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: NYT
July 11, 2009
Its name alone indicates what the western region of Xinjiang means to the Chinese state: it translates as New Frontier or New Dominion, a place at the margins of empire. For centuries, the rulers of China have sought to control and shape Xinjiang, much as the dry winds of the vast deserts here sculpt the rocks.
A history exhibition in the main museum in this regional capital goes one step further. “Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China,” it asserts, implyi
Source: NYT
July 11, 2009
Lloyd Gaines was moody that winter of 1939, acting not at all like a man who had just triumphed in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases in decades. And oddly, even though it was raining and the sidewalks of Chicago were clogged with slush, he felt a need to buy postage stamps one night.
Or so he told a friend just before he left his apartment house on March 19, 1939, never to be seen again. Had he not vanished at 28, Lloyd Gaines might be in the pantheon of civil rights history wi
Source: AP
July 11, 2009
The end of slavery meant a kind of beginning for the family histories of many African-Americans: for the first time, the enslaved people’s identities and family connections became part of a public record. And the huge task of recording that data fell to the federal Freedmen’s Bureau.
After collecting dust in government warehouses since the late 1800s, the Virginia portion of the Freedmen’s Bureau records is now available electronically to the public. The online database that lists
Source: NYT
July 9, 2009
Two economists with longstanding ties to the Federal Reserve warned Congress on Thursday that it would be a mistake to make the Fed a super-regulator in charge of reining in “systemic risk” and financial institutions considered “too big to fail.”
In what is shaping up as a political battle over a crucial part of President Obama’s plan to overhaul financial regulation, the economists told a House panel that the Fed had consistently failed to recognize financial catastrophes until th
Source: NYT
July 9, 2009
The so-called enfants de Boches — roughly, children of the Huns — born during the war to French women and German soldiers, are seeking to fill a hole in their lives, hunting for long-lost German fathers they never knew and speaking openly of the maltreatment they suffered from their French neighbors. It is estimated that 200,000 children were born of these wartime love affairs.
Photos of the time depict young women, their heads shorn in shame, being hounded through villages, clutchi
Source: Swiss Info
July 9, 2009
Archaeologists from Geneva University have discovered what they claim is Africa's oldest ceramic, dated at around 9,400BC, in eastern Mali.
"It's a tiny, ornate fragment that was made with great skill and the use of fire," said ethno-archaeologist Anne Mayor in Bamako, the Malian capital.
Source: Independent (UK)
July 11, 2009
Today, fourteen years after the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica – the worst atrocity in Europe since the end of the Second World War – another 500 coffins will join the thousands buried in the memorial graveyard outside the town.
The International Commission on Missing Persons has been carrying out the grim task of identifying remains using DNA and other evidence, allowing relatives to bury their dead and gain "closure". To date, it has identified 6,186 of
Source: Guardian (UK)
July 11, 2009
A former head of MI5 discloses in the Guardian today that she warned ministers and officials that an invasion of Iraq would increase the terrorist threat to Britain.
Lady Manningham-Buller says that as US and British forces were preparing to invade Iraq, she asked: "Why now?" She adds: "I said it as explicitly as I could. I said something like, 'The threat to us would increase because of Iraq'."
MI5 knew that invading Iraq would make its task much mo
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
July 11, 2009
Mummar Gaddafi demanded the return of the Lockerbie bomber yesterday in an extraordinary encounter with Gordon Brown.
The Libyan dictator used their first face-to-face meeting to raise the case of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who was convicted of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 in 1988.
He insisted that Al Megrahi, who is suffering from prostate cancer in a Scottish jail, be returned to Libya.
Source: Spiegel Online
July 10, 2009
Germany has been scratching an old itch this week. The issue of what to do with those Germans who once worked for the East German secret police, most commonly known as the Stasi, has come up again with figures released earlier in the week indicating there were still around 17,000 ex-Stasi employees in Germany's civil service.
Even more troubling, some of them appear to be employed by the police or in various national or state offices of criminal investigation. One was even rumored t
Source: Spiegel Online
July 10, 2009
The court stipulated that they were not to mention so much as a word about the case. Instead, Vera Demjanjuk, 84, told her husband John, 89, what she had planted in their garden at home. The telephone conversation, which lasted 20 minutes, was the only conversation to date between the Stadelheim Prison in Munich and Cleveland, Ohio. An official interpreter listened in on the conversation. "She hopes and believes that he will somehow return home," says John Demjanjuk, Jr., the couple's
Source: Deutsche Welle
July 9, 2009
"We consider unacceptable the fact that in the OSCE's parliamentary assembly resolution there is an attempt to distort history with political goals," said Russian foreign ministry spokesman Andrei Nesterenko on Thursday. "This does not contribute to creating an atmosphere of trust and cooperation between the member states of this body," he added.
Earlier this week lawmakers from Russia's two chambers of parliament said in a statement that the OSCE resolution was
Source: AP
July 9, 2009
The Dutch government has turned over dozens of antiquities stolen from
Iraq to Baghdad's ambassador.
The 69 pieces include cylindrical stone seals older than 2000 B.C. and a terra-cotta relief
depicting a bearded man praying.
Dutch Education, Culture and Science Minister Ronald Plasterk said Thursday the ancient artifacts
were surrendered by Dutch traders after police informed them they were stolen.
Source: http://www.physorg.com
July 10, 2009
David Cameron’s Jewish history goes back hundreds - if not thousands - of years, according to a University of Manchester historian.
Dr Yaakov Wise, who specialises in Jewish history, says the Tory leader is descended from a German-born Jewish scholar whose writings furthered the study of Hebrew in European Christendom at a time of widespread hostility toward its Jews.
Source: Times Online (UK)
June 11, 2009
Historians turn to fiction as advances are slashed.
Authors are seeing advances reduced to a quarter of what they could have expected two years ago as publishers react to the recession by minimising risks.
Among the hardest hit are historians, who have found that books that would previously have earned them an advance of £120,000 are now commanding only £30,000. Some academics have turned from serious history to historical fiction to earn more money.
Tris
Source: U.S News and World Report
July 10, 2009
The president held a dinner at the White House for leading presidential scholars.
President Obama has found another way to break out of the White House "bubble"—holding private discussions with eminent historians who have studied the successes and failures of his predecessors. His goal is to better understand what has worked and what has failed in the past as he makes policy today.
Obama held a dinner at the White House residence with nine such scholars on Jun
Source: http://www.gazette.net (Maryland)
July 9, 2009
If local history buff Dick Charlton wants to retrace the steps of American Marines who shot at invading British forces in the Battle of Bladensburg during the War of 1812, he has to drive up a busy road surrounded by tire shops and fast food restaurants.
"Most are not aware of it all," Chartlon, 77, of Beltsville, said of the battlefield.
"It's almost a forgotten war, and it's one that we won," he added. "It was a foreign country on our territor
Source: BBC
July 10, 2009
Fifty-one dismembered skeletons found in a burial pit on the site of a planned £87m relief road in Dorset are from the Saxon period, tests show.
Initially, it was thought the burial site on Ridgeway Hill, near Weymouth, dated from the Iron Age (from BC 800) to early Roman times (from AD 43).
But radio carbon dating shows the male rib cages, skulls and leg bones date between AD 890 and AD 1030.
Experts made the earlier estimate after examining pottery foun
Source: Telegraph (UK)
July 10, 2009
A tin lifeboat station which is rusting away is an important part of Britain's archaeological heritage and must be saved, conservation chiefs have ruled.
The 100-year-old building in Tenby, Pembrokeshire launched thousands of rescue missions.
But it was on the brink of collapse and the RNLI and the Pembrokeshire Coast agreed it should be demolished.
Source: Foxnews
July 10, 2009
Watergate figure John Dean, who once spent eight years embroiled in a libel suit against a publishing house, is now threatening to sue a college history professor for posting audio tapes online that suggest the Nixon confidant-turned-government witness is covering up the details of his role in the most infamous political scandal in American history.
Dean, the former White House counsel whose damning testimony led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974, is continuing what c
