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: Wa Po
December 6, 2005
The glamour, the popping camera lights of the paparazzi, and an impressive lineup of movie stars such as Jim Carrey, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt and Chris Tucker gave a glitzy Hollywood feel to the grand opening of the Muhammad Ali Center in this horse-racing town.
Lonnie Ali, the boxing champ's wife, could barely hold back tears as she stood in the shadow of the $75 million center, with its soaring butterfly roof and its dozens of exhibits, replete with LeRoy Nieman paintings of &quo
Source: CNN
December 5, 2005
The discovery of two large pieces of the Titanic's hull on the ocean floor indicates the fabled luxury liner sank faster than previously thought, researchers said Monday.
The hull pieces were a crucial part of the ship's structure and make up a bottom section of the vessel missing when the wreck was first located in 1985, the researchers said.
After the bottom section of the hull broke free, the bow and stern split, said Roger Long, a naval architect who analyzed the fi
Source: Rocky Mountain News
December 5, 2005
The reputation of a man whose name still could bring conversations to an icy halt in this city 50 years after he wrote a book about Grand Junction's leading residents may finally be rehabilitated here.
Author Dalton Trumbo, a renowned novelist who won two Academy Awards for his screenwriting, will be honored by a festival celebrating his career and the reprinting of the book that created such a ruckus in this Western Slope city.Trumbo was born 100 years ag
Source: NYT
December 5, 2005
After admitting that his second marriage to a woman who, it turned out, had several ex-husbands, was a mistake, former NY Governor Hugh Carey said in an interview that failing to hire a historian to record details of the state's fiscal crisis and its successful resolution in the seventies was an even worse mistake. He hopes to rectify that lapse by writing his memoirs.Mr. Carey said that had his first wife not died in 1974, he would have challenged Jimmy Carter f
Source: Australian
December 5, 2005
AT the centre of Hungary's wartime history lies a gaping hole. Documentary evidence of the reign of terror by the notorious fascist Arrow Cross regime during World War II is missing and there are few surviving witnesses.
One building that should be a source of historical records is the Arrow Cross party headquarters at 60 Andrassy St, Budapest -- known as the House of Loyalty.
To Melbourne pensioner Lajos Polgar, it was the House of Fidelity. Now a war crimes investigat
Source: scotsman.com
December 4, 2005
Veterans of the US boat that destroyed a Japanese submarine off the Oahu coast on December 7, 1941 met at Pearl Harbour this weekend to revisit the day when the first shot of the Pacific war was fired.
Almost an hour after the USS Ward attacked the midget sub, 40 Japanese torpedo bombers made their first successful and unhindered run on Pearl Harbour's Battleship Row.Veterans, their families and government and military officials are remembering the W
Source: BBC News
December 5, 2005
The remains of a skeleton found underneath a medieval ship discovered buried in the banks of the River Usk in Newport are that of an Iron age man. Tests carried out on the bones which were found in December 2002, have shown that they date back to 170BC.
It makes the skeleton about 1,500 years older than the 15th century ship.
Source: AP
December 5, 2005
Undersea explorers said Monday that the discovery of more wreckage from the Titanic suggests that the luxury liner broke into three sections _ not two, as commonly thought _ and thus sank faster than previously believed."The breakup and sinking of the Titanic has never been accurately depicted," Parks Stephenson, a Titanic historian, said at a conference at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
The ocean liner that was billed as "unsinkable"
Source: White Lake Beacon
December 5, 2005
Dan Rypma, a history major at Colorado State University and formerly of Whitehall, found himself making history this summer after discovering at an ancient site in Israel what may be the earliest form of the Hebrew alphabet.
“The Tel Zayit Inscription,” now sparking discussion and controversy among biblical and language scholars around the world, is two lines of 24 inscribed letters. It’s an alphabet, resembling both Phoenician and Hebrew, on a 38-pound limestone boulder which dates
Source: NYT
December 4, 2005
According to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, John Seigenthaler Sr. is 78 years old and the former editor of The Tennessean in Nashville. But is that information, or anything else in Mr. Seigenthaler's biography, true?
The question arises because Mr. Seigenthaler recently read about himself on Wikipedia and was shocked to learn that he "was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby."
Source: Beta News
December 5, 2005
Following two fairly high profile incidents regarding the anonymous editing of articles on the popular open-source online reference tool Wikipedia, the site said that it would make changes to how it operates to prevent future problems.On November 29, an op-ed piece appeared in USA Today penned by John Seigenthaler, a former aide to Robert Kennedy. Seigenthaler said that for 132 days, the Wikipedia entry under his name falsely accused him of being a suspect in Ken
Source: Boston Globe
December 5, 2005
With eyes trained to recognize pyramids hidden in the hills of El Salvador, Mexico and Peru, Semir Osmanagic has been drawn to the mound overlooking this central Bosnian town.
"It has all the elements: four perfectly shaped slopes pointing toward the cardinal points, a flat top and an entrance complex," he said, gazing at the hill and wondering what lies beneath.
No pyramids are known in Europe, and there is no evidence any ancient civilization there ever atte
Source: Boston Globe
December 4, 2005
SOME legal historians have been chipping away at one of the key anecdotes of 20th-century history: Franklin Roosevelt's showdown, in 1937, with the ''nine old men'' of the Supreme Court, and the famous ''switch in time that saved nine.'' The academic debate over what happened-or didn't happen-in 1937, says Laura Kalman, a history professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, ''is really a debate about whether judges are moved by law or politics.'' It's a timely subject, given the u
Source: NYT
December 4, 2005
There could be no doubt about the theme of President Bush's Iraq war strategy speech on Wednesday at the Naval Academy. He used the word victory 15 times in the address; "Plan for Victory" signs crowded the podium he spoke on; and the word heavily peppered the accompanying 35-page National Security Council document titled, "Our National Strategy for Victory in Iraq."
Although White House officials said many federal departments had contributed to the document, its
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria blog
December 3, 2005
The New York Times five best non-fiction books of 2005 includes four works of history: George Packer, The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq; Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swann, De Kooning: An American Master; Jonathan Harr, The Lost Painting; and Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945. At Ghost in the Machine, Kevin Murphy points out that Columbia's Eric Foner recently listed the five books that most influenced his work. There were three works of history: E. P. Thompson's The Making of th
Source: NYT
December 3, 2005
An Istanbul prosecutor filed charges against five prominent newspaper columnists who had criticized court rulings that tried to block an academic conference on the Armenian genocide, its first public discussion in Turkey. The conference, blocked by a court in May and again in September, was held on Sept. 24 after organizers changed its location. The conference, blocked by a court in May and again in September, was held on Sept. 24 after organizers changed its location. The j
Source: NYT
December 3, 2005
The National D-Day Museum, looted and vandalized in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, reopened Saturday with a smaller staff but with its artifacts and exhibits intact.
About 300 people were on hand for the opening and more filed in through the day to see the nation's first museum dedicated to World War II, with interactive video and audio exhibits that complement the artifacts, war planes and military vehicles on display.Unlike much of the city, the mus
Source: NYT
December 2, 2005
New information points to four Ku Klux Klan members as almost certainly responsible for the unsolved murders of two civil rights activists who died when their home exploded in 1951, Florida officials say.
Attorney General Charlie Crist announced Friday that investigators had begun excavating the site of Harry and Harriette Moore's home, which was blown up on Christmas night in 1951.
Detectives were searching for detonators and other evidence that could prove what type o
Source: NYT
December 2, 2005
There was a scheduling conflict, so a certain McLennan County rancher will not show up Monday in Waco for jury duty after all.
"The president has other commitments," said the White House spokesman, Scott McClellan.
No problem, said Judge Ralph T. Strother of State District Court, though President Bush's name had popped up on a random list of Texans summoned for jury service. Judge Strother said he had now given Mr. Bush, who owns a 1,600-acre ranch outside Cra
Source: NYT
December 2, 2005
Hermine Braunsteiner Ryan was a Queens homemaker in 1964 when The New York Times revealed her notorious past as a vicious Nazi death camp guard.
Nearly a decade later, she became the first United States citizen to be extradited for war crimes. She was sent to West Germany, where she was tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison.That was in 1981, and little has been written about her since, although a German newspaper took note of her release,
