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)
August 17, 2006
THE German author Günter Grass admitted that he had been in the Waffen-SS to pre-empt the release of the information from the East German secret police archive next year, a regional newspaper claimed.
The information about Grass's past is contained in Nazi era records compiled by the Stasi, the secret police of the communist government of former East Germany. The files were used for blackmail, the Kölner Stadtanzeiger wrote.
Historians have been working through the arc
Source: Australian
August 18, 2006
THREE state governments risk losing billions in schools funding after dismissing the finding of a summit of historians that recommended postmodern subjects be replaced with a traditional history course.
The history summit communique foreshadowed a massive shift in the teaching of history, as well as a new level of commonwealth interference in state and territory education systems.
But the Queensland, South Australian and West Australian education ministers yesterday dismissed
Source: Reuters
August 17, 2006
BEIJING (Reuters) - A centuries-old brothel teetering on the verge of collapse has red-faced Chinese officials pondering heritage versus morality behind closed doors, state media reported Thursday.
A local government in Jinggang, a town in central Hunan province, must decide whether to restore crumbling Hongtaifang, a brothel established in 1733, and face the ire of residents who see it as debauched, Xinhua news agency said.
"The brothel was a place where women were humi
Source: Narooma
August 17, 2006
THE deep waters off Bermagui continue to give up some their secrets with specialist divers in recent months positively identifying the shipwreck of the Iron Knight.
While trawlers have for decades known about the shipwreck located due east off Bermagui, the Iron Knight has now been formerly declared a protected site with relatives of the lost sailors able to lay flowers at the site of sinking.
The ship was transporting iron ore and associated materials up the coast on
Source: US News & World Report
August 14, 2006
US News & World Report's cover story features stories about firsts in history.
Who was first to the top of the world?
The mystery of 4,000 miles
Digging for old treasures
Washington? Get in line
Did Darwin get scooped?
Shining light on the "dark lady of DNA"
The sound and fury of HIV
After lots of small steps, it adds up
No, it was not Al Gore
Contrary to myth, baseball may have had no single inventor
Source: CBC News
August 15, 2006
A new discovery at Grand Pre has archeologists wondering if they've unearthed "ground zero" of the Acadian deportation of 1755.
Jonathan Fowler, a Nova Scotia archeologist, and his team recently discovered about 15 musket balls in the ruins of an old house.
"This volume of musket balls is a little bit strange for the usual domestic occupation," he told CBC News on Tuesday.
When Fowler compared the find to those at other Acadian archeolog
Source: Wa Po
August 17, 2006
TEHRAN, Aug. 16 -- At the exhibition entrance, a poster shows a helmet with the Star of David lying on top of others carrying a Nazi swastika. Inside, the Statue of Liberty is pictured holding a Holocaust book while giving a Nazi salute.
Organizers say the exhibition of more than 200 entries from Iran's International Holocaust Cartoons Contest aims to challenge Western taboos about discussing the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has call
Source: NYT
August 16, 2006
With each annual visit Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has paid to the Yasukuni Shrine, the war memorial linked to Japan’s imperial past, the damage to the nation’s relations with China and South Korea has worsened.
Even as Mr. Koizumi claimed a more assertive role for Japan in the world — and called for China’s and South Korea’s endorsement to realize it — he chose to be unyielding on his visits to Yasukuni, the one issue that was certain to offend them to the core and stir up me
Source: Courier-Mail (Australia)
August 17, 2006
AUSTRALIAN history should be a compulsory, stand-alone subject at some stage during high schooling, Education Minister Julie Bishop said last night.
Opening Australia's History summit, Ms Bishop said she hoped the meeting would help to define the body of historical knowledge that should be taught to all Australian students.
''Yes, there will be controversy but I would hope we can find agreement on the main currents and big themes in our national story,'' she said.
Source: Australian
August 17, 2006
STATE Governments will be under pressure to reinstate history as a compulsory separate subject in schools or risk losing nearly $13 billion in federal funding as a summit of experts meet in Canberra today.
But in launching the history summit last night, federal Education Minister Julie Bishop told the 23 participants she was not in favour of ''creating some form of an official'' history.
''We start, however, with a strong view that Australian history should be a compuls
Source: Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer/producer of the ABC 6-hour miniseries The Path to 9/11 which will air September 10th & 11th; in an interview at frontpagemag.com
August 16, 2006
This miniseries is not just about the tragedy and events of 9/11, it dramatizes "how we got there" going back 8 years to the first attack on the WTC and dealing with the Al Qaeda strikes against U.S. embassies and forces in the 90s, the political lead-up, the hatching of the terrorist plots, etc. We see the heroes on the ground, like FBI agent John O'Neill and others, who after the '93 attack felt sure that the terrorists would strike the WTC again. It also dramatizes the frequent opp
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch
August 15, 2006
For the first time in its 110-year history, the Museum and White House of the Confederacy will cut its operating hours.
The museum will close on Wednesdays, from Labor Day to Memorial Day. In addition, the White House will be closed for public tours in January and February.
The moves come a few months after approval of the state budget that awarded the museum just $50,000 of a $700,000 grant the downtown institution had requested for fiscal 2006-08. The money would have
Source: Courier (Scotland)
August 14, 2006
REMARKABLE find recovered from the River Tay is undergoing the first stages of a painstaking preservation process.
In the culmination of a meticulous rescue plan, the 3000-year-old log boat was dug from its watery resting place over recent weeks before being floated and towed into Newburgh harbour on Friday evening.
With great care the boat, which was carved from a single oak, was lifted from the water by crane, an operation greeted with cheers and applause by a 100-st
Source: Education Gadfly, published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation
August 10, 2006
[An issue brief issued by The U.S. Department of Education: National Center for Education Statistics]' examines the qualifications of those who taught secondary school history during 1999-2000.
While earlier studies looked at the percentages of teachers ''in-field'' (those with a postsecondary major and state certification in the subject they were teaching) and ''out-of-field'' (those without), the extent to which out-of-field teachers have other training or skills related to their
Source: Independent (UK)
August 16, 2006
Pte Harry Farr, shot for cowardice during the First World War, is to be granted a pardon posthumously. His pardon came as Des Browne, Minister of Defence, said all 306 soldiers executed during the First World War for cowardice and military offences would be issued a group pardon.
Mr Browne said that the Armed Forces Bill will be amended . "Although this is a historical matter, I am conscious of how the families of these men feel today. They have had to endure a stigma for dec
Source: Washington Times
August 16, 2006
Britain's Ministry of Defense will grant pardons to 306 soldiers executed by the British army for cowardice or desertion during World War I.Defense Secretary Des Browne said emergency legislation would be waiting for parliament when it resumes in the fall to clear the names of the Commonwealth soldiers who were executed, The Telegraph reported.
The government faced several challenges to issue pardons by the soldiers' survivors. One of the lawyers represen
Source: NYT Editorial
August 15, 2006
The sunny headquarters of the American Friends of the Salzburg Festival are conveniently right across the street from the festival’s performance halls. The association between the festival and the Friends has been long and close. Until this summer.
Festival officials are miffed with the Friends over that group’s decision to present “The Salzburg Festival: A Short History,” a new documentary by the British filmmaker Tony Palmer. The festival has disavowed the film, partly because of
Source: Cliopatria
December 31, 2069
The History Carnival is a twice-monthly roundup of blogging about history and historians. Caleb McDaniel hosts this edition.
Source: LAT
August 13, 2006
SAN MARINO - Reclaiming a neglected part of California's past, historians have unveiled an immense data bank that for the first time chronicles the lives and deaths of more than 100,000 American Indians in the Spanish missions of the 18th and 19th centuries.In an eight-year effort, researchers at the Huntington Library here used handwritten records of baptisms, marriages and deaths at 21 Catholic missions and two other sites from between 1769 and 1850 and created
Source: The Age (Australia)
August 14, 2006
SOME historians have been guilty of "political correctness" in romanticising nomadic Aboriginal life before the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, according to former NSW premier, Bob Carr.
Speaking last night on ABC radio's Sunday Profile program, Mr Carr said that some historians had "eliminated unattractive features of nomadic life of our accounts of pre-1788 Australia" out of a desire to avoid offending Aborigines.
Mr Carr's
