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
June 13, 2006
For the average museumgoer, the wrought-iron balustrade from Federal Hall, where George Washington took the oath of office in 1789, may simply be an ornate piece of Americana. But for the conceptual artist Fred Wilson, it was the starting point for a long riff on battles against oppression around the world.
Gesturing toward the swirls and arrows in the ironwork last week at the New-York Historical Society, Mr. Wilson said the name of the balustrade's creator, Pierre Charles L'Enfant
Source: NYT
June 13, 2006
In biblical lore, Edom was the implacable adversary and menacing neighbor of the Israelites. The Edomites lived south of the Dead Sea and east of the desolate rift valley known as Wadi Arabah, and from time to time they had to be dealt with by force, notably by the likes of Kings David and Solomon.
Today, the Edomites are again in the thick of combat — of the scholarly kind. The conflict is heated and protracted, as is often the case with issues related to the reliability of the Bib
Source: Toronto Star
June 13, 2006
When it ran in March, Prairie Giant, CBC-TV's two-part miniseries on the life of Tommy Douglas, proved one of the season's top-rated Canadian shows, drawing 905,000 viewers the first night and 751,000 the second night.
But the network has pulled it from circulation, with no plans for reruns, after complaints of historical inaccuracies.
The family of a political rival of Douglas, one-time Saskatchewan premier Jimmy Gardiner, complained that not only was the film's portr
Source: Independent (London)
June 13, 2006
When people ask writer Ashley Perry where his family is from, he replies "Britain". If they ask where his grandparents came from, he gives the same reply. When the more persistent ask where his great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents came from, the reply is still "Britain".
"This answer is usually met with incredulity as most assume that Anglo- Jewry is in the main no more than two or three generations long and has its origins in Eastern Europe,"
Source: NYT Editorial
June 13, 2006
Recently, researchers using data from Grace (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite program) announced that they had found the possible remains of an enormous crater a mile below the East Antarctic ice sheet — the result of an impact that may have wiped out 90 percent of life on earth some 250 million years ago.
To look back to that catastrophe — called the Permian-Triassic extinction — you have to imagine all of earth's continents merged in a single great land mass surr
Source: Wa Po
June 13, 2006
Robert C. Byrd, a champion of classical oratory in the Senate and pork barrel spending back home, yesterday became the longest-serving senator in U.S. history.
The West Virginia Democrat marked his 17,327th day in the Senate by visiting his wife's grave and then listening to several colleagues praise his career. Uncharacteristically for a man who has rhapsodized about spring, Mother's Day and countless other topics in the Senate chamber, Byrd left the floor without speaking, struggl
Source: Romenesko
June 12, 2006
Cincinnati Enquirer's Carl Weiser says he read Robert Kennedy's Rolling Stone mega-essay "and nothing in there was really new. The folks who know Ohio elections best checked into it and found there was no conspiracy." AP Ohio bureau chief Eva Parziale tells Joe Strupp: "They were things we already reported on and issues we did not see to have substance."
Source: Variety
June 8, 2006
Valhalla Motion Pictures and Legendary Pictures are going to Iraq, obtaining feature rights to Matthew Bogdanos' "Thieves of Baghdad" to produce for Warner Bros.
Studio and Legendary will co-finance the adaptation of the book, which focuses on the pursuit of stolen antiquities from the Iraq National Museum. Gale Anne HurdGale Anne Hurd will produce.
Tome's a first-person account of Bogdanos' criminal investigation in the midst of war to recover priceless artifacts a
Source: aibs.org
June 13, 2006
The Mesopotamian marshes of southern Iraq had been all but destroyed by Saddam Hussein’s regime by the year 2000. Earlier assessments suggested that poor water quality, the presence of toxic materials, and high saline soil conditions in the drained marshes would prevent their ecological restoration and doom the reestablishment of the Marsh Arab culture of fishing and agriculture.
However, the high volume of good-quality water entering the marshes from the Tigris and Euphrates River
Source: Sunday Times (London)
June 11, 2006
The unprecedented boom in property development and road building in Ireland has unearthed thousands of archeological artefacts but most of them lie gathering dust in warehouses, hidden from public view. With nearly 200 times more excavations being carried out than in the early 1990s, new discoveries are no longer being reported and Ireland's museums no longer have space to house them. As a result, academics claim the country is being denied an opportunity to learn more about its history.
Source: Newsday
June 8, 2006
EAST HADDAM, Conn. Kidnapped from his African homeland at age 7 and sold into slavery in America, Venture Smith would grow into a man of mythically large proportions. He won his freedom and became a successful 18th-century businessman so revered by this river town that its denizens to this day tend his grave.
While state and local historians know Smith's story well, they want to make it as well-known to the rest of the world as the story of Amistad and its hero, Cinque. To do that,
Source: BBC
July 12, 2006
He was a war hero - but his family say he was abandoned by his country and left to die in the murky waters of Portsmouth Harbour.
Lionel "Buster" Crabb vanished while spying on Soviet warships visiting the city at the height of the Cold War.
The frogman's fate has remained one of the country's most closely-guarded secrets, but the BBC has obtained the report into his final mission on 19 April, 1956.
The secret document was the subject of a Freedom Of
Source: BBC
June 11, 2006
Archaeologists working on India's south-west coast believe they may have solved the mystery of the location of a major port which was key to trade between India and the Roman Empire - Muziris, in the modern-day state of Kerala. For many years, people have been in search of the almost mythical port, known as Vanchi to locals.
Much-recorded in Roman times, Muziris was a major centre for trade between Rome and southern India - but appeared to have simply disappear
Source: Daily Telegraph (UK)
June 12, 2006
THE final push in a long-running fight to save the site of the "other battle of 1066'' will begin tomorrow.
Campaigners will be appealing against a housing development on a water meadow near the scene of the Battle of Fulford, which is on the outskirts of York.
It was seen by some as a crucial factor in Saxon King Harold's defeat less than a month later by William, Duke of Normandy, at Hastings.
Objectors believe that a proposed approach road for the
Source: NYT
June 10, 2006
NIE YUANZI was an ambitious college professor whose "big character poster," displayed on the grounds of Beijing University, was said to have ignited the Cultural Revolution, a prairie fire of violent purges and denunciations that quickly spread across the nation.
Wang Rongfen was a student of German at Beijing's elite Foreign Language Institute who was imprisoned after writing a bold letter to Mao challenging his judgment in unleashing the self-destructive frenzy of his yo
Source: Matthew Kaminski in the WSJ
June 10, 2006
Wojciech Jaruzelski, Poland's last communist leader, is still fighting hard to shape history. Press any hot button and the general holds forth in long, clear, numbing sentences, as if back at a Party Plenum. Martial law imposed by him in the early hours of Dec. 13, 1981, to break Solidarity and Lech Walesa? That, he claims -- as he has always done -- "saved Poland" from the Soviets. His unswerving loyalty to Moscow and a decade of strongman rule? That paved the way for democracy. Gen.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
June 12, 2006
The FBI’s inquiries into the Jack Anderson archive, now held at George Washington University, is a “fishing expedition," according to a University of Utah political science professor, Tim Chambless. The Salt Lake Tribune reports that Mr. Chambless reviewed 85 boxes of the archive years ago -- probably when they were held at Brigham Young University, though the article doesn’t specify. Mr. Chambless says the documents contain facts that "were politically embarrassing to a few people,&qu
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
June 12, 2006
Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia compiled by a distributed network of volunteers, has often come under attack by academics as being shoddy and full of inaccuracies. Even Wikipedia’s founder, Jimmy Wales, says he wants to get the message out to college students that they shouldn’t use it for class projects or serious research.
Speaking at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania on Friday called “The Hyperlinked Society,” Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a
Source: Timesonline (UK)
June 11, 2006
ONE of Britain’s most senior military strategists has warned that western civilisation faces a threat on a par with the barbarian invasions that destroyed the Roman empire.
In an apocalyptic vision of security dangers, Rear Admiral Chris Parry said future migrations would be comparable to the Goths and Vandals while north African "barbary" pirates could be attacking yachts and beaches in the Mediterranean within 10 years.
Europe, including Britain, could be
Source: NYT
June 11, 2006
NYC: There is that instant of horror to be relived, forever frozen in bronze. There are scenes of valor and camaraderie to be celebrated. But more than anything, there are names to be touched and traced: the Fire Department's 343 dead.
The first large-scale 9/11 monument at ground zero — a bold, literal and almost neo-Classical 56-foot-long bronze relief dedicated to the firefighters "who fell and to those who carry on" — was unveiled yesterday on the side of "10 Hous
