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: WTOP Dallas
January 9, 2006
The discovery of a long-lost letter offers rare insight into Robert Johnson's life and confirms that the bluesman recorded at a downtown Dallas building, music historians said.
Blues fans have long thought Johnson recorded 13 songs in 1937 in a building two blocks east of Dallas City Hall. The building was home to Brunswick Records at the time, but there was no known documentation to confirm where the recordings took place.That was until San Diego blues en
Source: Boston Globe
January 8, 2006
DeLay said he would continue to serve in his suburban Houston district. He will seek a 12th term this fall, in what promises to be a tough campaign against Nick Lampson, a Democrat and a former congressman.
While members pushed to oust DeLay in part out of fear about their own reelection prospects this fall, the revolt that led DeLay to step aside could send the opposite message to voters. DeLay's decision to resign on the heels of the Abramoff plea might suggest a "hint of gui
Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN
January 7, 2006
Update Sunday 1-8-06: This morning the AHA Council unanimously approved the resolution referred to below.
In a pointed response to the growing campaign to pressure universities to hire more conservative professors in the humanities, historians meeting in Philadelphia today said the effort smacks of McCarthyism and vowed to oppose it. They passed a resolution to put the American Historical Association—the nation’s oldest and most revered historical society—on record against the effort.
Source: http://www.adnki.com
January 5, 2006
Iran has decided to rewrite and revise the history of the Holocaust. Following the repeated declarations by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and other senior government officials on the need to re-examine the history of the genocide of the Jews during the Second World War, the association of Islamic Journalists of Iran has been tasked with quickly putting together an international conference on the Holocaust.
"President Ahmadinejad has placed at the centre of intern
Source: nature.com
January 9, 2006
Thanks to political tensions easing in Lebanon, archaeologists have finally managed to locate the sites of ancient Phoenician harbours in the seaports that dominated Mediterranean trade thousands of years ago.
By drilling out cores of sediment from the modern urban centres of these cities, geologists have mapped out the former coastlines that the sediments have long since buried. From this they have pinpointed the likely sites of the old harbours, and have marked out locations that
January 9, 2006
A petition is circulating on the Internet to rally academics to the defense of their colleagues in Iraq. As the petition states:"A little known aspect of the tragedy engulfing Iraq is the systematic
liquidation of the country's academics. Even according to conservative
estimates, over 250 educators have been assassinated, and many hundreds
more have disappeared. With thousands fleeing the country in fear for their
lives, not only is Iraq undergoing a major brain drain, the secular
midd
Source: Boston Globe
January 7, 2006
Brown University's library boasts an unusual anatomy book. Tanned and polished to a smooth golden brown, its cover looks and feels no different from any other fine leather. But here's its secret: the book is bound in human skin.A number of prestigious libraries -- including Harvard University's -- have such books in their collections. While the idea of making leather from human skin seems bizarre and cruel today, it was not uncommon in centuries past, said Laura Hartma
Source: Seattle P-I
January 7, 2006
BURG, Switzerland -- Albert Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the window.
Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a sym
Source: Rick Shenkman, reporting for HNN
January 7, 2006
Update Sunday 1-8-06: This morning the AHA Council unanimously approved the resolution denouncing the use of torture.
Alarmed by reports that the United States is torturing foreign prisoners American historians meeting in Philadelphia sharply criticized the practice after a brief debate lasting just under 15 minutes. The historians, members of the American Historical Association, the nation’s oldest and most revered historical society, acted at the recommendation of their former presiden
Source: HNN
January 6, 2006
Allegations of conservative political bias at the National Endowment of the Humanities have been made over the last several years, but few scholars have come forward to tell their stories. On Saturday 7 January, at a panel sponsored by the American Historical Association Professional Division, the Coordinating Council for Women in History, and the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, historian of sexuality Marc Stein, an associate professor at York University in Toronto, will go public. Unan
Source: Chicago Tribune
January 7, 2006
Fire swept through Bronzeville's historic Pilgrim Baptist Church on Friday, sending flaming walls and timbers crashing into the grand sanctuary where gospel music was born. The building, a cornerstone of Chicago's African-American community and a landmark work by architect Louis H. Sullivan, was a total loss, fire officials said.
As the ruins steamed Friday evening, that loss had to be assessed from many angles.
A neighborhood had lost a church; worshipers, a church ho
Source: ABC
January 7, 2006
New Orleans has 20 different neighborhoods on the National Register of Historic Places — more than any other city per capita — with some 37,000 structures ranging from Greek revival mansions to Creole cottages and shotgun shacks. Because these neighborhoods were built by early settlers who understood the dangers of their environment; they sit in the city's highest parts, and came through the storm in the best shape.The Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans
Source: ANSA
January 7, 2006
The Italian partisan who captured Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini at the end of WWII has died .
Urbano Lazzaro, whose 'nom de guerre' was Bill, died Tuesday night in a Vercelli hospital aged 81 .
Lazzaro, a member of the partisans' Garibaldi Brigade, took Mussolini off a truck at Dongo near the Swiss border on April 27, 1945 .The dictator, who ruled Italy for over 20 years from 1922, was disguised as a German soldier .
Mus
Source: CNN
January 6, 2006
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- A massive fire Friday destroyed a landmark South Side church where Mahalia Jackson and other gospel royalty often sang during the 20th century and the man considered the father of gospel music led the choir.
The fire gutted Pilgrim Baptist Church, collapsing its roof and steeple. No major injuries were reported, and the cause of the fire was not immediately known, though repair work had been under way on the roof, fire officials said.
Source: Fox News
1--6-06
Hugh Thompson Jr., a former Army helicopter pilot honored for rescuing Vietnamese civilians from his fellow GIs during the My Lai massacre, died early Friday. He was 62.
Thompson, whose role in the 1968 massacre did not become widely known until decades later, died at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Alexandria, hospital spokesman Jay DeWorth said.
Trent Angers, Thompson's biographer and family friend, said Thompson died of cancer.
Source: Guardian
January 6, 2005
Described as “the killer with pen”, Yao Wenyuan was the group's propagandist and Xinhua, the official news agency, today reported that he had died of diabetes, at the age of 74, on December 23. He was the last survivor of the quartet, and deserves more than a footnote in the history books.
A former propaganda official and Shanghai journalist, Yao wrote the article in 1966 that signalled the start of the Cultural Revolution. During the revolution, hundreds of thousands of people died
Source: KATC-3 Acadiana
January 6, 2006
Chalmette Battlefield park will reopen for the first time since Hurricane Katrina left it under water. Saturday marks the 191st anniversary of the famous battle, when Andrew Jackson turned back British forces seeking to seize the port of New Orleans at the close of the War of 1812. Commemorations have been held at the site since the late 1800s, but this year's event is different because Chalmette, where the battlefield is located, was devastated in the hurricane."We're
Source: USA Today
January 5, 2006
Visitors to Machu Picchu see well-preserved ruins hidden among the majestic Andes: palaces, baths, temples, tombs, sundials and farming terraces, along with llamas that roam among hundreds of gray granite houses. However, curious tourists won't find many bowls, tools, ritual objects or other artifacts used by the Incas of the late 1400s.
To see those, they have to go to New Haven, Conn.
Yale historian Hiram Bingham rediscovered Machu Picchu in 1911, and backed by the National
Source: Telegraph (UK)
January 5, 2006
The Muslim Council of Britain is to boycott the National Holocaust Day for the second year running, the organisation said last night. A spokesman said it would not participate in the event on Jan 26 because it was not sufficiently inclusive."The MCB would be honoured to participate in a national memorial day providing that it clearly affirmed that the lives of all people, regardless of race or religion, are to be valued equally," he said. "This is why the Musl
Source: WaPo
January 5, 2006
Windswept and rocky, the knobby point overlooking the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in present-day Potomac provided a strategic lookout but little shelter for the Union soldiers who fortified the spot in 1862.
Beginning that winter of the Civil War, soldiers of the 19th Massachusetts Infantry are believed to have guarded this Montgomery County site on the C&O, then an important commercial route parallel to the adjacent Potomac River. From their perch, Northern soldiers attempted t
