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: AP
June 6, 2006
ASNELLES-SUR-MER, France — Hundreds of relatives and others joined at least two dozen veterans to remember the June 6, 1944, invasion on Normandy's beaches that helped free France — and much of Europe — from Nazi Germany's grip.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge laid a wreath along with the U.S. ambassador to France at the American cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, where thousands of crosses and Stars of David mark soldiers' graves on a finely groomed lawn.
Source: AP
June 7, 2006
In the heart of the New South near the turn of the 20th century, more than 10,000 people stormed through the city's downtown - the beginning of a four-day melee that left dozens of black residents and two whites dead.It became known as the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, putting U.S. racial tensions on an international stage. A century later, historians are working to educate "the city too busy to hate" about this dark chapter from its past that many living here toda
Source: Cox News Service
June 7, 2006
Despite growing ties to the southern hemisphere, two-thirds of U.S. states have weak or non-existent standards for teaching the history and culture of Latin America and Mexico, a study released Tuesday found.The study was conducted by the Thomas B. Fordham?Institute, a Washington-based non-profit organization dedicated to improving elementary and secondary education.
Renowned historian and foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead, who conducted the study,
Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
June 7, 2006
It is estimated that in the next three years, humanity will generate more data than it has in the past 1,000 years --- nearly all of it digital.
Many of the records that once allowed historians to study a society's history --- from personal correspondence to government documents --- may be slipping, irretrievably, into the digital ether."It's a major historical problem and presents, potentially, a major political problem," says Air Force historia
Source: The Washington Post
June 7, 2006
The CIA organized Cold War spy networks that included former Nazis and failed to act on a 1958 report that fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was living in Argentina, newly released CIA records show.
The records were among 27,000 pages of documents made public yesterday at the National Archives. They shed new light on the secret protection and support given to former Nazi officials and Nazi collaborators by U.S. intelligence agencies as fighting communism became the central a
Source: NYT
June 6, 2006
After weeks of speculation, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, has chosen a collaborator for his memoir, to be published by Penguin Press in fall 2007. Peter Petre, a senior editor at large at Fortune magazine and co-author of best sellers by Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf and by Thomas J. Watson Jr., former chairman of I.B.M., will help Mr. Greenspan write his book.
Mr. Greenspan, who sold the book for an $8.5 million advance in March, has been interviewing gho
Source: NYT
June 6, 2006
A lost wartime diary by a doctor in which she tells of love, loneliness and death on the Ho Chi Minh Trail has become a best seller in Vietnam, bringing the war alive for a new generation of readers.The journey of the diary itself has given it a special postwar symbolism for people here. It was returned to the doctor's family just last year by a former American soldier who recovered it after she died on the battlefield in 1970.
The writer, Dang Thuy Tram, was ki
Source: Wa Po
June 6, 2006
Welcome to the William J. Clinton Presidential Center. Your personal tour guide: President Bill Clinton.
"There were lots of times when Republicans thought I was right about an issue but they were determined not to let anything happen," Clinton says in a new audio tour of his presidential library. "I know that when I got elected president, a lot of those folks just went into denial."The library, along the Arkansas River in downtow
Source: Wa Po
June 6, 2006
The Senate Judiciary Committee gave the Bush administration a new lashing Tuesday over its use of executive power, citing the FBI's posthumous probe of columnist Jack Anderson and questioning the notion that espionage laws might allow the prosecution of journalists who publish classified information.
"It's highly doubtful in my mind that that was ever the intent of Congress," Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said.The World War I-e
Source: AP
June 6, 2006
Determined to win the Cold War, the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anticommunist efforts in West Germany, according to documents released Tuesday.
The 27,000 pages released by the National Archives are among the largest post-World War II declassifications by the CIA. They offer a window into the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence — and the efforts to use former Nazi war criminals as spies, som
Source: NYT
June 6, 2006
He is Thomas R. Robinson, an associate professor of accounting at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.
Dr. Robinson's descent from Genghis Khan emerged in a roundabout way. The Y chromosome of that Mongol emperor was identified in 2003 by geneticists at the University of Oxford in England. Surveying the chromosomes of Asian men, they noticed a distinctive genetic signature in populations from Mongolia to Central Asia. Their common feature was that all but one lay within the
Source: The Washington Post
June 6, 2006
Debra S. Ritt, the Smithsonian Institution's inspector general, resigned last week to take a senior executive position at the Small Business Administration, in part because she feared that shrinking resources for her Smithsonian office would lessen its effectiveness and independence."In the last 10 years, the number of positions in this office went down 30 percent while the federal appropriation has grown 70 percent," Ritt said yesterday in a phone interview.
Source: BBC
June 6, 2006
A signed first edition of one of the most famous animal stories ever written has sold at auction for £33,600. The copy of Black Beauty, written in Norfolk by Anna Sewell, had been expected to sell for up to £8,000 at Christie's in London.
It was the only book ever written by Sewell, who was born in 1820 in Great Yarmouth and died in 1878.
The book, which belonged to her mother, is inscribed with the words: "Mary Sewell, from her loving child A.S.".
Source: 17KGET.com
June 5, 2006
An aviation archaeologist discovered the lost wreckage of a World War II bomber in the middle of the Mojave Desert.
A military recovery mission is underway with the discovery of decades-old bones.
“It's very, very...it's an emotional experience,” said U.S. Marines Captain George Murphy. “Even though we didn't know these men personally, we share a common experience.” On April 09, 1944, a B-24D Bomber went down during a training mi
Source: People's Daily Online
June 5, 2006
Archaeologists have found two ancient engraved chessboards probably used by soldiers on the Great Wall more than 700 years ago at Qinhuangdao, North China's Hebei Province.
The two boards, one for Chinese chess and the other for the ancient game "Tiger Eats Sheep", were engraved on a stone in front of a Great Wall beacon tower possibly in the Song Dynasty (960-1279), said officials with the provincial department of cultural relics.
Archaeologists believe tha
Source: AP
June 5, 2006
Jim Donohue is trying to solve a mystery that has been building for about 12,000 years, but he has only a few days left to gather clues. Donohue, senior archaeologist with the state Archaeological Research Center in Rapid City, is supervising the excavation of a site occupied by generations of ancient hunters off S.D. Highway 79 near Buffalo Gap. He and his crew have found artifacts, bison bones and two ancient spear points, including a rare Folsom spear point found in
Source: CNN
June 5, 2006
A rock carving discovered in Arizona might depict an ancient star explosion seen by Native Americans a thousand years ago, scientists announced today.
If confirmed, the rock carving, or "petroglyph" would be the only known record in the Americas of the well-known supernova of the year 1006.
Source: AP
June 5, 2006
FORT EDWARD, N.Y. - A husband and wife team of amateur archaeologists have unearthed human skeletons, believed to be about 250 years old, at a burial site here on the Hudson River island that's considered the birthplace of today's U.S. Army Rangers.Richard and JoAnne Fuller said it's very likely the remains found on private property date back to the French and Indian War, when Rogers' Rangers earned a place in American military lore while operating out of Fort Edward. The co
Source: Press Release -- Thomas B. Fordham Institute
June 6, 2006
A new report released today by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute finds that at a time of rapid globalization, most states don’t even try to provide young Americans with a solid grounding in world history.
Renowned historian and foreign policy expert Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, conducted this first ever review of states’ academic standards for K-12 world history—the blueprints that outline what
Source: PhysOrg
June 6, 2006
The size of a shoebox, a mysterious bronze device scooped out of a Roman-era shipwreck at the dawn of the 20th century has baffled scientists for years. Now a British researcher has stunningly established it as the world's oldest surviving astronomy computer. A team of Greek and British scientists probing the secrets of the Antikythera Mechanism has managed to decipher ancient Greek inscriptions unseen for over 2,000 years, members of the project say.
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