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: History Today
May 17, 2006
In the biggest development project since its opening, the Museum of London is spending £18 million to transform the way visitors view and experience its collections. Reflecting the Museums status as the largest urban history museum in the world the Capital City project will look at new ways to tell the history of London and its population and hopes to take the lead in promoting empathy between Londoners of different generations and backgrounds. Plans to build new galleries will create 25% more s
Source: Lee Formwalt in the OAH Newsletter
May 19, 2006
Back in the fall of 2004, the OAH Executive Board voted to require that all future hotel contracts include "labor disputes" in its escape clause [to avoid the situation faced in San Francsico in 2005]. Until that point, our contracts provided that disruptions caused by strikes would annul a hotel contract, but in San Francisco we faced a lockout and then a boycott, neither of them a full-fledged strike. "Labor disputes" in future contract language would allow us to get out of
Source: Scripps-Howard
May 19, 2006
What if the Japanese battleships got past the big guns that were the key coastal defenses around San Francisco and the Golden Gate? What then? The U.S. Army had an answer. On the night of Dec. 7, the Army assigned every available soldier at the Presidio of San Francisco to get to work digging slit trenches and field fortifications to stop a Japanese invasion.Trenches were dug on the bluffs above the Golden Gate. Machine guns were sited to cover Baker Beach on the western edg
Source: USA Today
May 19, 2006
Scientists said Friday they have confirmed that at least some of Christopher Columbus' remains were buried inside a Spanish cathedral, a discovery that could help end a century-old debate over the explorer's final resting place.DNA samples from 500-year-old bone slivers could contradict the Dominican Republic's competing claim that the explorer was laid to rest in the New World, said Marcial Castro, a Spanish historian and teacher who devised the study that began in 2002.
Source: Discovery News
May 4, 2006
King Tutankhamen's rediscovered penis could make the pharaoh stand out in the shrunken world of male mummies, scientists say.
They've taken a close look at old pictures of the 3300-year-old mummified king.
His sexual organ has been just another puzzle in the story of the best-known pharaoh of ancient Egypt.Harry Burton (1879-1940) photographed the royal penis intact during Howard Carter's excavation of King Tut's tomb in 1922.
Bu
Source: La Vista Sun
May 17, 2006
When Holocaust survivor Beatrice Karp told her eighth-grade audience that she kicked a Nazi soldier in the shin while imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp, the laughter lightened the mood somewhat in the La Vista Junior High cafeteria.
But her young listeners quickly assumed their former uneasy hush as the charming, well-dressed woman on the platform continued speaking almost effortlessly of the torrent of abuse she witnessed.
Though her delivery of grim memori
Source: Reuters
May 17, 2006
VISOKO, Bosnia - An Egyptian geologist said on Wednesday that a hill in central Bosnia appeared to be a primitive human-made pyramid of uncertain age.
Geologist Aly Abd Barakat was sent by Egypt’s government to join the local team researching what Bosnian-born amateur archaeologist Semir Osmanagic says are three 12,000-year-old pyramids — the Bosnian Pyramids of Sun, Moon and Dragon.
“In my opinion, it is a type of pyramid, probably primitive pyramid ... (that) we did n
Source: NYT
May 19, 2006
Not all scientists agree that the 18,000-year-old "little people" fossils found on the Indonesian island of Flores should be designated an extinct human-related species. Some expressed their opposition in news interviews and informal symposiums, but papers arguing their case were rejected by major journals.Now the critics are getting their day in the court of scientific discourse.
In today's issue of the journal Science, researchers led by
Source: NYT
May 19, 2006
DETROIT, May 18 — The Federal Bureau of Investigation, plenty experienced in searching for James R. Hoffa, said a "fairly credible lead" is what led investigators this week to still another potential burial spot: a horse farm aptly named Hidden Dreams.Using cadaver dogs borrowed from the Detroit police, and aided by students and professors from Michigan State University, F.B.I. agents began a search on Wednesday of the 80-acre farm in Milford Township,
Source: The Irish Times
May 19, 2006
There were cries of protest from left- and right-wing benches when Jean-Louis Debré, the speaker of the French National Assembly, suspended a stormy debate on the Armenian genocide yesterday. Armenian visitors in the public gallery chanted in unison: "Vote! Vote! Vote!" as gendarmes removed them.
When the socialist parliamentary group filed the proposed law last month, few imagined it would be so divisive. The law is an addendum to that of January 2001, which publicly reco
Source: Press Release -- AHA
May 18, 2006
Humanities Advocates:
There is still time to take a few minutes and write or call your Representative.
The U.S. House of Representatives is tentatively scheduled to consider the
FY2007 Interior Appropriations bill between Friday, May 19 and Tuesday, May 23. Recently, the Interior Appropriations Committee supported the President's request and recommended funding for the NEH at $142 million. Despite the appearance of level funding, this actually is a proposed cut of $1.3 million to t
Source: NYT
May 18, 2006
The split between the human and chimpanzee lineages, a pivotal event in human evolution, may have occurred millions of years later than fossil bones suggest, and the break may not have been as clean as humans might like.
A new comparison of the human and chimp genomes suggests that after the two lineages separated, they may have begun interbreeding.
The analysis, by David Reich, Nick Patterson and colleagues at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., sets up a serious
Source: Business Week
May 16, 2006
As "source nations" put pressure on museums to return antiquities, a new code of conduct for the art world may be in the making.
Back in 1998, with help from prominent local donors, the St. Louis Museum of Art cobbled together $499,000 to buy a beautiful ancient Egyptian burial mask. The piece, one of the gems of the museum's collection, recently became controversial when the Egyptian government demanded its return, contending it had been stolen from a warehouse in the lat
Source: BBC
May 20, 2006
Next month the British army will make its biggest deployment in southern Afghanistan in more than a century.
Their ancestors packed up and left southern Afghanistan in 1881 after two disastrous wars.
The Afghan militants today don't outwardly look much different from their forefathers who picked off the British troops struggling down the snowbound passes after the first Anglo-Afghan war.
But today's British soldier is almost unrecognisable. Their leaders
Source: People's Daily Online
May 18, 2006
Some well-preserved murals have been discovered in a tomb of more than 1,500 years old in Datong, North China's Shanxi Province, supplying rich first-hand evidence for the research of early ethnic apparel and rituals.
The tomb was identified to belong to a general's mother who died in AD 435. Taking up an area of 24 square metres, it was found in a cemetery of 12 tombs excavated last summer by local archaeologists.
Lying on a plateau in the rural suburbs of Datong, th
Source: The Independent
May 18, 2006
In the quiet town of Bad Arolsen, in a former Nazi SS barracks, lies probably the most exhaustive record of human misery ever kept. The details, which can be found in more than 47 million files covering 16 miles of shelves, are contained in ordinary hardback writing books that might be found in any school classroom.
Punctiliously noted in the Totenbuch or Death Book kept at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria is the camp commandant's "present" to Hitler on the occ
Source: Financial Times
May 18, 2006
France's relations with Turkey will come under strain today if the parliament in Paris approves a bill that would make it a crime to deny the killing of Armenians by Ottoman troops in 1915 was genocide.
Turkish academics have warned that if the opposition proposal becomes law, it would be "disastrous" for the democratic movement in Turkey. It could also cause economic disruption, with business leaders warning that French products could be boycotted in Turkey.
Source: BBC
May 17, 2006
A decommissioned US warship has found a new lease of life on the ocean floor after being sunk, to become the world's largest artificial diving reef.
The USS Oriskany, which served in the Korean and Vietnam wars, was sent to its watery grave in a finely tuned operation by the US navy.
It took 500lb (226kg) of explosives to sink the 32,000-metric ton vessel to its new home off the Florida coast.
The new tourist attraction is expected to reap yearly revenues of $
Source: BBC News
May 17, 2006
A movie about the Irish civil war is being tipped to carry the day at the Cannes Film Festival. The Wind That Shakes The Barley, directed by Ken Loach, is in the running for the top award.
The Da Vinci Code - set to be one of the biggest movies of the year - will open the festival.
Since his groundbreaking BBC television 1960s plays - like Cathy Come Home - Loach has forged a reputation for intense and often controversial cinema, dealing with historical, social and po
Source: CNN
May 17, 2006
FBI agents and local police were searching a Michigan horse farm Wednesday for the remains of former Teamsters union leader Jimmy Hoffa after receiving a tip about his disappearance, the agency said.
The search was being conducted in Milford Township, 30 miles west of Detroit. Police from nearby Bloomfield Township were assisting the FBI agents.
A federal law enforcement official speaking on condition of anonymity said the search is for Hoffa's body.
