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: Hiram Hover (blog)
July 20, 2006
The Seventh edition of the Carnival of Bad History is at Hiram Hover's blog.
A"blog carnival" is a regular roundup of blog writing on a subject. The Carnival of Bad History covers mistakes, distortions and illogic and serves both to entertain -- let's face it, it's fun! -- and educate.
Source: BBC
July 19, 2006
A team of divers from the University of Bristol is to investigate the wreck of a fireship which sank off the Isles of Scilly nearly 300 years ago. . . The tragedy, which cost the lives of 1,500 Royal Navy seamen, sparked the competition for the 'discovery of longitude' and resulted in the design of the Harrison chronometer.
Source: NYT
July 20, 2006
The sensitive surveillance equipment hidden in the room picked up a comment about a box of condoms on display, and another about a red telephone. “I had one just like that,” a man could be heard saying, in German. Then came another voice speaking English with a British accent. “There must be a microphone around here someplace,” it said.
Indeed there was, and the fact that the British visitor to Berlin’s new DDR Museum — D.D.R. being the German initials for the German Democratic Repu
Source: NYT
July 20, 2006
Cambodia’s former king demanded Wednesday that the bones of Khmer Rouge victims be cremated according to Buddhist tradition, rather than displayed “for the pleasure of tourists.”
With efforts under way to try former leaders of the Khmer Rouge, who laid waste to Cambodia during their rule from 1975 to 1979, the former king, Norodom Sihanouk, has attacked government claims that the bones must be kept as evidence.
Cambodia is dotted with evidence of the Khmer Rouge’s destr
Source: AP
July 20, 2006
Railroad tracks dip into the harbor next to an old, square, brick building in this rapidly gentrifying post-industrial waterfront.
The tracks enter the water by design, not decay.
As part of the new Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Park, which opened June 28, they help re-create the nation's first black shipyard, complete with a marine railway like those that once pulled ships from the harbor for repair in the days before modern drydocks.
Baltimor
Source: North Shore Times Advertiser (New Zealand)
July 18, 2006
The United States planned to invade Auckland, New Zealand almost a century ago if the emerging superpower had gone to war with Japan, then a British ally, a US intelligence document reveals.The document includes intelligence reports on North Head, Fort Takapuna and Mt Victoria. It recommends the Manukau Harbour as the best invasion point.
The plan involved landing heavy guns on Rangitoto Island to shell forts on the North Shore.
Although the documen
Source: AP
July 19, 2006
Years before desegregation sit-ins made national headlines in 1960, college students in Wichita, Kan., and Oklahoma City stubbornly refused to leave whites-only lunch counters. They were threatened with beatings, but held fast and won their battles, laying the groundwork for a movement that would spread across the country.
The often overlooked demonstrators, all former NAACP youth members, were being recognized Wednesday — nearly 50 years later — at the annual convention of the Nati
Source: The Daily Telegraph
July 19, 2006
THE earliest Englishmen were the same as their modern counterparts, contemptuous of foreigners and snobbish about their neighbours, according to researchers. New computer models of the process of colonisation demonstrate that, by refusing to let their daughters marry the locals, and never inviting them to share even the smallest crumb from the Anglo-Saxon table, our genetic ancestors slowly but surely ethnically cleansed the country.
For the past 50 years and more, historians, archa
Source: BBC
July 18, 2006
An apartheid society existed in early Anglo-Saxon Britain, research suggests.
Scientists believe a small population of migrants from Germany, Holland and Denmark established a segregated society when they arrived in England.
The researchers think the incomers changed the local gene pool by using their economic advantage to out-breed the native population.
The team tells a Royal Society journal that this may explain the abundance of Germanic genes in England today
Source: AP
July 17, 2006
-- A brief history of the Lebanese-Israeli conflict:
Because Israel and Lebanon have never signed a peace accord, the countries remain officially in a state of war that has existed since 1948 when Lebanon joined other Arab nations against the newly formed Jewish state.
The two countries have been bound by an armistice signed in 1949, which regulates the presence of military forces in southern Lebanon.
With a large Christian minority in an overwhelmingly Mus
Source: History Today
July 10, 2006
The World Heritage Committee will today discuss issues relating to the conservation of environmental World Heritage Sites in the face of increasing concern over global warming. An international coalition of environmentalists and lawyers are urging the Committee, who are holding their annual meeting, in Lithuania, this week, to take urgent action to protect sites such as Mount Everest and Great Barrier Reef from future environmental threat. The World Heritage Convention legally requires all count
Source: History Today
July 11, 2006
English Heritage has released its annual Buildings at Risk Register listing the nation’s most vulnerable Grade l and Grade ll* properties and Scheduled Ancient Monuments most urgently in need attention and renovation. The list is a working tool by which the degree of degeneration of a building can be assessed and the necessary resources required to bring it back into good repair and beneficial use, established. It also serves to prioritise action taken by English Heritage, building preservation
Source: History Today
July 14, 2006
Carlo Broschi, the famed castrato and favourite of Handel, has been exhumed by historians and scientists studying the anatomical effects of castration. Castrated men have held a quasi mythical status throughout history from the eunuch priests of the Greek Magna Mater cult to the celebrated opera singers of 18th century Europe.
Outside of conventional society they have inspired reactions as extreme as disgust and veneration; the Catholic Church banned the proceedure on pain of excom
Source: History Today
July 18, 2006
As much as 30% of Egypt’s ancient monuments could still be underground according to secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo, Zahi Hawass.
Speaking whilst excavations began on the latest tomb to be unearthed in the Valley of the Kings, Hawass commented that a great proportion of Egypt’s history was buried under existing modern towns, including, perhaps the tomb of famous Egyptian monarch, Queen Nefertiti.
This latest tomb is known as KV 62 and
Source: Discover
February 1, 2006
Epidemics followed the Spanish arrival in the New World, but the worst killer may have been a shadowy native—a killer that could still be out there.
When Hernando Cortés and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained. Even compared with the casualties of the Black Death, the mortality rate was extraord
Source: Times Online (UK)
July 11, 2006
The mausoleum built as a memorial to Queen Victoria’s love for Prince Albert was put on English Heritage’s “at risk” list yesterday.
Days after Albert died, in 1861, Victoria ordered that the mausoleum, above, be built in the grounds of the Windsor Castle retreat of Frogmore House. Decorated with frescoes, plaster angels and marble, it took ten years to complete. When Victoria died, 40 years after her husband, her remains were placed there with his.
English Heritage is so con
Source: BreakingNews.ie
July 14, 2006
A mortar bomb from the Second World War was found today in the archaeological ruins of Pompeii, Italy, police officials said.
The bomb was discovered in the rubble of the Surgeon’s House, the archaeological site next to the Roman Basilica, the ANSA news agency said.
Police from Pompeii secured the area as tourists looked on until the bomb squad from Naples arrived.
Police said the public was never in any danger.
Source: Reuters
July 17, 2006
Chile's Supreme Court on Monday reopened the first human rights case brought against 90-year-old former dictator Augusto Pinochet, four years after it was thrown out because of his dementia.
Pinochet led a 17-year dictatorship in Chile after a 1973 coup and more than 3,000 people died in political violence and tens of thousands were detained and tortured during the regime.
The so-called Caravan of Death case involved a tour of Chile by army officers after the 1973 coup
Source: NYT
July 18, 2006
That a victim of a Palestinian suicide bombing would seek legal redress from an American museum might seem baffling to the uninitiated. But for Daniel Miller, 27, it is simply a way of extracting justice from a government that he blames for his suffering.
Because Iran helped to train and support members of Hamas, the militant group that carried out the attack along a Jerusalem shopping promenade in 1997, Mr. Miller and four other Americans who survived the attack decided to seek dam
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
July 18, 2006
The 1968 Orangeburg Massacre of civil-rights demonstrators at a South Carolina college, a tragedy in its day as momentous as were the Kent State shootings two years later, has faded into obscurity. But not for the governor of South Carolina at the time, Robert E. McNair.
In a new biography, Mr. McNair, now 83, takes full responsibility for decisions that led to the shooting deaths of three black students and the wounding of 27 at South Carolina State College, in Orangeburg, S.C., on
