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: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History
October 6, 2005
The National Park Service (NPS) has selected a new location for the Hamilton Grange, the NPS administered New York residence of Alexander Hamilton. After existing for over one hundred years at Convent Avenue and 141st Street in New York City, Hamilton’s residence is being moved to St. Nicholas Park. By relocating the house the NPS hopes to reveal the true front and back of the structure and would permit the original porches to be reattached and enhance the visitor experience.
Source: Newsletter of the National Coalition for History
October 6, 2005
The National Archives and Records Administration’s (NARA) Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) has released a report on the automatic declassification of 25-year-old documents of various executive branch agencies. Submitted to President Bush, the report indicates that most of the agencies are on track to meet the 31 December 2006 deadline, though a handful still remain at risk of coming up short.The report states that an estimated 155 million pages of textual records
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
October 6, 2005
FOR SOMEONE BOTH HERALDED AND FEARED as a potentially conservative voice on the U.S. Supreme Court, President Bush's nominee, Harriet E. Miers, has played a key role in exposing college students to some unmistakably liberal ideas. In the late 1990s, she helped create a lecture series in women's studies at Southern Methodist University whose inaugural speaker was Gloria Steinem.In the late 1990s, as a member of the advisory board for Southern Methodist University's law school
Source: Inside Higher Education
October 6, 2005
Recreating exactly what happened, and why, is difficult, because most of the parties are reluctant to talk about it — and in fact agreed not to as part of the mediated settlement reached over the summer. But it went something like this:
Last March, the University of California Press published Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, by Kathryn Edin, an assistant professor of sociology at Penn, and Maria Kefales, an assistant professor at Saint Joseph’s Uni
Source: Jerusalem Post
October 6, 2005
In a surprise move, an advisory body to California's board of education rejected a sixth-grade history program that Hindu and Jewish groups blasted as biased, erroneous and culturally derogatory.
During a two-day hearing last week before the state's curriculum development and supplemental materials commission, Jewish critics lambasted the Oxford University Press textbook and related materials for subjecting early Jewish history to a more rigid standard of proof than Christian or Mus
Source: NYT
October 5, 2005
Who will be the author of Algeria's history?
Will it be a former member of the Islamic Salvation Front, Nassiridin Turkman, who says that Islamic militants played no role in the massacres that left more than 100,000 innocent civilians dead in the 1990's?
Will it be the president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who maintains that the state's security institutions played no role in the disappearance of more than 6,000 people?
Or will it be the member of Parliament who
Source: NYT
October 5, 2005
The United States Mint plans to introduce a new design for the nickel with the image of Thomas Jefferson shown facing forward, rather than in profile, for the first time in history. The nation's circulating coins have featured a side view of presidents for nearly a century, beginning with Abraham Lincoln on the penny in 1909. Officials at the mint said the new nickel, based on an 1800 Rembrandt Peale painting of Jefferson, would begin circulating early next year.
Source: NYT
October 6, 2005
Over the years, Sondra Mose-Ursery received blank looks from neighbors in response to her questions about a nearly forgotten 19th-century community of fugitive slaves. "You'd ask people about Ramptown, and no one had heard about it," said Ms. Mose-Ursery, a local historian. That was before a team from the anthropology department at Western Michigan University verified the existence of the community with the discovery of the first archaeological evidence of fugitive slaves in Michigan,
Source: The New Zealand Herald
October 6, 2005
Shakespeare's plays were not written by the bard but rather a politician descended from King Edward III and John of Gaunt, remarkable new evidence suggests.
British Shakespeare scholar Brenda James and historian Professor William Rubinstein of the University of Wales propose the real Shakespeare was English courtier and diplomat Sir Henry Neville.Shakespeare's plays were not written by the bard but rather a politician descended from King Edward III and John of G
Source: The Baltimore Sun
October 6, 2005
That dancing "N" signature at the end of the letter seeking supplies for officers encamped at Valley Forge in 1778 belongs to Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene, George Washington's quartermaster.
George Washington signed "GWashington" to a bill of lading for 10 barrels of shad and 40 of herring at Mount Vernon on May 29, 1788, connecting the G and W with a flourish and crossing his t with a trademark curlicue.
These letters are among the treasures in the Ed
Source: AFP
October 6, 2005
The World Monument Fund (WMF) announced that it was adding New Orleans and the rest of the hurricane-devastated US Gulf Coast to its list of the world's 100 most endangered sites. "We recognize that heritage preservation is a secondary concern as extraordinary humanitarian relief efforts continue throughout the Gulf Coast region," said WMF president Bonnie Burnham."But we also know from experience that there are things we can do now to prevent further loss lat
Source: US Newswire
October 6, 2005
A new U.S. government report refers to Holocaust-deniers as "scholars and researchers," prompting the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies to call for the report to be recalled from circulation and corrected."Holocaust-deniers are not scholars or researchers -- they are bigots who try to hide their anti-semitism behind the mask of fake scholarship," said Wyman Institute Director Dr. Rafael Medoff. "For a U.S. government report t
Source: Japan Focus
September 28, 2005
Ikiteiru heitai (Living soldiers or Soldiers alive) by Ishikawa Tatsuzo (1905-1985) is arguably the best piece of war literature to emerge from the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 to 1945. In Japan, the novella has been published and republished throughout the postwar era, most recently as a Chuko Bunko in 1999, and is now available for the first time in English. Providing a strong indictment not only of the conduct of the Japanese military in China but also of war itself, Ikiteiru heitai is a powerfu
Source: Japan Focus
October 4, 2005
Over 35 years since returning home from the Vietnam War, a former US soldier has returned a poignant diary he recovered from a young Vietcong military doctor. The diary has sparked a patriotic revival in Vietnam, turning the two former enemies into national heroes.
The diary was written by Dang Thuy Tram, an army doctor who fought Americans in the Vietnam War and died defending her hospital from a US attack. Since its reemergence this year after 35 years in the hands of a US veteran
Source: NYT
October 5, 2005
Two teams of federal and university scientists announced today that they had resurrected the 1918 influenza virus, the cause of one of history's most deadly epidemics, and had found that unlike the viruses that caused more recent flu pandemics of 1957 and 1968, the 1918 virus was actually a bird flu that jumped directly to humans.The work, being published in the journals Nature and Science, involved getting the complete genetic sequence of the 1918 virus, using t
Source: NYT
October 5, 2005
Forty years ago, the antiquities market in Europe and the United States was flooded with looted artifacts from the Petén rain forest of Guatemala. Their artistic style and inscriptions suggested to scholars that the monumental stones came from an abandoned seventh-century Maya city at some unidentified remote place, which became known as Site Q.
Now, archaeologists think the mystery has been solved in the little-known ruins of a place called La Corona. Last week they reported findin
Source: Boston Globe
October 5, 2005
Scientists have made from scratch the Spanish flu virus that killed as many as 50 million people in 1918, the first time an infectious agent behind a historic pandemic has ever been reconstructed. Researchers say it may help them better understand -- and develop defenses against -- the threat of a future worldwide epidemic from bird flu.Like the 1918 virus, the current avian flu in Southeast Asia occurs naturally in birds. In 1918, the virus mutated, infected peo
Source: Xinhua
October 5, 2005
A Japanese textbook criticized for distorting history will be used by only 0.4 percent of junior high school students nationwide, according to a government survey published on Wednesday. The textbook, compiled by the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform and published by Fusosha Publishing Inc, will be used by 4,912 students from next year, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology said. The book is widely slashed for glossin
Source: NY Newsday
August 4, 2005
The White House on Tuesday moved toward declaring the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan a National Monument a step which could greatly boost federal care for the historic site. In a letter to Secretary of the Interior Gale Norton, President Bush asked the agency to determine whether the burial ground should be declared a national monument "and whether it may warrant permanent federal protection."The burial site was uncovered in 1991 during planned buil
Source: icWales
October 5, 2005
A new book claims to have discovered compelling evidence to prove Shakespeare was a well-paid frontman for the real author of his work, it emerged today. Two academics claim to have unmasked little known English politician and aristocrat Sir Henry Neville as the true creator of the bard’s celebrated plays and sonnets.Former university lecturer Brenda James, and historian Professor William Rubinstein, of the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, claim the evidence is
