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: Washington Post
January 30, 2006
Everywhere on the Mall are echoes of marching feet, slaves' cries, market peddlers' calls, children's laughter and the singing of black men at the Million Man March. But there never has been a place there to commemorate the African American story. Today, more than 42 years after King's triumphant moment, that history is expected to find a home. The Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution is scheduled to meet this morning to select a site for the National Museum of African American Histor
Source: Irish Times
January 30, 2006
Speaking at UCC, Dr Jérôme van de Wiel of the University of Rheims said that even Imperial Russia seemed to have some military interest in Ireland - a document in the French military archives shows that a "Franco-Russian landing in Ireland" might have been contemplated in 1902 just after the Boer War."As various diplomatic and military archives located in Berlin, Brussels, Freiburg, Paris, Rome and Vienna reveal, continental Europe was much interested in
Source: The Independent (London)
January 30, 2006
Marie-Antoinette lives again. The last great queen of France, guillotined in 1793, threatens to make us all lose our heads in 2006. She may rival, or even eclipse, her close contemporary and fellow Austrian, Mozart, as "historical personality" of the year.In July, the Palace of Versailles will extend its acreage open to visitors to include a new Marie-Antoinette domain surrounding her beloved private retreat, the Petit Trianon.
And an exhibition
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
January 30, 2006
The Roman Catholic church is bracing for a new public backlash after agreeing to participate for the first time in a television documentary series about the Inquisition, its 600-year-long campaign across Europe against heresy which formally ended only 40 years ago.The four-part American-made series, which begins tonight on the UKTV History Channel, is based at least in part on archives which the Vatican only formally opened to scholars in 1998, though church records from oth
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
January 28, 2006
Actor Morgan Freeman reignited debate over whether Black History Month is necessary when he called the observance "ridiculous" on national television."You're going to relegate my history to a month?" Freeman asked in an interview broadcast on"60 Minutes" in December."I don't want a black history month.
Black history is American history."
Some African Americans agree that the observance belittles black history. But most prominent African Americans and h
Source: Baltimore Sun
January 28, 2006
Baltimore's Fort McHenry should have a new visitors center in time for the bicentennial anniversary of the War of 1812, with the help of an $11 million federal grant, officials announced yesterday.The money -- included in a recently approved transportation bill -- is expected to help complete decades of planning to replace a building that National Park Service officials believed was too small and limited from the time it opened in 1964.
Source: Discovery News
January 27, 2006
Archaeologists have unearthed a 3,000-year-old skeleton of a man who appears to be clutching a dagger and is posed as though he were about to thrust the weapon into something, or someone, according to a Cultural Heritage News report from Iran. The unusual burial is the first of its kind for Iran, and possibly for the rest of the world.
"He is holding a 26-centimeter dagger and appears to be making a forward thrust," said archaeologist Ali Mahfor
Source: zeenews.com
January 29, 2006
Leading historians from Pakistan participating at the Indian History Congress today flayed the Pervez Musharraf government for "distortion" of history in school textbooks of that country saying their government had resorted to "subversion" of history and "perpetration" of half-truths.The seven-member Pakistani delegation here on the invitation of the Indian Council of Cultural Research (ICCR) regretted that the Musharraf government was mak
Source: NYT
January 29, 2006
THEY were the grandest of all the neighbors along the Mississippi Gulf Coast: splendid manors with names like Tullis-Toledano, Beauvoir and Grasslawn, squeezed in among the giant moss-covered oak trees. More than any road sign could, they announced that a bit of the old South had endured.
Source: NYT
January 29, 2006
Even as Haiti prepares to pick its first elected president since the rebellion two years ago, questions linger about the circumstances of Bertrand Aristide's ouster — and especially why the Bush administration, which has made building democracy a centerpiece of its foreign policy in Iraq and around the world, did not do more to preserve it so close to its shores.
Source: NYT
January 29, 2006
More than four years later, the written record of life inside the mayor's office in the chaotic weeks after Sept. 11 is emerging for the first time from city archives. At once insightful, poignant and banal, the documents vividly portray an administration toiling in the shadow of catastrophe, grappling with basic needs, fielding requests for help and offers of advice, and coping with an unrelenting dirge of wakes and funerals. They also provide the occasional glimpse of Mr.
Source: NYT
January 29, 2006
Beginning more than 200 years ago, the Cowan family has kept letters written to one another, as well as correspondence with eminent outsiders like Ralph Waldo Emerson, sermons given by preachers in the family and multipart essays sent home while traveling. The collection, at least 75,000 documents totaling hundreds of thousands of pages filling 200 boxes, is one of the largest private family troves that has turned up in recent years.It has been stored in attics, sheds
Source: SF Chronicle
January 29, 2006
The restructuring announced by Ford, which follows similar moves by General Motors, demonstrates among other things that autoworkers are expendable, and that tens of thousands of people -- and their families -- are about to be cast adrift at a time of economic uncertainty.This isn't how communities are stabilized. It's how they're eviscerated.
There was a time when Ford took a diametrically opposite approach to its workers, a trailblazing recognition that
Source: NYT
January 27, 2006
Democrats in Georgia and Alabama, borrowing an idea usually advanced by conservative Republicans, are promoting Bible classes in the public schools.The Democrats who introduced the bills said they hoped to compete with Republicans for conservative Christian voters. "Rather than sitting back on our heels and then being knocked in our face, we are going to respond in a thoughtful way," said Kasim Reed, a Georgia state senator from Atlanta and one of the sponsors of t
Source: NYT
January 28, 2006
What is probably the world's richest sunken treasure — the Sussex, a British warship that went to the bottom of the Mediterranean in 1694 with a cargo of coins now worth up to $4 billion — has become embroiled in a bitter diplomatic dispute that pits Spain against Britain, the United States and an American company that wants to salvage the wreck. The conflict turns on arcane and often disputed aspects of international law that govern sovereign waters and the righ
Source: Baltimore Sun
January 28, 2006
Interest grows in projects to honor a heroic Dorchester County, Maryland native.There is a growing chorus of voices who think there ought to be a new museum here in Dorchester, where Tubman was born, to house artifacts associated with the Underground Railroad heroine, Civil War spy and nurse.
"We realize the value of Harriet Tubman now - people have opened their eyes and can see her importance," said Kay McKelvey, a retired teacher who runs an after-s
Source: chichestertoday.co.uk
January 5, 2006
Chichester Cathedral will be seen in all its glory – without external scaffolding – for the first time in 40 years in around 18 months' time. This will follow the completion of a major part of the restoration work now under way on the 900-year-old building's magnificent Lady Chapel, costing £870,000.But it will not mark the end of work elsewhere in the cathedral. And meanwhile, the task ahead is to raise more than £1,000 a week in the coming year and beyond.
Source: NYT
January 27, 2006
The speaker of Russia's Parliament snubbed a call by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe for former Communist countries to reassess their repressive histories and to "condemn them without any ambiguity." On Wednesday, the assembly, which represents legislators from European countries, called for governments to confront their nations' former policies of starvation, mass executions and concentration camps. Yesterday, Boris Gryzlov, the Russian speaker
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
January 27, 2006
Although the academic boycott a British faculty union imposed on two Israeli universities last spring has been overturned, anti-Israel bias continues to harm scholars and distort research, said participants in a conference here this week at Bar-Ilan University. Scholars and public figures from the United States, Britain, and Israel said that virulent anti-Israel sentiment, much of it emanating from the academic left, has created an atmosphere in which students and faculty me
Source: Inside Higher Ed
January 27, 2006
Scholars issue draft "declaration" calling for expanded role of religion in curriculum and student life -- at religious and secular colleges."To live in America is to live in a religiously charged atmosphere,” and that includes colleges — whether they like it or not. With those words, William M. Sullivan, a senior scholar at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, summed up why 25 scholars — from a range of disciplines and faiths — have been workin
