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: Telegraph (UK)
September 18, 2009
The correspondence from the First World War hero of the Arab revolt are to his financier Robin Buxton and he writes of his love of motorbikes that was eventually to kill him.
Speaking about one of his machines, he wrote: "It's a heavenly bike, goes like smoke and is as smooth as milk to ride."
Buxton financed T.E. Lawrence's seminal work The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the letters include the author asking about how he can obtain more money.
Sc
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
September 18, 2009
The Lockerbie bomber has launched a fresh bid to clear his name by publishing documents relating to his appeal on the internet.
Abdelbaset Al Megrahi, who is now back in Libya, has posted documents running to 300 pages online which he claims will prove his innocence.
Not content with being released back to his homeland on compassionate grounds, he is still adamant he wants to clear his name.
Megrahi, who has terminal prostate cancer, had abandoned his appea
Source: History Today
September 17, 2009
Mary Queen of Scots’ last letter, dated 1587, went on display in the George Bridge Building at the National Library of Scotland on Tuesday, September 15th, to mark the official launch of the library’s new visitor centre. The 422-year-old manuscript is the farewell letter which Mary wrote to Henri III, King of France, just six hours before she was executed. The letter will remain on show until Monday 21st September. It will thereafter be replaced by a facsimile.
Source: WaPo
September 11, 2009
VINCENNES, Ind. The students filed into their social studies class just after lunch and slumped into desks where they had learned about the Civil War, Lewis and Clark, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor. On this day, teacher Michael Hutchison said, the class would feature "another of those huge moments in our history." He reminded the high school juniors and seniors that he would be grading their notes. Then he dimmed the lights and played a video on the classroom TV....
Eigh
Source: Yahoo News
September 17, 2009
AUSTIN, Texas – Minority activists urged Texas education officials on Thursday to not minimize the importance of civil rights leaders Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall in public schools.
The State Board of Education heard testimony in a plan to update the social studies requirements for the state's 4.6 million K-12 students. Two members of a board-appointed advisory panel had suggested removing Chavez and Marshall from some grades' curriculum, triggering a strong backlash from civi
Source: MailOnline (Daily Mail UK)
September 17, 2009
Over the last century they have passed into gruesome folklore, but Victorian census records on Jack the Ripper's victims cast new light on the lives of some of the murdered prostitutes.
An online genealogy website which trawled the 1881 census - taken seven years before their deaths - has pulled together information on the women that 'provides a small window onto the past' and dispels the myth that they had been teenage street walkers.
The five - Mary Ann Nichols, Anni
Source: Ascribe Newswire
September 17, 2009
Pasadena: The Planck mission has captured its first rough images of the sky, demonstrating the observatory is working and ready to measure light from the dawn of time. Planck - a European Space Agency mission with significant NASA participation - will survey the entire sky to learn more about the history and evolution of our universe.
The space telescope started surveying the sky regularly on Aug. 13 from its vantage point far from Earth. Planck is in orbit around the second
Source: Yahoo News
September 17, 2009
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AP) -- Google Inc. is giving 2 million books in its digital library a chance to be reincarnated as paperbacks.
As part of a deal announced Thursday, Google is opening up part of its index to the maker of a high-speed publishing machine that can manufacture a paperback-bound book of about 300 pages in under five minutes. The new service is an acknowledgment by the Internet search leader that not everyone wants their books served up on a computer or an elect
Source: Yahoo News
September 17, 2009
MOUNTAIN VIEW, California (AP) -- Google Inc. is giving 2 million books in its digital library a chance to be reincarnated as paperbacks.
As part of a deal announced Thursday, Google is opening up part of its index to the maker of a high-speed publishing machine that can manufacture a paperback-bound book of about 300 pages in under five minutes. The new service is an acknowledgment by the Internet search leader that not everyone wants their books served up on a computer or an elect
Source: The Huffington Post
September 17, 2009
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama abruptly canceled a long-planned missile shield for Eastern Europe on Thursday, replacing a Bush-era project that was bitterly opposed by Russia with a plan he contended would better defend against a growing threat of Iranian missiles.
The United States will no longer seek to erect a missile base and radar site in Poland and the Czech Republic, poised at Russia's hemline. That change is bound to please the Russians, who had never accepted U.S. arg
Source: Little About
September 16, 2009
Archaeologists from Newcastle University, in collaboration with English Heritage, have begin the first systematic excavation of a cemetery on Hadrians Wall in England, in order to preserve it effectively.
Hadrians Wall is a stone and turf fortification built by the Roman Empire across the width of what is now northern England.
An important Roman cremation cemetery, situated on a cliff edge, forms part of the World Heritage Site at Birdoswald Fort, Cumbria.
Source: BaltimoreJewishTimes.com
September 15, 2009
A new project will survey mass graves and Jewish cemeteries in the Baltic states where Jewish communities were largely destroyed during World War II.
The aim is to identify and repair the neglected sites from the Holocaust era, which often are the last reminder of once-vibrant Jewish communities, according to a statement released Monday by Lo Tishkach-Do Not Forget, a project coordinated by the Conference of European Rabbis, the continent’s main Orthodox rabbinical association, and
Source: National Park Traveler
September 17, 2009
Is an old railroad bridge a hiking trail? Come October 2 and that could be a new national park trivia question now that the Poughkeepsie-Highland railroad bridge in New York State has been designated a National Recreation Trail by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.
The “Walkway Over the Hudson” project on the Hudson River turned an historic railroad bridge that stretched more than a mile into a scenic biking and pedestrian pathway. Now it will become part of a national network of sceni
Source: Politico
September 17, 2009
Top officials from George W. Bush's White House are greeting the impending arrival of the latest unflattering insider account of the administration with a collective question: Who is Matt Latimer?
Latimer, a former special assistant to the president for speechwriting, is the author of a new book titled "Speech-less: Tales of a White House Survivor," which includes a number of embarrassing Bush anecdotes including the assertion that the former president was confused about t
Source: Las Vegas Sun
September 14, 2009
The basilica where Francisco Franco is buried has canceled the politically charged tradition of holding a memorial Mass to mark the anniversary of the Spanish dictator's death, a monk said Monday.
The Mass at the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid was usually held around Nov. 20, the anniversary of Franco's death in 1975, and drew gatherings of far rightists nostalgic for Franco's nearly four-decade rule.
A law passed in December 2007 specifically outlaws political ral
Source: guardian.uk.co
September 14, 2009
Sitting in his front room at home in Moscow, surrounded by shelves of books on 20th-century history, Leonid Zhura recounts how life was better under Stalin. "It was a heroic epoch. It was the first time in human history that a society was founded on fair principles," he says, adding that Stalin did not commit any crimes.
Zhura's views are not greatly unusual in today's Russia. What distinguishes the amateur historian from other Stalin fans is that he is going to court to p
Source: telegraph.co.uk
September 16, 2009
Tolkien, one of his generation's most respected linguists, was ''earmarked'' to crack Nazi codes in the event that Germany declared war.
ntelligence chiefs singled him and a 'cadre' of other intellectuals to work at Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire.
Its staff - which included Alan Turing, the gay codebreaker - would later decipher the 'impenetrable' Enigma machines.
This saved Britain from German conquest by allowing the Navy to
Source: philly.com
September 16, 2009
Nearly 180 years ago, President Andrew Jackson handed a letter to a military officer with a message for two American Indian tribes: Leave Mississippi and Alabama, or else.
His direct language was the start of federal efforts that led to the forced relocation of five tribes and the infamous "Trail of Tears," as thousands of Indians died from starvation, exposure, and disease.
But historians have always had to depend on a draft of Jackson's message - not the fin
Source: telegraph.co.uk
September 16, 2009
Members of the Habsburg-Lorraine dynasty that ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire have asked for the right to run for the Austrian presidency.
Rudolf Vouk, their lawyer, said the family has lodged a request for the repeal of a 90-year-old ban that prohibits its members from being elected Austria's head of state."Such a disposition is no longer justifiable and contravenes the right to free and democratic elections" as well as the principle of equality before the law
Source: USA Today
September 16, 2009
Lucille Boggess lost two brothers in the invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. She wonders what will happen to the memorial to them and the other "Bedford Boys" whose deaths that day made their town in the Blue Ridge foothills a national symbol of suffering in World War II.
"I'd be very saddened" if the financially troubled National D-Day Memorial in the southwest Virginia town had to close, says Boggess, 80. "This community made a sacrifice on D-Day. We wan
