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: UPI
August 11, 2008
The grave of a Union soldier has finally been correctly marked after 125 years in a North Carolina grave mistakenly identified as belonging to a Confederate.
Pvt. Jacob Pfeiffer of New York has a new tombstone and was honored Saturday by about a dozen Civil War buffs and others in Raleigh's Oakwood cemetery, reported the Raleigh News & Observer Sunday.
Pfeiffer grew up on a farm in east Manhattan and was 21 when he died from wounds incurred during the Battle of Gett
Source: Top News
August 11, 2008
He might have led Britain to victory in the Second World War, but the new history seems to have forgotten Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
A team of scholars working for TV’s History Channel compiled the list for a five-part television series called 50 Things You Need To Know About British History, but omitted the likes of Churchill, Queen Victoria, Florence Nightingale, Captain Cook and Sir Walter Raleigh from their list.
Though the list included Shakespeare, Charles
Source: Daytona Beach News-Journal
August 9, 2008
Once upon a time, robes of Franciscan friars swept the sands of Volusia County west of New Smyrna Beach. They moved past palmettos and through the shade of ancient oaks to pray behind arched coquina windows as they sought to save souls of heathen Jororo Indians.
Chants and song resonated from the mission of San Josef de Jororo as its bell tolled the faithful to the altar of the chapel built by followers of Columbus on his second voyage in 1496. It was one of several holy out
Source: Muskogee Phoenix
August 11, 2008
Chad Smith, principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, will be among speakers at a ceremonial kickoff celebrating the beginning of historical renovation of the Cherokee Nation Supreme Court Building on Tuesday.
The building is the oldest municipal building in the state.
The restoration is one of several planned by the Cherokee Nation’s cultural tourism department. The building is to become a museum with pre-statehood photographs and artifacts. Completion is expected in July 2009
Source: NYT
August 11, 2008
The invention of agriculture was a pivotal event in human history, but archaeologists studying its origins may have made a simple error in dating the domestication of animals like sheep and goats. The signal of the process, they believed, was the first appearance in the archaeological record of smaller boned animals. But in fact this reflects just a switch to culling females, which are smaller than males, concludes Melinda Zeder, an archaeologist at the Smithsonian Institution.
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Source: History Today
August 11, 2008
An exhibition to mark the centenary of the discovery of a 25,000-year-old sculpture has opened in Vienna. The four-inch tall Venus of Willendorf, which was found along the River Danube in 1908, features alongside other female statuettes in a special display which opened on August 9th at the Naturhistorisches Museum. Austria’s post office has also commissioned a stamp featuring the Palaeolithic period stone figurine, which could have been a symbol of fertility or a goddess.
Source: Salon
August 10, 2008
The southern Vermont town of Cavendish is planning a memorial service for famed Russian writer and one-time resident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.
The Nobel Prize-winning author had settled in Cavendish when he sought refuge in the West and was looking for a place whose forests and harsh winters reminded him of his homeland.
He wound up spending 18 years in Cavendish before returning to Russia.
The former exile who had exposed the horrors of Soviet slave labor ca
Source: Salon
August 10, 2008
Fort Ticonderoga, one of the nation's oldest and most significant historic sites, is so financially strapped that its trustees are considering selling off some of the fort's vast collection of artifacts, including artwork believed to be worth millions.
The move comes after the fort lost the support of billionaire Forrest E. Mars Jr. amid disagreements with Fort Ticonderoga's longtime executive director, Nicholas Westbrook.
Besides being a privately owned tourist attract
Source: Salon
August 10, 2008
Former President Ford secretly advised the FBI that two of his fellow members on the Warren Commission doubted the FBI's conclusion that John F. Kennedy was shot from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository in Dallas, according to newly released records from Ford's FBI files.
Ford, still a congressman at the time, also told a senior FBI official about internal panel disputes over hiring staff, Chief Justice Earl Warren's timetable for completing the final report on the assassin
Source: Mephis Commercial Appeal
August 10, 2008
Lab technicians were playing Elvis music in the background. From somewhere outside the lab, people could be heard crying.
"People were just sobbing. It was a sad, sad moment," says Dr. Noel Florendo, a pathology intern assigned to help perform the autopsy of the 42-year-old man on the table at Baptist Memorial Hospital.
Florendo says he and another intern followed instructions from his former professor, Dr. Jerry Francisco, as they began the postmortem on the
Source: The Grand Rapids Press
August 10, 2008
Our nation's third president likely was enamored with grass around his Virginia estate because he didn't have to mow it.
Even if he had, Jefferson wouldn't have been cramming clippings into plastic bags destined for a landfill.
Jefferson was "green" well before the term was popular. Today, his 5,000-acre estate in Charlottesville, Va., remains eco-friendly.
Healthy soil, proper plant selection and preservation of natural resources were just
Source: Victorian Times-Colonist
August 10, 2008
So, should we believe a learned judge turned historian or a former Speaker of the B.C. legislature with imaginative writing style when it comes to colourful B.C. history?
Both Judge F.W. Howay and a former Speaker D.W. Higgins tell the story of Victoria's only documented duel resulting in death on an 1858 afternoon, but with different gunmen in the lead roles -- and different backdrops to the event.
Howay, in his scholarly history British Columbia, tells the story of th
Source: BBC
August 9, 2008
On Arwad Island off the coast of Syria, a group of 20 sailors-to-be are preparing for a voyage their captain believes has not been undertaken for two and a half millennia.
They plan to set off on Sunday on a journey that attempts to replicate what the Greek historian Herodotus mentions as the first circumnavigation of Africa in about 600BC.
Their vessel, the small, pine-wood Phoenicia, is modelled on the type of ship the Phoenician sailors he credited with the landmar
Source: Independent
August 10, 2008
Exactly 100 years since the British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton travelled further south than any human being, his and his team's descendants are to follow in his footsteps and undertake the gruelling 900-mile trek to the South Pole – on foot.
On 29 October 1908, Shackleton set out to become the first man to reach the South Pole. Two months later, after travelling south in severe weather conditions with temperatures dropping below -30C, the group, running perilously lo
Source: Telegraph
August 10, 2008
Letters uncovered as part of a major project to compile Darwin's correspondence have revealed that the great Victorian naturalist devoted part of his time to examining whether hair colour affects a woman's ability to find a mate.
He set out to investigate a theory that the prevalence of dark hair in the general population was increasing because brunettes were more likely to get married and have dark-haired offspring, while blondes tended to stay single and childless.
Source: Telegraph
August 9, 2008
The country's longest-serving monarch is among the most controversial omissions from the list, which sets out to encapsulate the things every Briton should know about their nation's past.
Compiled by the History Channel, the list includes crucial dates in our islands' story such as the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215, the execution of Charles I in 1649 and Nelson's victory at Trafalgar in 1805.
They are listed alongside such less-obv
Source: NYT
August 3, 2008
From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, oil extracted from the blubber of whales and boiled in giant pots gave light to America and much of the Western world. The United States whaling fleet peaked in 1846 with 735 ships out of 900 in the world. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States; in 1853 alone, 8,000 whales were slaughtered for whale oil shipped to light lamps around the world, plus sundry other parts used in hoop skirts, perfume, lubricants and candles.
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Source: Telegraph
August 9, 2008
When reading accounts of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, 420 years ago this month. They occasionally make a reference to the weather when it impinges on historical events, but they rarely do more than scratch the meteorological surface.
They tell, for instance, of "a contrary wind'', "a rain squall from the northeast'', and "a shift of the wind into the southwest''. They do not investigate how unusual the storms of summer 1588 were, nor do they make reference to the
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
August 9, 2008
It was there when Pickett's soldiers made their famous charge. It was there when Lincoln gave his address.
On Thursday afternoon, a honey locust tree that had stood as one of the last living testaments to the Battle of Gettysburg cracked in a storm and crashed to earth.
Standing on Cemetery Hill, 150 feet from the platform on which the Gettysburg Address was given, it was one of the last of what are termed "witness trees" to the one of the most devastating of
Source: Tehran Times
August 10, 2008
Tehran Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts Department (TCHTHO) lacks adequate funding to finance any new excavations on the 9000-year-old Ozbaki Tepe in Nazarabad, near Savojbolagh in Tehran Province.
The first season of excavations was carried out on the site in 1997, during which several architectural ruins and artifacts dating back to ancient times and the early Islamic era were discovered.
A team of archaeologists led by Yusef Majidzadeh excavated the
