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: Guardian (UK)
10-15=-05
In a lovely spot in Bavaria, surrounded by majestic mountains with snowy peaks, speckled with alpine roses and edelweiss, quaint white houses and onion-domed churches, stands a lovely hotel. Opened last March, the five-star Intercontinental Resort Berchtesgaden features a golf course, a superb wine cellar and first-class restaurant, an excellent sauna and fitness centre, and panoramic views from every room.
The fact that the view from the great window is almost identical to what Hitler s
Source: Stars and Stripes
October 16, 2005
A Japanese historian contends that Air Force Staff Sgt. Charles O. Baumgartner Jr., an American POW, knew “a powerful bomb” would be dropped on Hiroshima when the Japanese took him prisoner 10 days before the city was destroyed, killing an estimated 140,000 people almost instantly. The death toll included 12 American prisoners of war, including Baumgartner, a ball-turret gunner of the B-24 bomber Taloa, said Hiroshima historian Shigeaki Mori.
Mori has successfully tracked down relat
Source: CNews (Canada)
October 17, 2005
Three days after the D-Day invasion in June 1944, the British army occupied a Normandy mansion called Chateau d'Audrieu and found a row of 13 Canadian soldiers lying dead along a fence. So began Canada's first war-crimes investigations. They became a drawn-out and unsatisfying process, which would determine that more than 150 Canadians were massacred in Normandy by members of the 12th SS Panzer Division, but which would bring only one man to trial.
Since then, Canada has had a spott
Source: Guardian (UK)
October 17, 2005
If you want a reference point for al-Qaida, suggests Faisal Devji, some other movement that channels the same impulses for similar reasons, look no further than environmentalism. Devji, a New York-based historian and author of the new book Landscapes of the Jihad, is unafraid of provocative statements about Islamist terrorism. Another is that al-Qaida and the other groups pursuing the global jihad provide a mirror image of industrial globalisation, so the atrocities they commit are, as one revie
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 17, 2005
An original typescript of the deciphered Zimmerman Telegram, one of the greatest coups mounted by Britain's intelligence services, has been discovered.The document is believed to be the actual telegram shown to the American ambassador in London in 1917 that proved Germany's hostility to the United States and guaranteed President Woodrow Wilson's entry into the First Word War. Historians say no single piece of paper did more to guarantee victory in the Great War for Britain and her allies.
Source: WP
October 17, 2005
Lonnie G. Bunch III is settled in an office at L'Enfant Plaza lined with first-edition history books, various hats that he doesn't wear, and special photographs of family, the famous and the unknown. On the job for just 10 weeks, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture loves looking into history through photographs. Among his personal keepsakes are a couple of tintypes and daguerreotypes from the 1840s and 1850s."Photographs
Source: WP
October 16, 2005
The saga of John Champe, the Loudoun County man who became a double agent to capture the Revolutionary War traitor Benedict Arnold, is a tale worthy of grand opera.In late October 1780, near Bergen, N.J., the Loudoun Dragoons were encamped a few miles from the Hudson River. Champe, 28, was the cavalry unit's sergeant major; Maj. Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee was its commander.
"The Escape of Sergeant Champe," a Currier & Ives lithog
Source: WP
October 14, 2005
The Republican candidate for governor is drawing fire for campaign ads that suggest his Democratic opponent is so averse to the death penalty he would have spared Adolph Hitler from execution. The radio and TV ads feature victims' relatives who tearfully recount the crimes that killed their loved ones and say they don't trust Democrat Tim Kaine to administer the state's death penalty.Kaine, who says his moral objections to capital punishment are rooted in his Roman Catholic
Source: New York Times
October 15, 2005
It was a major coup for the museum, and the crowning glory of a curator's career. After years of courting a wealthy New York couple, the J. Paul Getty Museum had outmaneuvered the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other top institutions to capture one of the world's finest private collections of ancient art.
That 1996 acquisition, encompassing more than 300 masterworks of Greek, Roman and Etruscan art collected by Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, was envisioned as the anchor of a lavish ne
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
October 14, 2005
Richard Pells, a professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, says that based on his experience last summer as a Fulbright senior specialist in Indonesia, the United States has not been successful in making its policies and values better understood among Muslims in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. QUOTE: My dialogue with Indonesians often became surreal. "Is there grass in Texas?" I was regularly asked of my home state. Obviously Indonesians — ha
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
October 14, 2005
Cuts the Senate has proposed for the U.S. Census Bureau's budget next year may make it harder for the government to prepare for natural disasters, fund public schools appropriately or understand this country's complex and mobile population, according to those who rely on census data. The fiscal 2006 spending plan approved in the Senate includes a 17 percent cut from the $879 million the Bush administration wanted to allocate for the census. That cut would push census spending for fiscal 2006, wh
Source: Newsweek
October 17, 2005
After Sandra Day O'Connor resigned from the Supreme Court in July, the White House reached out to an informal network of conservative lawyers and academics to help build support for the next nominee. The group of about three dozen worked smoothly during the confirmation battle over John Roberts, plotting strategy in conference calls with administration officials and penning newspaper op-eds. But last week members of the "brain trust," as one called it, rebelled. In a string of sometime
Source: CNN
October 14, 2005
Vivian Malone Jones, one of two black students whose effort to enroll at the University of Alabama led to George Wallace's infamous "stand in the schoolhouse door" in 1963, died Thursday. She was 63.
Jones, who went on to become the first black to graduate from the school, died at Atlanta Medical Center, where she had been admitted Tuesday after suffering a stroke, said her sister, Sharon Malone.
Source: Wa Po
October 14, 2005
With more than half an acre of stained glass set in 175 windows, Chartres Cathedral is in the midst of the most exhaustive renovation in its modern history as millennial anniversary celebrations next year draw near.16 of the cathedral's windows, including the most famous -- the Blue Virgin window depicting Mary and the child Jesus--have been restored. The artisans are now working on the glass of other churches while awaiting the chance to bid for work on seven wi
Source: The Independent (London)
October 12, 2005
Italy is about relive two of its most shocking episodes of alleged police brutality as the trial of officers accused of illegal behaviour over attacks on anti- globalisation protesters proceed in Genoa.The attacks occurred as the G8 summit of July 2001 in the port city was winding down after days of peaceful mass demonstrations by 200,000 people from all over the world, and violently anarchic protests by a small group known as the Black Block.
Today the trial be
Source: The Independent (London)
October 12, 2005
One of the enduring mysteries of British naval history moved a step closer to being solved as archaeologists raised remaining parts of the Mary Rose.Historians have been baffled as to why Henry VIII's flagship foundered and sank in the Solent off Portsmouth in 1545, watched by the monarch, as it set sail to repel a French invasion force. But after a painstaking two-year project to recover the central part of the ship's bow, which also resulted in the raising of its massive a
Source: The Herald (Glasgow)
October 13, 2005
An ancient stone circle has been discovered in the Hebrides after being hidden for thousands of years.The significant find is integral to the famous Callanish Stones on Lewis which encompasses around 20 other satellite sites across a wide landscape.
It is also aligned to an extraordinary lunar phenomenon which only occurs around every 20 years and would have terrified the ancients.
The new site, believed to be up to 5000 years old, is the la
Source: Independent (UK)
October 13, 2005
Descendants of some of the 1.5 million Armenians killed during the collapse of Ottoman rule in 1915 will share a $17m (£9.7m) payout after a settlement with the French insurance giant AXA. The relatives lodged their legal case in California, home to one of the world's largest Armenian communities, claiming for life insurance benefits that were never paid. The settlement is likely to be approved in November in the US District Court in California.The California settlement will
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
October 13, 2005
The American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress is working with folklorists at the University of Houston and in Austin, Texas, to create an oralhistory project that will put academic survivors of the hurricane to work collecting survivor stories in Texas. The Library is training historians and other academics in conducting oral histories, and will donate tape recording equipment for this project. In addition, the Library will assist in the development of a database a
Source: Ralph Luker at Cliopatria
October 11, 2005
Remember the discussion of Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins six months ago? She'd been acclaimed as an African American novelist by no less an eminence than "Skip" Gates, when a Brandeis student turned up substantial evidence that Kelley-Hawkins was white. Among others, Henry Farrell, Caleb McDaniel, and Scott McLemee discussed the issue. Still, there were difficult holes in the research trail. Now, a researcher known only as Neil seems to have filled some major ones by locating Kelley-Hawki
