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
August 30, 2005
Travelling in Africa, you sometimes find it hard to avoid being scared or, perhaps more honestly, creepily thrilled by horrors that catch you entirely by surprise. Driving by the seaside, you notice big numbers on placards on the dunes. What are they? Oh, that's where the ex-president used to have people shot. This has been a year in which such images were supposed to be turned upside down. The thesis of the Africa 05 festival is that we have become too used to bad news from the continent.
Source: Daily Telegraph (London)
August 30, 2005
Almost completely forgotten during the bitter battles over Japan's anthem is that the origins of this contentious piece of music can be traced back to John William Fenton, bandmaster of Britain's 10th Foot Regt, 1st Bn.Fenton arrived in Japan in 1868, the year Japanese modernisers overthrew the medieval shogunate and replaced it with a constitutional monarchy.
His regiment, later renamed the Royal Lincolnshire Regt, had come to protect the small foreign communit
Source: Boston Globe
August 30, 2005
As Governor Mitt Romney mulls a race for president in 2008, his strategists expect their "family values" candidate who opposes gay marriage, abortion, and some forms of embryonic stem cell research to find a natural base of support among religious conservatives. But an examination of the views of powerful Christian right groups suggests that, even as some of these voters might appreciate Romney's lifelong commitment to his church, the governor's Mormon faith could become an obstacle f
Source: Balt Sun
August 30, 2005
Starting today in Washington World War II veterans from the China-Burma-India theater will observe the 60th anniversary of V-J Day, commemorating the victory over Japan. These veterans of what has been called the "forgotten theater" will have a weeklong reunion, their last."Everyone is old or gone," said Helen Rogan Heil. "Lots of others are sick or physically unable to make trips. This is like a family breaking up. The reunion is our last hurr
Source: Chronicle of Higher Education
August 30, 2005
THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION will move its annual meeting from San Francisco next year -- as it did last year and as a handful of other scholarly organizations have done recently -- because of a labor dispute involving the city's hotel workers.
Source: Scholars for Peace in the Middle East
August 30, 2005
Scholars for Peace in the Middle East is trying to get 10,000 signatures on this petition (launched at 11:00 am EST Tuesday, Aug. 30) immediately - and more names as the weeks go by. The petition is designed to draw attention to allegedly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activity on California campuses, both inside and outside the classroom. THE PETITION:
To: Governor of Califormia, University of California and California State University Officials
Open Let
Source: Solomonia (Blog)
August 30, 2005
Richard Landes, a medievalist at Boston University, has announced his intention to establish "a media oversight venue for discussing how the media processes the information they gather and how they present it to the public as news. We'll take significant news events and present them as dossiers to the public for discussion, using for grist as much primary source material as possible, starting with the Pallywood discussion."Pallywood is "a play on t
Source: Boston Globe
August 28, 2005
ARE COLLEGE HISTORY professors too busy writing books, chasing the tenure bus, and expanding the minds of elite 18-year-olds to care about the problem of high-school graduates who don't know what century the Civil War was fought in? That's the charge leveled by a damning article in the latest issue of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the American Historical Association (AHA), the nation's most prominent organization of history professors.Th
Source: Robert A. Schneider Editor, American Historical Review
August 30, 2005
The American Historical Review will host an on-line discussion of the June 2005 Forum Essay, "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future: The Discipline of History and History Education" by Robert Orrill and Linn Shapiro. This article, which charts the changing involvement of academic historians in elementary and secondary schools over the last 100 years, asserts that the history profession today has largely failed to live up to its historic role as shapers of public education.
Source: Wa Po
August 30, 2005
Former North Carolina senator Jesse Helms, writing with the same passion that made him the Senate's leading archconservative for 30 years, renews his criticism of abortion in a memoir published this week, comparing it to both the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "I will never be silent about the death of those who cannot speak for themselves," Helms wrote in "Here's Where I Stand," which is scheduled for release Tuesday.In the book,
Source: Wa Po
August 30, 2005
Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. advised the Reagan administration's attorney general that "it makes eminent sense" to seek legislation permanently barring the use of employment quotas to redress discrimination and prohibiting the busing of students to foster the integration of schools, according to newly disclosed archival documents. The March 15, 1982, recommendation to enact administration policy into law came up in a written assessment that year by Roberts and a colleague
Source: BBC
August 30, 2005
The world's most eminent scientists are not usually associated with the dim-lit surroundings of a clairvoyant's parlour. But some of science's biggest names have not only dabbled in, but been entirely convinced by the world of the seance. Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell and John Logie Baird are familiar to most for the household indispensables they invented. But the attraction to spiritualism they all shared is definitely not part of the GCSE science syllabus.
Source: BBC
August 30, 2005
An excavation in Wiltshire has recently revealed the grave of a Bronze Age archer, buried with a rich array of precious metal goods and a quiver of arrows. Was this the King of Stonehenge? In the spring of 2002 what started as a routine excavation was undertaken in advance of the building of a new school at Amesbury in Wiltshire. By the end of the excavation the richest Bronze Age burial yet found in Britain had been discovered. The Bronze Age man discovered there had been b
Source: NYT
August 29, 2005
Close to the heart but far from public consciousness, the World Trade Center Memorial Museum - where visitors will be immersed in history in the very crucible where it unfolded - is beginning to take form. There is no director, though a national search is under way. No artifacts have been chosen, though a three-volume catalog suggests how many there are to choose. Boundary skirmishes among the users of underground space on the trade center site are settled enough that officials can say the museu
Source: CNN
August 30, 2005
Poland's Solidarity hero Lech Walesa has told his countrymen that any price, including the pain accompanying economic reforms, was worth paying for the freedom they have enjoyed since the overthrow of communism. Addressing a special session of parliament marking the 25th anniversary of the birth of Solidarity on Monday, Walesa praised the role of communist East Europe's first independent trade union in changing Poland and ending the post-1945 division of Europe. Representati
Source: NYT
August 30, 2005
The Gulf Coast has always been vulnerable to coastal storms, but over the years people have made things worse, particularly in Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina struck yesterday. Since the 18th century, when French colonial administrators required land claimants to establish ownership by building levees along bayous, streams and rivers, people have been trying to dominate the region's landscape and the forces of its nature. As long as people could control floods, they could
Source: WP
August 28, 2005
Historians have teamed up with politicians to commemorate the War of 1812, parts of which were fought up and down the Chesapeake Bay. Congress is considering legislation that would designate as a national historic trail a 290-mile path winding through Virginia, Maryland and the District to link the war's battle sites. The Star-Spangled Banner Trail would begin in Southern Maryland near St. Leonard Creek and loop up to such sites as Alexandria, Washington, Bladensburg and Bal
Source: WP
August 30, 2005
Despite what he looks like on the dollar bill, it turns out George Washington may have been kind of hot. For the first time, it's possible to see what the teenage Washington probably looked like, and though at this stage he is nude and hairless, he will be fully realized in October 2006 when he goes on display at Mount Vernon Estate and Gardens. Young George will be a life-size figure with auburn hair and gray-blue eyes, perhaps propping his foot on a stump in a manly fashion as he scans the hor
Source: Sacramental Bee
August 28, 2005
As his approval numbers sink during these dog days of August, President Bush might take solace by reflecting on the roller-coaster ride through history taken by one of his predecessors. In April 1951, shortly after he removed Gen. Douglas MacArthur from command of U.S. troops in Korea, Harry Truman hit an all-time low in presidential popularity: Only 23 percent of his countrymen approved of the Missourian's job performance. Yet today, Truman regularly shows up as a top 10 president in scholarly
Source: Guardian
August 28, 2005
A CODE-BREAKING book which aims to change the image of William Shakespeare and reveal him as a subversive who embedded dangerous political messages in his work is to be published in Britain. Far from being an ambitious entertainer who played down his Catholic roots under a repressive Elizabethan regime, Shakespeare took deliberate risks each time he took up his quill, according to Clare Asquith's new book Shadowplay.She argues that the plays and poems are a network of
