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: The Times (London)
February 21, 2006
A repentant soldier who helped interrogate prisoners of war on the Thai-Burma Death Railway wants to make the bridge on the River Kwai a UNESCO World Heritage site.Takashi Nagase, a teacher who has spent the past 60 years attempting to atone for what he and the Japanese Imperial Army did during the Second World War, spent his 88th birthday yesterday arguing that the United Nations should pay homage to those who died working on the bridge.
More than 16,000 Allied
Source: The Daily Telegraph
February 21, 2006
DAVID IRVING, the controversial historian, was jailed for three years in Austria yesterday after pleading guilty to charges of denying the Holocaust 17 years ago. "I'm shocked and I will be appealing,'' he said as he was led from a Vienna court by armed police.Irving turned red when the sentence was delivered and told the judge that he had not understood.
During the 10-hour trial he apologised for his "mistakes'' and "errors of judgment'' in
Source: NYT
February 21, 2006
In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to
Source: BBC
February 20, 2006
The trial of the British historian David Irving has unleashed a debate in Austria about the country's Holocaust denial law, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in jail.The law was enacted after World War II, and was meant to prevent any further Nazi activities.
Austria had been annexed to Nazi Germany in 1938, and was deeply involved in the crimes of the Third Reich.
A few Austrians, such as Lothar Hobelt,
an associate professor
Source: Salon
February 20, 2006
Last August in Tahlequah, Okla., Lucy Allen appeared before the Judicial Appeals Tribunal, a three-person court that hears constitutional questions in the Cherokee Nation. Allen is suing to become a Cherokee citizen. Born in Vinita, Okla., within the boundaries of the Cherokee Nation, she is far from your typical Indian wannabe. She is attempting to overturn a 1987 Cherokee law that makes the descendants of these slaves ineligible for Cherokee citizenship.Depending on the Tr
Source: NYT
February 19, 2006
MORE than a century before it became the scene of a vice presidential hunting accident, this humble stretch of property had connections to another gun incident. On a manhunt in 1877, a hard-bitten Texas ranger named John B. Armstrong captured the notorious outlaw John Wesley Hardin after what the officer later described in a telegram back home as a "lively shooting" aboard a train in Florida. The capture made a hero of Mr. Armstrong, who bought a 50,000-acre plot f
Source: WSJ
February 18, 2006
Before the Berlin Wall fell, the Olympics were considered, to adapt Clausewitz, politics by other means. Occasionally this was explicit, such as when Cold War opponents boycotted each other's Summer Games in 1980 and 1984. But when enemy countries did agree to participate, geopolitical overtones permeated the Games and produced some of the more memorable Olympic contests. More people tuned in when more was at stake.Nothing viewers are likely to see in Turin can compete with
Source: Press Release -- David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
February 20, 2006
As reported in today's New York Times, more than seventy leading journalists and journalism professors (see below) have signed a letter urging the Newspaper Association of America to acknowledge the failure of American journalists to aid German Jewish refugee journalists who were trying to flee Hitler in the 1930s.The letter was initiated by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and former New York Times reporter Laurence Zuckerman. It has also been repor
Source: NYT`
February 20, 2006
Tempers are flaring over a United States demand to open to scholars and researchers a huge repository of information about the Holocaust contained in the files of the International Tracing Service at Bad Arolsen, Germany.Based in part on documents gathered by Allied forces as they liberated Nazi concentration camps, the stock of files held by the organization stretches for about 15.5 miles, and holds information on 17.5 million people. It amounts to one of the la
Source: Seattle Times
February 20, 2006
KLAMATH FALLS, Ore. — Part of a former World War II internment camp for Japanese Americans has been officially designated a National Historical Landmark.The 42-acre landmark was part of the Tule Lake Relocation-Segregation Camp in a remote area of Northern California near the Lava Beds National Monument just south of the Oregon border.
More than 120,000 Japanese Americans were displaced from their homes across the West and put in 10 relocation camps
Source: Wa Po
February 20, 2006
The newest compilation of Reagan's presidency, however, does not come between hard covers. Instead, it is available on the Internet in the form of oral histories from about 45 friends or former advisers, compiled by the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs.In conjunction with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, the Miller Center has been interviewing Reagan administration officials since 2001 and recently released more than 2,500 pages of
Source: CNN
February 18, 2006
From engaging in sexual relations with an intern to letting the Vietnam War escalate, U.S. presidents have been blamed for some egregious errors. So who had the worst blunder? President James Buchanan, for failing to avert the Civil War, according to a survey of presidential historians organized by the University of Louisville's McConnell Center.The survey's top 10 presidential blunders were announced Saturday during a President's Day weekend conference called &q
Source: Reuters
February 20, 2006
British historian David Irving pleaded guilty on Monday to charges of denying the Holocaust 17 years ago, but told an Austrian court that the personal files of Nazi mastermind Adolf Eichmann had changed his views.The 68-year-old Irving faces up to 10 years in jail in Austria in a case based on remarks he made in a 1989 interview and in speeches when he visited Austria, where denying the Nazi genocide on Jews is a crime.
"I'm not a holocaust denier. Obviousl
Source: Yahoo News
February 15, 2006
Three decades after it was made, the movie arrives Tuesday in a two-disc special edition DVD. It includes a commentary from Redford and a featurette on the recent revelation of the identity of Woodward's secret informant, Deep Throat: former FBI agent W. Mark Felt.For the 69-year-old Redford, it's an unusual opportunity to look back on a film he remains proud of. Redford, who co-produced, was largely responsible for the movie getting made.
He s
Source: Inside Higher Ed
February 17, 2006
Arizona Senate panel -- following complaint over "The Ice Storm" -- votes to give students right to demand alternative books.When faculty leaders talk about the various versions of the Academic Bill of Rights circulating among state legislators, many single out a bill in Arizona as the worst of all.
The legislation there would require public colleges to provide students with “alternative coursework” if a student finds the assigned material “perso
Source: NYT
February 17, 2007
The images are familiar, yet different. Looking more than two centuries into the past, scientists have created what they say are the most accurate depictions of George Washington at three critical stages in his life, ages 19, 45 and 57.After almost two years of forensic research, historical delving, computer manipulation and work by a team of artists, Washington comes alive in three sculptures that are supposed to be the most accurate images of what he actually looked
Source: AP
February 17, 2007
In a former box factory on an old Brooklyn street named for him, half a mile from where his defeated army escaped by night to fight another day, George Washington has all but come back to life.Not just one George Washington, but three -- the 19-year-old wilderness surveyor, the 45-year-old Revolutionary War general and the 57-year-old president on his inauguration day in 1789.
The trio of life-size wax figures, created by British-born artists Stuart Willia
Source: NYT
February 17, 2006
The Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass likened the cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published by a Danish newspaper to Nazi caricatures of Jews, Agence France-Presse reported yesterday. In an interview published in Portugal in the weekly news magazine Visão, Mr. Grass, whose novels include "The Tin Drum" and "Cat and Mouse," said: "I recommend that everyone have a look at the drawings: they remind one of those published in a famous German
Source: NYT
February 17, 2006
The images are familiar, yet different. Looking more than two centuries into the past, scientists have created what they say are the most accurate depictions of George Washington at three critical stages in his life, ages 19, 45 and 57.After almost two years of forensic research, historical delving, computer manipulation and work by a team of artists, Washington comes alive in three sculptures that are supposed to be the most accurate images of what he actually l
Source: Fox News
February 17, 2006
Germany's Dresdner Bank AG financed Nazi arms makers and owned a stake in a company that built crematoriums at the Auschwitz concentration camp, authors of a bank-commissioned study said Friday.The 2,400-page, four-volume study is the result of seven years of work by a team of historians who scoured a huge number of the bank's files to detail its involvement with Adolf Hitler's regime before and during World War II.
The report "calls things by their proper
