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: USA Today
November 15, 2005
There are enormous differences between the war in Iraq and the one in Vietnam that defined a generation. The current conflict hasn't lasted as long, taken nearly as many American lives or sparked the sort of massive protests that became common in the '60s and '70s.
But when it comes to public opinion, Americans' attitudes toward Iraq and the proper course ahead are remarkably similar to public attitudes toward Vietnam in the summer of 1970, a pivotal year in that conflict and a time
Source: Albuquerque Tribune
November 15, 2005
While the nation debates whether President Bush and his administration deliberately misled the nation into war in Iraq, local parents, Albuquerque Public Schools and its high school educators are facing off over the accuracy of a history textbook used in advanced placement (college preparatory) history classes.The APS debate, which finds itself now before a district committee of parents and educators reviewing the complaints, is timely and worthy of broader public attention.
Source: Baltimore Sun
November 15, 2005
Atlanta's Auburn Avenue commercial district, once the heart of the nation's black business community, is lined with historic treasures such as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth house -- and also with crumbling, boarded-up buildings.
That makes it the most recognizable and jarring of the places listed statewide as "in peril" in a report released Monday by the Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation, the nation's largest nonprofit state preservation group.
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer
November 13, 2005
A symbol of the epic struggle to found our nation is suffering from years of neglect by our national government. Valley Forge National Park is in trouble. It may be time for Pennsylvania to take back control of it, before a penny-pinching Congress and a paralyzed National Park Service do more damage.Valley Forge, established as Pennsylvania's first state park in 1893, became a national park in 1976. Its purpose, Congress said then, was to commemorate the "hardship
Source: BBC News
November 14, 2005
Three preserved Maori heads will be returned to New Zealand after decades in a Glasgow museum.
The tattooed heads, and a thigh bone, are believed to belong to Maori chiefs killed in battle in the 19th century. They were donated to the Kelvingrove Museum, although they have never been shown in public.
A delegation from New Zealand's national museum Te Papa arrives in Glasgow on Monday to return the heads and offer them for tribal burial.
Source: Fox4news
November 11, 2005
Kansas City, MO - President Jimmy Carter says President Bush's policies conflict with American values. More than a thousand people packed into Unity Temple on the Plaza for the former president to sign a copy of his new book "Our Endangered Values." Reviews call the book biting political commentary, despite the fact that there's an unwritten rule in American politics that former presidents do not criticize current ones.Carter says he wrote this book reluctantly, bu
Source: The History Carnival
November 15, 2005
The twice-monthly roundup of historical blogging -- blogging by historians and blogging about historical issues -- is up at TigerLily Lounge.
Source: The Observer
November 13, 2005
It took more than half a century from the end of the Second World War before Peter Phillips, Evi Labi and the 2,000 other Britons who had family property, insurance policies and bank accounts looted by the Nazis in Austria were promised any redress.
A $210 million compensation fund, created in 2001, seemed to offer some compensation for their losses. But five years on, the money remains elusive. Holocaust survivors who should be benefiting are ageing and, increasingly, dying. So far
Source: Guardian (UK)
November 14, 2005
A revisionist history book praising the former Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, whose regime liquidated tens of thousands of opponents over nearly 40 years, has shot to the top of the bestseller list in Spain as the country marks the 30th anniversary of his death.
"Franco should . . . receive the gratitude and recognition of the majority of Spaniards," writes Pio Moa in Franco: an historical review. The success of the book, which repeats old claims that Franco br
Source: NY Daily News
November 14, 2005
Douglas Morris, a veteran public defender in Brooklyn, has spent most of his legal career helping people in trouble and fighting for the principle of fairness.
Somehow, over the past nine years, while defending scores of defendants in federal court, Morris found the time to research and write a biography of anti-Nazi lawyer Max Hirschberg, whose case files included tangling with none other than Adolf Hitler in a libel suit."What I found so movin
Source: Inside Higher Ed
November 14, 2005
Two of the five members of a committee investigating research misconduct allegations against Ward Churchill have quit the panel, the University of Colorado at Boulder has announced. The university did not indicate why they quit, but both professors were recently criticized on an anti-Churchill Web site for comments they had made defending the controversial professor. The university did not announce whether or how the two professors would be replaced.
Source: Time Magazine
November 13, 2005
Even after Franco's death in 1975, parties across the political spectrum maintained a "pact of silence" about the Civil War and decades of dictatorship to ensure, they said, a peaceful transition to representative government. But after watching their democracy survive tests ranging from the legalization of divorce to the Madrid bombings, Spaniards are ready to break that silence. Unlike his allies Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco survived World W
Source: The Art Newspaper
November 10, 2005
American counter-insurgency measures in Samarra in western Iraq have, once again, led to concerns over possible damage to the rich archaeological heritage of the city. On 19 September, the news agency UPI reported that the American battalion stationed in Samarra had begun the construction of a berm or temporary embankment around the city, setting up checkpoints on all the roads to control access. According to Major John Holcomb, the intelligence officer for the First Brigade Combat Team of the T
Source: Canada.com
November 11, 2005
Canadian students are finishing high school without a basic understanding of their country's history, and schools are ignoring the subject in favour of a new fixation with math and science, the Dominion Institute says.
The private, Toronto-based advocacy group says provincial governments could help solve the problem by making Canadian history a mandatory requirement of high school graduation.The institute's annual Remembrance Day poll -- a national s
Source: NYT
November 11, 2005
Historic discoveries don't happen every day at the auction houses, but Swann Galleries has a true find in its Nov. 22 autographs auction: a signed letter, dated Feb. 14, 1776, by Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave and the author of the first book of poetry published by an African-American. Wheatley was held in high esteem during the abolitionist movement in the 19th century and is still revered, as shown by her inclusion in a new exhibition on slavery at the New-York Historical Society.
Source: NYT
November 13, 2005
Another election has come and gone, and with it yet another demonstration of American voters' fascinating indifference to the sexual behavior of their public officials.
This year's prime exhibit was New Jersey, where Senator Jon Corzine scored a decisive win against his Republican opponent in the governor's race, Douglas Forrester, despite a last-minute barrage of attack ads in which Mr. Corzine's ex-wife was quoted as declaring that unlike Mr. Forrester, "Jon did let his famil
Source: NYT
November 11, 2005
Semou Diouf, holding a pipe in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood amid the noisy games of checkers and cards in the dingy ground-floor common room of a crowded tenement building and pondered the question of why he feels French. "I was born in Senegal when it was part of France," he said before putting the pipe in his mouth. "I speak French, my wife is French and I was educated in France." The problem, he added after pulling the pipe out of his mouth again, "is
Source: NYT
November 13, 2005
When the mayor and members of the chamber of commerce of White Settlement, Texas decided that the very name of the city might be limiting its allure to outside investors, they decided to ask voters to approve a change to something a little less provocative like, say, Liberator Village or West Settlement, or, simply, Settlement.
The residents of White Settlement responded last Tuesday by defeating the measure by about a 9-to-1 margin among about 2,500 who voted.
Source: NYT
November 14, 2005
As a young lawyer seeking to move up in the Reagan administration in 1985, Samuel A. Alito Jr. declared that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion.
In language certain to stoke heated debate at his January confirmation hearings, Mr. Alito, now President Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, also expressed disapproval of Supreme Court decisions while Earl Warren was chief justice, including those that dealt with criminal procedures.Mr.
Source: Newday.com
November 14, 2005
During the Revolutionary War, Gen. George Washington took a keen interest in the tiniest details of how his spies operated, right down to the formula for invisible ink. His focus on the minutia of the Culper Spy Ring, which had key Long Island links, is visible in a rare and historically important letter being auctioned in Manhattan tomorrow by Christie's.The letter was written in 1779 by Washington to his chief of intelligence, Gen. Benjamin Tallmadge, and focus
