, in a preview of the building Tuesday ahead of its official reopening to the public on Saturday. "We needed to give the old building a new meaning....
Source: Agence France-Presse
Oct 11, 2011
The winners of this year’s Nobel prize in economics said yesterday that the eurozone crisis is mainly a political issue, not an economic one.New York University’s Thomas Sargent, who with Princeton University colleague Christopher Sims captured the annual prize for economics, said the founding of the United States shows what the issues and solutions are.“There are no new issues in economic theory with Europe and the euro... the difficult thing is the politics,” Sargent told a news conference in Princeton. “In the 1780s, the United States is a basket case,” he added, with 13 sovereign governments, each of which could raise taxes and print money.In contrast, the nation had a very weak center, not having yet established a central bank or gained taxing power....
Source: Toronto Star
Oct 11, 2011
As long ago as 1842, with the War of 1812 just three decades in the rear-view mirror, Major John Richardson was already lamenting that its heroism and import were being forgotten in Canada.“It is a humiliating yet undeniable fact,” Richardson harrumphed, “that there are few young men of the present generation who are at all aware, except by vague and inaccurate report, of the brilliant feats of arms, and sterling loyalty displayed by their immediate progenitors.”...The War of 1812 has been called by U.S. historians “Our Strangest War,” “A Forgotten Conflict” and “Mr. Madison’s War” (after U.S. President James Madison). It’s also been called the War that Both Sides Won, “a curious little war,” “a silly little war” fought between creaking sailing ships, inexperienced armies and bumbling generals.Whatever the name, it remains the only real war, said the great historian J.M.S. Careless, fought in English Canada in defence of the country’s own soil.Thinking, doubtless, of Brock, the great chief Tecumseh and the heroine Laura Secord, Careless wrote that “the very creation of heroes and legends out of the conflict reveals the impact that it made on popular consciousness.”...
Source: Ynet News
Oct 11, 2011
Palestinians are using archeology to advance their statehood bid. Prominent archaeologist Gabriel Barkai called it "cultural Intifada."The PA will seek World Heritage status for the birthplace of Jesus, Bethlehem, once the UN’s cultural agency (UNESCO) admits them as a full member. Hamdan Taha, the Palestinian Authority minister who deals with antiquities and culture, also listed Nablus and Hebron among 20 cultural heritage sites which he said could be nominated as World Heritage Sites....Taha's bid at UNESCO is supported by the Vatican Custody of the Holy Land, the Greek Orthodox Church, and the Armenian Church. As th UN bid brings the Palestinians closer to an independent state, the historical and archeological claims are playing an increasingly prominent role in the building of the national consciousness.Taha, who did his undergraduate work in Berlin, worked in Jericho with Paolo Matthiae, an Italian scholar who discovered Ebla, the Syrian site that is most famous for the “Ebla tablets.” In Herodion (Herod’s fortress in the Judean hills), Taha worked with Michele Piccirillo, a Fransciscan priest who has been one of the most famous Italian archaeologists. Taha gets funds and support from UNESCO, European governments and societies like the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, a major Catholic association in Jerusalem....
Source: NYT
Oct 11, 2011
Sea explorers announced Monday the discovery of a new sunken treasure that they plan to retrieve from the bottom of the North Atlantic.Off Ireland in 1917, a German torpedo sank the British steamship Mantola, sending the vessel and its cargo of an estimated 20 tons of silver to the seabed more than a mile down. At today’s prices, the metal would be worth about $18 million.Odyssey Marine Exploration, based in Tampa, Fla., said it had visually confirmed the identity of the Mantola with a tethered robot last month during an expedition and had been contracted by the British Department for Transport (a successor to the Ministry of War Transport) to retrieve the lost riches....
Source: The Post and Courier
Oct 10, 2011
Mary Chesnut, wife of U.S. Sen. James Chesnut Jr. of South Carolina on the eve of the Civil War — a man who played a pivotal role in the war's first shot at Fort Sumter and later served as an aide to Confederate President Jefferson Davis, wrote an extensive diary widely praised as one of that era's greatest works of literature.But she also collected a few hundred photographs, primarily of the people who were her subjects. These photos likely jogged her memory as she continued to rework her diary up throughout Reconstruction and until her death in 1886.Since then, the photographs and her written words were split up.Her diary, first published in 1905, would become famous. Her photographs, however, disappeared — at least from the scholars and family members most involved in keeping Chesnut's legacy alive....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Oct 10, 2011
The severed head of King Henri IV of France, lost during the Revolution and formally identified last year, should be reunited with his body, the pretender to the throne of France has demanded.Louis de Bourbon said the embalmed head, identified by forensic scientists in December, should now be reinterred with his body so that one of France's best-loved monarchs can "rest in peace".Henri IV was 57-years-old when he was assassinated by a Catholic militant in 1610.He was buried alongside France's other kings in the Basilica of Saint Denis, outside Paris. French revolutionaries dug up his body in 1793 but a mystery admirer of "Good King Henri" managed to make off with his head.Over the next 200 years, it was lost from view until a private collector finally handed it over to Louis de Bourbon, 37, the Duke of Anjou, a banker and King Henri's direct descendant....
Source: Bristol University
Oct 10, 2011
An extremely rare Egyptian coffin, possibly belonging to the son of a king or a very senior official, has been ‘discovered’ at Torquay Museum by an archaeologist at the University of Bristol.Dr Aidan Dodson, a senior research fellow in Bristol’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology made the discovery while undertaking a long-term project to catalogue every single Egyptian coffin in English and Welsh provincial museums.Dr Dodson said: “When I walked into Torquay Museum for the first time I realised that the coffin was something really special. Not only was it of a design of which there is probably only one other example in the UK (in Bristol), but the quality was exceptional.“Cut from a single log of cedar wood, it is exquisitely carved, inlaid and painted. For a child to have been given something like that, he must have had very important parents – perhaps even a king and queen. Unfortunately, the part of the inscription which named the boy and his parents is so badly damaged that we cannot be certain.
