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: Yahoo News
Feb 24, 2011
Fairfax, Va. – History lights a path out of partisan morass, if we will but see. The new Republican House has read the Constitution, reverently, voted to repeal and defund health-care reform, defiantly, and listened to the president’s views on health care and our union, dutifully.
As a next step, I highly recommend they read Pauline Maier’s masterful “Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-88,” before plunging back into business as usual. Two lessons in particular sp
Source: CBS News
Feb 24, 2011
Our medieval ancestors had any number of habits we now find odd - among them their pursuit of a formula to turn base metals into gold. That's one reason why we often equate the word "alchemist" with "charlatan." But the often-derided practice is now getting a second look from historians, who say the popular image we have of alchemy does not accurately comport with the reality.
That topic was taken up in earnest during a recent meeting of American Association fo
Source: Life Site News
Feb 24, 2011
Documents now open to the public reveal a new story about the fascinating inner workings of the Pontifical Commission on Population, Family, and Birth-rate, commonly referred to as the “Birth Control Commission,” which was behind the critical papal encyclical Humanae Vitae.
Dr. Germain Grisez, emeritus Professor of Christian Ethics at Mount St. Mary’s University and a close friend and advisor to Commission member Fr. John Ford, S.J., has made the documents available on his website,
Source: Ahram Omline (Egypt)
Feb 24, 2011
Archaeologists succeeded in thwarting a looting attempt of a 160-ton colossus of the 19th dynasty king Ramses II.
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the statue of king Ramses II
the statue of king Ramses II
the statue of king Ramses II
Last night looters sneaked into the southern quarry of the upper Egyptian city of Aswan in an attempt to cut and remove the statue of King Ramses II. The statue is half buried in the sand as it was originally cut in red
Source: Science Now
Feb 24, 2011
About 11,500 years ago, at a seasonal base camp in central Alaska, a 3-year-old child died. Its family burned the small body, perhaps ceremonially, in the house's central hearth, and then they moved on, never to use the home again.
Last year, archaeologists discovered the remains of the house and burial, providing a rare slice of life of the first Americans. Some aspects of the burial resemble those in both Siberia and North America, but in other respects the new find is completely
Source: WaPo
Feb 24, 2011
Some 11,500 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, a child died near a river in what is now central Alaska. The people living with the child in a tent-pole house - presumably the parents - placed the 3-year-old's body in their home's cooking pit and lit a fire. After two to three hours of burning, the family covered the remains with dirt and left.
That's the dramatic story emerging from the study of the oldest human remains ever found in Alaska - and some of the oldest in all of
Source: HNN Staff
Feb 24, 2011
Both Democrats and Republicans in Wisconsin are waging battle armed with the weapons of parliamentary procedure. Fourteen Democratic state senators have fled the state for neighboring Illinois. Their choice of refuge is eminently appropriate, for Abraham Lincoln himself famously tried to deny his political opponents quorum through a very unorthodox method of departure in 1840.Lincoln, then a young Whig state congressman, was a major backer of Illinois’s State Bank. &n
Source: National Parks Traveler
Feb 24, 2011
The Sesquicentennial of the Civil War has also brought renewed interest in the Underground Railroad, and a talk this Saturday at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park will examine an intriguing question: "The Underground Railroad Quilt Code - Truth or Myth?"
Information about the event notes,
"The Underground Railroad (UGRR) has captured the imagination of the country, and stories of its use have been published and repeated in countless books and songs
Source: National Parks Traveler
Feb 24, 2011
The Sesquicentennial of the Civil War has also brought renewed interest in the Underground Railroad, and a talk this Saturday at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park will examine an intriguing question: "The Underground Railroad Quilt Code - Truth or Myth?"
Information about the event notes,
"The Underground Railroad (UGRR) has captured the imagination of the country, and stories of its use have been published and repeated in countless books and songs
Source: Virginia Pilot
Feb 24, 2011
Sixty-six years ago Wednesday, Hershel "Woody" Williams was face down in the black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima when he heard the cheers.
He and thousands of other Marines and Navy corpsmen were trying to break through Japanese defenses on the South Pacific island during what became one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.
"The Marines around me started yelling and screaming and firing their weapons in the air and jumping up and down," Williams rec
Source: Telegraph (UK)
Feb 24, 2011
MI5 and the police were concerned that associates of the fertiliser bombers were planning attacks 17 months before the July 7 bombings, it has emerged.
The security service had bugged fertiliser bomb plot ringleader Omar Khyam boasting he had four terrorist cells, any of which could carry out an attack, the July 7 inquest heard yesterday.
Mohammed Sidique Khan, the leader of the London bombers, had been seen meeting with up with members of the fertiliser bomb plot on f
Source: Discovery News
Feb 23, 2011
Neanderthals living in what is now Italy may have used feathers as fashion accessories, according to a study on 44,000-year-old bird bones.
While investigating Neanderthal remains in the Fumane Cave near Verona in northern Italy, paleoanthropologist Marco Peresani from the University of Ferrara and colleagues discovered 660 bird bones in layers that were dated to around 44,000 years ago.
Belonging to 22 species of birds, the remains included several wing bones which, ac
Source: WaPo
Feb 23, 2011
Here's Abraham Lincoln on Bolshaya Pirogovskaya Street, larger than life, shaking hands with Czar Alexander II. They are the Emancipator and the Liberator, joined together in a new work by sculptor Alexander Burganov. They're looking jolly, these men who, half a world apart, presided over the freeing of serfs and slaves.
Behind them, in the building of the Russian federal archives, an exhibit opened Tuesday that looks at Lincoln's life, and Alexander's. In this season of sesquicente
Source: Talking Points Memo
Feb 23, 2011
If you were worried there wouldn't be a 2012 candidate touting the pro-Crusades platform, then today is your lucky day!
"The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical," former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA) told a South Carolina audience yesterday. "And that is what the perception is by the American left who hates Christendom."
Santorum's defense of the Crusades cam
Source: Post and Courier
Feb 23, 2011
SHUTES FOLLY -- The toaster-oven-size machine whirred quietly atop the tripod as its laser recorded up to 40,000 data points a second.
National Park Service architects brought it here Tuesday, and by Thursday, they expect to have collected between 150 million and 200 million electronic measurements of one of Charleston's most neglected historic sites.
Castle Pinckney has stood guard on this island for two centuries -- and the brick fortification looks every year its ag
Source: Montreal Gazette
Feb 23, 2011
Back in 1989, a National Film Board documentary titled Dis paraitre warned that Quebec's French culture could disappear within a couple of decades.
That doomsday scenario has not come true.
But there is a group whose presence is fading in some parts of the province. Anglophones.
Quietly, without fanfare, English-speakers are disappearing from regions where the roots of both language communities run deep.
For rural anglophones, the prospect of D
Source: WaPo
Feb 23, 2011
VATICAN CITY -- The headline was an eye-grabber: "Homer and Bart are Catholic."
That this homage to The Simpsons was splashed across the Vatican's newspaper was odder still, hinting that as it nears its 150th year of publication, L'Osservatore Romano was trying to be relevant, hip, even a bit controversial.
It wasn't always so, and the pope's newspaper is still full of dense treatises on obscure 15th century saints, papal discourses and appointments of bishops
Source: CNBC
Feb 23, 2011
Inflation has led to political revolutions since Medieval times and we may be witnessing the fifth such great revolution in history unfolding in the Middle East and in our own country right now, said Dr. Ed Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist of Yardeni Research.
Yardeni cites the work of historian David Hackett Fischer, who described civilization’s first four major inflation cycles in his 1999 work The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. The fir
Source: BBC
Feb 23, 2011
Campaigners are celebrating a "major milestone" in the fight to save a London workhouse thought to have inspired the work of Charles Dickens.
The Cleveland Street Workhouse Group (CSWG) wants the 18th Century building in Fitzrovia - earmarked for demolition - to be given listed status.
It claims a positive English Heritage report acknowledges its "historical and architectural" contribution to London.
A government statement said a decisio
Source: BBC
Feb 23, 2011
A former Serbian chief of police has been jailed for 27 years for his role in the murder of more than 700 ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999.
The UN tribunal at The Hague found Vlastimir Djordjevic guilty of five counts of crimes against humanity, including murder and deportation.
His actions had "contributed significantly" to the "campaign of terror" against Kosovans, it ruled.
Djordjevic had said he was not guilty as he had no control
