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: ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
January 26, 2006
The New South Wales Teachers Federation has accused the Prime Minister of attacking school teachers in his call for students to be taught more about Australian history.The New South Wales Teachers Federation President Angelo Gavrielatos says history is adequately being taught in schools.
"The Prime Minister's comments were ill-informed and dishonest and aimed at attacking and denigrating Australia's teachers," he said.
The Federal Oppositi
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
January 25, 2006
Historians are only cautiously optimistic about healthier job prospects. Over the past few years, the number of graduate students entering doctoral programs in history has been rising again, while the proportion of faculty members approaching retirement age has been falling. Those trends could collide to create more competition for fewer job openings in the future.A report on the history job market for 2004-5 shows that faculty jobs advertised in the history associati
Source: Secrecy News, written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists
January 25, 2006
The Bush Administration rejected a Congressional initiative in 2002 that would have lowered the legal threshold for conducting surveillance of non-US persons under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from "probable cause" that the target is a terrorist or agent of a foreign power to "reasonable suspicion."Administration officials said at the time that the legislative proposal was unnecessary and possibly unconstitutional.
Yet in a speec
Source: NYT
January 25, 2006
Ramping up the administration's defense of its domestic eavesdropping program, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales on Tuesday invoked the lessons of George Washington and Franklin D. Roosevelt in justifying President Bush's broad power to wage war against terrorism.Mr. Gonzales, in his speech, cited the arc of history in justifying an expansive view of presidential power. He said the country's "long tradition of wartime enemy surveillance," often without wa
Source: FamousPlagiarists.com
January 25, 2006
The website is run by John P. Lesko, an assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State University, who is also responsible for a new scholarly journal, Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. The webste features brief analyses of all the famous history plagiarism cases from Ambrose to Goodwin to H.G. Wells. A color-coded meter ranks the threat they pose to good scholarship.
Source: webwire.com
January 24, 2006
A Johns Hopkins University archaeological expedition in Luxor, Egypt, has unearthed a life-sized statue, dating back nearly 3,400 years, of one of the queens of the powerful king Amenhotep III. [The media are calling her Kingt Tut's grandmother.]The statue, which dates to between 1391 and 1352 B.C.E., was uncovered earlier this month by the expedition’s director, Betsy Bryan, Johns Hopkins professor of Egyptian art and archaeology. Bryan and a graduate student, Fatma T
Source: The Guardian Unlimited
January 25, 2006
£2bn train tunnel linking Europe to Asia faces delays as dig unearths 5th-century port. Lost treasures of Constantinople test Turkey's 21st-century ambitionDeep in the soft black earth beneath the cleared slum tenements of old Istanbul, Metin Gokcay points to neatly stacked and labelled crates heaped with shattered crockery. "That's mostly old mosaics and old ceramics," said the Istanbul city archaeologist. "And over there we found bones and coins."
Source: Australian
January 25, 2006
Prime Minister John Howard wants a coalition of the willing to overhaul the teaching of Australian history in the nation's schools. Mr. Howard said there was strong concern throughout the community about the way history was being taught, with a focus on themes rather than on when something happened and why.Answering questions at the National Press Club, Mr Howard said it was ridiculous to believe history could be taught without knowing when something occurred, such as the Ba
Source: Haaretz
January 25, 2006
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is a sacred institution in America, certainly in Jewish America, but it is not without controversy. Now its opponents are taking it to task for what they see as its failure to tackle Arab-Muslim anti-Semitism.The issue has heated up in recent weeks, thanks to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who called for Israel to be wiped off the map, and simultaneously denied the Holocaust and declared a conference to be held in Iran on the subjec
Source: Businessweek
January 25, 2006
The Peruvian government is threatening to sue Yale University for the return of all the artifacts found at Machu Picchu. There's no dispute that Peru gave Bingham permission to take the artifacts to Yale for further study. But Peruvian authorities say they have documents specifying that the material had to be returned within 18 months. It has now been more than 90 years. Yale says that Peruvian law in the 1900s "gave Yale title to the artifacts at the time of their excavation and ever since
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 25, 2006
As muddy holes go, they don't get much more romantic. Beneath four feet of heavy south London clay, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of Henry VII's lost chapel at Greenwich. The site is where he and a host of his Tudor successors - Henry VIII, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth I - worshipped.The existence of the chapel, part of the Royal Palace of Placentia, a Tudor favourite but pulled down in the 17th century to be replaced by Greenwich Hospital - now the Old Naval College
Source: NYT
January 24, 2006
Within the next few weeks, Barbara Principe, a 73-year-old South Jersey woman who still lives near the chicken farm where she grew up, will begin receiving payments from millions of dollars in real estate in the former East Berlin. The land was lost to her family 67 years ago. It was then, when Ms. Principe was 6, that she and her brother were rushed out of Berlin in the dead of night by their mother and their father, a partner in the family-owned department store chain, A.
Source: NYT
January 23, 2006
Twenty-seven years after the Khmer Rouge leadership was driven from power, some of its top figures may soon be put on trial for causing the deaths of nearly one-fourth of the Cambodian population.Under an agreement between the United Nations and the government here, a special authority is preparing a courtroom and hiring staff and technical experts. In February, the head of a United Nations administrative team is expected to arrive and set up shop. Both Cambodia and th
Source: National Geographic News
January 24, 2006
Pennsylvania hunters hoping to stalk deer with Stone Age spear- throwers may get their chance later this year. Today the state's game commission gave preliminary approval for hunting deer hunting using the atlatl and dart. The ancient weapon uses a throwing stick to propel spearlike projectiles farther and harder than hunters can with arm power alone.
Source: National Security Archive
January 24, 2006
The final report of East Timor's landmark Commission for Reception, Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) has found that U.S. "political and military support were fundamental to the Indonesian invasion and occupation" of East Timor from 1975 to 1999, according to the "Responsibility" chapter of the report posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive, which assisted the Commission with extensive documentation.The Commission report, entitled &qu
Source: Inside Higher Ed
January 24, 2006
A conservative alumni group at the University of California at Los Angeles on Monday withdrew its offer to pay students $100 to file tapes and notes on what professors say during courses.A statement from the group’s founder, Andrew Jones, said that debate over the offer had become “a distraction from the real problem, which is classroom indoctrination.” Professors at UCLA and elsewhere have criticized the tactic of paying students as unethical and a violation of professors’
Source: National Geographic News
January 9, 2006
A new study of prehistoric cemeteries in North America is adding weight to the theory that the development of agriculture helped fuel baby booms around the world. According to the theory, populations swell when societies shift from a nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle to one based on the more sedentary routine of farming.
Staying put allows women to have more babies, and a farming economy provides more food to support the growing population, explained Jean
Source: dcmilitary.com
January 19, 2006
Scientists working with the Naval Historical Center (NHC) to try to solve the mystery of the Confederate submarine H.L. Hunley's disappearance in 1864, stumbled onto yet another mystery in December. A view port on the left front side of the submarine is completely missing, possibly a catastrophic result of the Hunley's historic battle with the Housatonic.
Some have speculated Sailors aboard Housatonic may have shot out the view port, causing the submarine
Source: CNN
January 23, 2006
A Johns Hopkins University archaeological team has unearthed a statue of Queen Ti, one of the most important women in ancient Egypt and wife of Pharaoh Amenhotep III, Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities announced Monday.The statue, mostly intact, was found under a statue of Amenhotep III in the sprawling Karnak Temple in Luxor, which was a royal city in ancient Egypt.
Ti was the first queen of Egypt to have her name appear on official acts alongside that of h
Source: BBC News
January 23, 2006
A £25m application has been made to the National Lottery in the hope of saving a clan chief's historic castle. John MacLeod of MacLeod, the 29th chief of his clan, is the owner of Dunvegan Castle and the Black Cuillin mountains on the Isle of Skye.
The dilapidated home could now be given the funding in return for Mr MacLeod giving the mountains up for community ownership.
The application is one of the largest bids ever submitted.
It
