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: DPA
July 6, 2007
Two of Germany's leading novelists, Martin Walser and Siegfried Lenz, were inducted into the Nazi Party as 16-year-old boys late in the Second World War, it has been revealed.Both men angrily denied this week that they had sought Nazi party membership. It was suggested that local party officials had compelled schoolboys to enroll en masse, perhaps as a "birthday gift" to dictator Adolf Hitler.
The controversy, triggered by journalists fishing for famou
Source: Archaeology
July 6, 2007
On June 14, 2007, construction resumed on a four-lane highway near the Hill of Tara in central Ireland. Traditionally the seat of the high kings of Ireland, the landscape is littered with burial mounds, rock art, earthen enclosures, and stone monuments. Tara, which has been described as Ireland's equivalent of Stonehenge, was named one of the 100 most endangered sites by the World Monuments Fund this year.The Irish government met resistance when it announced plans for a 60 k
Source: Independent (South Africa)
July 6, 2007
In an unprecedented truth-seeking process in the Arab world, Morocco tried to blot out stains of past human rights abuses on Tuesday with public testimony about tortures and disappearances in the Muslim kingdom.The hearings were broadcast live on national radio and television - another first - and held by a state body empowered to look into widespread abuses committed over a period of 43 years, from independence from France in 1956 to 1999.
The Equity and Reconc
Source: AP
July 6, 2007
Aged men and women in Ukraine are unburdening themselves of wartime memories, many for the first time, in testimonies to a French priest. Their words may change history, as they shed light on this poorly known chapter of the Holocaust.Father Patrick Desbois and his mixed-faith team have been crisscrossing Ukraine for six years and have located more than 500 mass graves, many never before recorded. The project is central to a broader reassessment of the Nazi horr
Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
July 5, 2007
Historians are criticizing Arkansas' new social studies curriculum, claiming that it will water down the study of Arkansas history at the elementary level and leave high school students studying it with seventh-grade textbooks.
Schools must start using the new curriculum when the 2007-08 school year begins in August.
"I'm just astonished and appalled," said Jeannie Whayne, chairman of the history department at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. "
Source: AP
July 4, 2007
Jamestown's 400th anniversary helped revive interest in Virginia's Indian tribes and their role in America's founding. Now, the Virginia Indian Heritage Trail is enriching that education with an 80-page interpretive guide.
Part of the trail leads to the Monacan Ancestral Museum in Amherst County, where visitors can learn about Virginia's "lost" tribe. Monacans say they were only able to survive as a nation hundreds of years after colonists thought they'd died out because t
Source: WaPo
July 5, 2007
Archaeologist Jed Levin keeps a hand-held click counter at the ready, even while answering a busy cellphone and addressing the curious crowds that have gathered at the site he is excavating. Since March, when he began digging for historical remains in a small, square pit in this city's historic district, the onlookers have come in steadily increasing numbers. On a good day, his little clicker registers some 4,000 to 5,000 visitors.
Given how little there is to see, those are impress
Source: LAT
July 5, 2007
Dan Lowenstein passionately opposes the war in Iraq and recently helped stage an antiwar teach-in at UC San Francisco. "We must listen to our conscience and speak out," he told the hundreds of people who had gathered.
Lowenstein is no student organizer; he's a noted professor and vice chairman of the department of neurology at UCSF.
Four years into the war, student protests at campuses across the country have been rare, but a handful of academics have begun sp
Source: NYT
July 5, 2007
In a city with the greatest Gothic cathedral in Germany and no fewer than a dozen Romanesque churches, adding a pair of slender fluted minarets would scarcely alter the skyline. Yet plans for a new mosque are rattling this ancient city to its foundations.
Cologne’s Muslim population, largely Turkish, is pushing for approval to build what would be one of Germany’s largest mosques, in a working-class district across town from the cathedral’s mighty spires.
Predictably, a
Source: Boston Globe
July 4, 2007
The day before Senate Watergate Committee minority counsel Fred Thompson made the inquiry that launched him into the national spotlight -- asking an aide to President Nixon whether there was a White House taping system -- he telephoned Nixon's lawyer.
Thompson tipped off the White House that the committee knew about the taping system and would be making the information public. In his all-but-forgotten Watergate memoir, "At That Point in Time," Thompson said he acted with &
Source: NYT
July 4, 2007
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to honor the grave sites of Declaration of Independence signers, don't count New Jersey in. It says it can't afford it.
Five Declaration signers are buried in the Garden State: four New Jerseyans and a Pennsylvanian. An effort to preserve their graves, promote their lives and honor them with graveside plaques has stalled in a state that was home to several key Revolutionary War battles and dubs itself the ''Crossroads of the Am
Source: NYT
July 4, 2007
AIDONE, Sicily — The star attraction of the archaeological museum in this sleepy backwater in central Sicily actually isn’t here.
Instead, this ancient treasure, a giant statue from the fifth century B.C. usually identified as the goddess Aphrodite, holds court thousands of miles away, at the J. Paul Getty Museum’s antiquities villa in California.
In the Aidone Archaeological Museum, which houses artifacts from a nearby dig at an ancient Greek settlement called Morganti
Source: NYT
July 3, 2007
Eighteen young men charged in the assassination of the newspaper editor Hrant Dink went on trial here on Monday in what has been described as a test of the rule of law in Turkey.
Mr. Dink, a Turkish citizen of Armenian descent, was shot dead in front of his office on Jan. 19. A day later, a Turkish teenager, Ogun Samast, was arrested and charged with the murder. The government has brought charges against 17 other people.
Mr. Dink, the editor of Agos, a bilingual newspap
Source: NYT
July 4, 2007
On the stretch of land where the Declaration of Independence was signed, the Constitution drafted and the Liberty Bell first tolled, pre-Independence Day crowds peered from a wooden platform into a 10-foot-deep dirt hole that is revealing more complex notions of the nation’s history.
Digging through layers of soil, brick and mortar, archaeologists for the city and the National Park Service have exposed remains of a four-story brick and stone mansion that was home to George Washingto
Source: WaPo
July 3, 2007
At the nadir of his presidency, George Bush is looking for answers. One at a time or in small groups, he summons leading authors, historians, philosophers and theologians to the White House to join him in the search.
Over sodas and sparkling water, he asks his questions: What is the nature of good and evil in the post-Sept. 11 world? What lessons does history have for a president facing the turmoil I'm facing? How will history judge what we've done? Why does the rest of the world se
Source: NYT Book Review
July 1, 2007
t is one of the paradoxes of the Bush administration that the senior official whose face is among the most recognized around the world, and who is consistently ranked as the most popular at home, is perhaps the least known. Condoleezza Rice has regularly enjoyed poll numbers 20 points higher than those of the man she serves; in 2006 she topped an Esquire survey of the women men would most like to take as a date to a dinner party, ahead of Angelina Jolie, Julia Roberts, Oprah Winfrey and Jennifer
Source: NYT
July 3, 2007
Other presidential contenders have sold more books, but none of their books have sold for as much as Fred D. Thompson’s.
Mr. Thompson’s amble toward the Republican race has sent the price of used copies of his long-forgotten, out-of-print 1975 memoir soaring to $199.35 on Amazon.com’s network of used-book dealers, providing a gauge of his appeal as a candidate, if not as an author.
The book, “At That Point in Time: The Inside Story of the Senate Watergate Committee,” re
Source: International Herald Tribune
July 3, 2007
A suicide bomber killed nine people including six Spanish
tourists Monday when he drove his car into the site of an ancient
temple, police officials said. In addition to the Spanish tourists,
three Yemenis, including the suicide bomber, died, said the police
officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not
authorized to speak to the media. Witnesses said a car drove through a
gate and then exploded at the Queen of Sheba temple in northeastern
Yemen, which was bu
Source: Japan Times
July 3, 2007
Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma resigned Tuesday to take responsibility for controversial remarks he made over the weekend that were interpreted as justifying the U.S. atomic bombings of Japan in 1945.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe accepted Kyuma's resignation when the defense chief visited his official residence Tuesday afternoon.
"People do not seem to understand" the intentions behind the remarks, "so I told Prime Minister Abe that I need to take responsibili
Source: Seattle Times
July 3, 2007
Amid the recent tumult, the president has sought refuge in history. He read three books last year on George Washington, read about the Algerian war of independence and the slave trade in Congo, and lately has been digging into "Troublesome Young Men," Lynne Olson's account of Conservative backbenchers who thrust Winston Churchill to power. Bush idolizes Churchill and keeps a bust of him in the Oval Office.After reading Andrew Roberts' "A History of the English
