Breaking News
Highlights
- Vietnam Vet Stages Hunger Strike in Front of White House to Raise Awareness About PTSD
- 'Global warming' and '9/11': words that define the decade
- Klan Enters Debate Over Song at Ole Miss
- Senior counsel to 9-11 Commission claims the government sanitized the record to make itself look good
- Adolf Hitler is 'German Mussolini' warns 1924 French document
- Will a New Bear Market Bring Eugenics Movement Back? New Study from Socionomics Institute Says It's Happened in the Past, Could Happen Again
- New York Times Washington correspondent Jodi Kantor to write book on Obamas
- Sweden sends back Maori remains
- Obama confronts history on Great Wall of China
- Watergate 'Gap' Mystery to be Solved?
WEEK OF AUGUST 28, 2006
United States, Cyprus Extend Protections for Byzantine Treasures
Greece displays returned Getty antiquities, vows to seek more
Rumsfeld Says War Critics Haven’t Learned Lessons of History
WEEK OF AUGUST 21, 2006
Bush and Saddam Should Both Stand Trial, Says Nuremberg Prosecutor
Louisiana Bus Driver Accused of Forcing Black Students to Back of Bus
Hurricane Archive Collects over 5000 Online Stories and Images
Pottery shard unearths North America’s first French settlement
This Cuban woman toiled as a man in the Civil War. So why has no one heard of her?
A Decade After Welfare Overhaul, a Shift in Policy and Perception
Cold War Missiles Target of Blackout: Documents Altered To Conceal Data
Harvard to Get Paintings by Artist Controversially Linked to Ripper
Jewish Groups Implored to withdraw Invitations to Mel Gibson
Hundreds gather to celebrate the start of a movement that culminated in the creation of the NAACP
As Files on Nazi POWs Are Declassified, Their Interrogators Break Their Silence
WEEK OF AUGUST 14, 2006
Lydia, Duchess of Bedford, 88, Pioneer in Noble-Tourism, Dies
Park Service is 1 step closer to creating Heritage Area in state
Swiss high court rejects Gypsy Holocaust suit versus IBM, cites time limit
Review of Landmark Study Finds Fewer Vietnam Veterans With Post-Traumatic Stress
The black sheep of the family? The rise and fall of Hitler's scouse nephew
'Must do' history - Compulsory lessons needed, says minister (Australia)
Restore History as a subject or funding is history (Australia)
Hundreds of soldiers shot for 'cowardice' to be pardoned (UK)
Neolithic stone carving of Big Dipper discovered in northwest China
WA Gov. Gregoire, tribe announce settlement over Indian burial site
Archaeologists Challenge Link Between Dead Sea Scrolls and Ancient Sect
Petition against destruction of cultural landmarks in Lebanon and Israel
NYT editorializes against new visitor center to "interpret" the Vietnam War
Ancient Britons' war paint drafted in to help battle against disease
Discovery of richest undisturbed cache of dinosaur fossils in North America
Google Wants to Digitize Every Book. Publishers Say Read the Fine Print First.
Drought unearths treasure trove of ancient monuments (Wales)
ARCHAEOLOGISTS unearthed a hidden medieval settlement in Horsham town centre this week.
Nobel Prize Winner Grass Under Fire for Belated SS Confession
WEEK OF AUGUST 7, 2006
Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials as Clouds from the Past Hover
An Antiwar Campaign That Takes a Page From the G.O.P. Playbook
September 11 -- what year? 30 percent of Americans don't know
Museums Establish Guidelines for Treatment of Sacred Objects
Echoes of Early Design to Use Chemicals to Blow Up Airliners
Army Engineers Taste History, Humility as They Explore the Ziggurat of Ur
Qualifications of Public Secondary School History Teachers, 1999–2000
France's new Stonehenge: Secrets of a neolithic time machine
John Howard's Australian History Summit is bound to be heated
Organization Celebrates South Carolina's African American Civil War and Reconstruction Period Heroes
Thieves steal medals awarded to famous Indian Civil War hero
Conservative website blasts Episcopal leader for apologizing for Hiroshima
Actor playing Churchill in London can't smoke cigar on stage, officials warn
Victorian jokes reveal history of humour - but we are not amused
Dig turning up information on famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass
Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities in Vietnam went far beyond My Lai
WEEK OF JULY 31, 2006
Cuban Americans will have to craft a new identity if the island turns democratic
9/11 Commissioners Say They Went Easy on Giuliani to Avoid Public’s Anger
U.S. denies misuse of Law Regarding Those Who 'Espoused Terrorism'
Group blasts Arizona for requiring flags in every classroom but not history
Long-forgotten papers may offer a new road map for Middle East peace
The presidential pen and signing statements: History makes a statement
Group pushing for American History requirement for college graduation
California to establish a Hall of Fame, Disney, Reagan and Alice Walker among 1st inductees
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Bush compares Islamic radicals to Nazis and communists
Source: AP (8-31-06)
President Bush on Thursday predicted victory in the war on terror at a time of increasing public anxiety at home, likening the struggle against Islamic fundamentalism with the fight against Nazis and communists.
United States, Cyprus Extend Protections for Byzantine Treasures
Source: US State Department (8-31-06)
The United States and Cyprus have agreed to extend a 2002 bilateral agreement and to continue imposing import restrictions on a range of Byzantine treasures, such as priceless frescoes and floor mosaics, to protect them from pillaging.
Greece displays returned Getty antiquities, vows to seek more
Source: AP (8-31-06)
Greek officials vowed to step up their fight to reclaim its plundered ancient heritage after taking delivery Thursday of two ancient sculptures returned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Rumsfeld Says War Critics Haven’t Learned Lessons of History
Source: NYT (8-30-06)
SALT LAKE CITY, Aug. 29 — Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday that critics of the war in Iraq and the campaign against terror groups “seem not to have learned history’s lessons,” and he alluded to those in the 1930’s who advocated appeasing Nazi Germany.
In a speech to thousands of veterans at the American Legion’s annual convention here, Mr. Rumsfeld sharpened his rebuttal of critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy, some of whom have called for phased withdrawal of United States forces or partitioning of the country.
Comparing terrorist groups to a “new type of fascism,” Mr. Rumsfeld said, “With the growing lethality and the increasing availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased?”
It was the second unusually combative speech by Mr. Rumsfeld to a veterans group in two days and appeared to be part of a concerted administration effort to address criticism of the war’s conduct.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Thatcher and Attlee voted best PMs
Source: India Daily (8-29-06)
Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher and Clement Attlee, whose post-war government presided over the partition of the sub-continent and India's independence, have been named the best British prime ministers of the 20th century.
Sunday, August 27, 2006
Women and History Blogging
Source: Cliopatria (blog) (8-27-06)
A roundup of women blogging history, under their own names and pseudonymously, by Ralph Luker.
Bush and Saddam Should Both Stand Trial, Says Nuremberg Prosecutor
Source: OneWorld US (website) (8-27-06)
SAN FRANCISCO, Aug 25 (OneWorld) - A chief prosecutor of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg has said George W. Bush should be tried for war crimes along with Saddam Hussein. Benjamin Ferencz, who secured convictions for 22 Nazi officers for their work in orchestrating the death squads that killed more than 1 million people, told OneWorld both Bush and Saddam should be tried for starting "aggressive" wars--Saddam for his 1990 attack on Kuwait and Bush for his 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"Nuremberg declared that aggressive war is the supreme international crime," the 87-year-old Ferencz told OneWorld from his home in New York. He said the United Nations charter, which was written after the carnage of World War II, contains a provision that no nation can use armed force without the permission of the UN Security Council.
Ferencz said that after Nuremberg the international community realized that every war results in violations by both sides, meaning the primary objective should be preventing any war from occurring in the first place.
He said the atrocities of the Iraq war--from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the massacre of dozens of civilians by U.S. forces in Haditha to the high number of civilian casualties caused by insurgent car bombs--were highly predictable at the start of the war.
Friday, August 25, 2006
Nanjing judgment opens new Sino-Japanese front
Source: Guardian (London) (8-23-06)
A Chinese court has ordered two Japanese historians to pay damages of 1.6m yuan (£110,000) to a survivor of the Nanjing massacre after they accused her of fabricating her account of the 1937 atrocity.
Historians downgrade Battle of Britain
Source: Guardian (London) (8-24-06)
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few," said Winston Churchill in praise of the pilots who took part in the Battle of Britain. But as the 66th anniversary of the firefight in the skies approaches, some of the country's top military historians have claimed it was the Royal Navy rather than the RAF that saved Britain from invasion by the Germans in the autumn of 1940.
UC to Debut Free Online State History Database
Source: Daily Californian (8-25-06)
The UC system announced Monday that it has launched a Web site offering free access to more than 150,000 images, documents and primary source materials relating to California's history and culture.
‘Destroyed’ FBI Puerto Rico Files Prompt Cover-up Charges
Source: News Standard (Syracuse) (8-25-06)
In the wake of an activist’s death at the hands of FBI operatives, the agency’s revelation that it may have destroyed records on the independence movement in Puerto Rico has aggravated tensions over the government’s presence on the island.
Rethinking Easter Island
Source: American Scientist Online (8-25-06)
Every year, thousands of tourists from around the world take a long flight across the South Pacific to see the famous stone statues of Easter Island. Since 1722, when the first Europeans arrived, these megalithic figures, or moai, have intrigued visitors. Interest in how these artifacts were built and moved led to another puzzling question: What happened to the people who created them?
In the prevailing account of the island's past, the native inhabitants—who refer to themselves as the Rapanui and to the island as Rapa Nui—once had a large and thriving society, but they doomed themselves by degrading their environment. According to this version of events, a small group of Polynesian settlers arrived around 800 to 900 A.D., and the island's population grew slowly at first. Around 1200 A.D., their growing numbers and an obsession with building moai led to increased pressure on the environment. By the end of the 17th century, the Rapanui had deforested the island, triggering war, famine and cultural collapse.
Jared Diamond, a geographer and physiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, has used Rapa Nui as a parable of the dangers of environmental destruction. "In just a few centuries," he wrote in a 1995 article for Discover magazine, "the people of Easter Island wiped out their forest, drove their plants and animals to extinction, and saw their complex society spiral into chaos and cannibalism. Are we about to follow their lead?" In his 2005 book Collapse, Diamond described Rapa Nui as "the clearest example of a society that destroyed itself by overexploiting its own resources."
Louisiana Bus Driver Accused of Forcing Black Students to Back of Bus
Source: CNN.com (8-25-06)
A Louisiana school district suspended a white bus driver while it investigates complaints that she ordered nine black children to sit at the back of the bus.
...
Two mothers, both black, sparked the investigation with a complaint on Monday that their children and the other black children had been ordered to sit in two rows of seats in the rear of the bus.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Credit debt in historical context
Source: Robert J. Samuelson, WaPo (8-24-06)
The origins of today's credit culture date to the 1920s and the advent of installment lending for cars and appliances (stoves, refrigerators, radios), says economist Martha Olney, author of "Buy Now, Pay Later." Attitudes changed. In the 19th century, "it was thought that only irresponsible families bought on credit," she says. "By the 1920s, it was only foolish families that didn't buy on credit and use it while they were paying for it." In the mid-1920s, 60 to 70 percent of cars were sold on one- to two-year loans.
After World War II credit became part of the mass market. In 1958 Bank of America introduced a credit card that in 1976 was renamed Visa. The combination of aggressive merchandising and government laws prohibiting racial and ethnic discrimination in lending led to a huge expansion of borrowers. One reaction to the anti-discrimination laws was the use of impersonalized, computer-driven credit scores to determine loan eligibility. Now U.S. businesses buy 10 billion FICO scores annually.
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Cincinnati Historian Tolzmann found guilty of plagiarism
Source: Ralph Luker (blog) (8-23-06)
An internal investigating committee at the University of Cincinnati has found Don Heinrich Tolzmann guilty of plagiarism in his book, The German-American Experience. After reviewing charges first made three years ago on H-Ethnic, the committee has recommended that Tolzmann be dismissed as a faculty member in the University's German Studies Department and as director of its German-American Studies Program. Tolzmann promises to meet with University officials in mid-September about the matter and to fight the charges vigorously. Thanks to David Merkowitz for the tip.
American history museum to close for 2-year face-lift
Source: Washington Times (8-23-06)
For tourists and residents who enjoy lolling among the trinkets and treasures of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, the building's closure next month for a two-year renovation may be a disappointment.
But curators say history buffs still can enjoy objects which range from "the famous to the unexpected" when officials open a temporary exhibit Nov. 17 at the National Air and Space Museum.
Culloden defeat should be celebrated, says historian
Source: Times (London) (8-20-06)
Bonnie Prince Charlie’s defeat at Culloden should be a cause for national celebration instead of collective wailing and gnashing of teeth, one of Britain’s leading historians has advised Scots.
Aztecs butchered, ate Spanish invaders
Source: CNN (8-23-06)
Skeletons found at an unearthed site in Mexico show Aztecs captured, ritually sacrificed and partially ate several hundred people traveling with invading Spanish forces in 1520.
Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Report Reignites Feud Over ‘Little People of Flores’
Source: NYT (8-22-06)
After the 18,000-year-old bones of diminutive people were found on the Indonesian island of Flores, the discoverers announced two years ago that these were remains of a previously unknown species of the ancestral human family. They gave it the name Homo floresiensis.
Hurricane Archive Collects over 5000 Online Stories and Images
Source: Press Release--Hurricane Archive (8-15-06)
NEW ORLEANS, August 15, 2006-Courtney Giarrusso and her family followed a Crescent City tradition and decided to ride out Hurricane Katrina on the top floors of the Fairmont Hotel in downtown New Orleans. Little did they know that the levee flooding would trap them in the hotel and later destroy their Lakeview home, which was designed to accommodate Courtney’s needs as a quadriplegic. Since she returned to New Orleans in December, Courtney has encountered many more challenges, including finding a permanent health care attendant and finishing college.
Giarrusso’s accounts are just one example of the compelling stories and images collected in the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) http://www.hurricanearchive.org from those who lived through the hurricanes.
Pottery shard unearths North America’s first French settlement
Source: Ottawa Citizen (8-22-06)
One of the greatest archeological mysteries in Canadian history — the precise whereabouts of French explorer Jacques Cartier’s 1541 settlement near present-day Quebec City — has been solved after experts matched the shard of a broken plate found at suburban Cap Rouge with an identical, 465-year-old porcelain treasure held by the famed Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, Russia.
The startling discovery of Cartier’s short-lived Fort Charlesbourg-Royal, announced Friday by Quebec Premier Jean Charest and quickly hailed as the most important find in Canada since a 1,000-year-old Viking village was unearthed in northern Newfoundland in the early 1960s, is expected to shed light on many lingering questions about what exactly happened to North America’s earliest French settlement.
The fort was built during Cartier’s third and last voyage to Canada where the Cap Rouge River runs into the St. Lawrence.
To a Presidential Notion: Sorry, Mr. Bush, but No
Source: NYT (8-22-06)
“I may be the only person, the only presidential candidate who never carried the state in which he was born,” President Bush said Monday.
Uh, no, Mr. President. There have been quite a few, actually. Some are known only to historians, while others are famous. You might even call one a household name, Mr. President, depending on which household.
This Cuban woman toiled as a man in the Civil War. So why has no one heard of her?
Source: Boston Globe (8-22-06)
Loreta Janeta Velazquez sounded like a mythical figure: a Cuban-born woman raised in New Orleans, where she masqueraded as a male soldier and fought in the Civil War. With a fake mustache, beard, and a soldier's uniform, the Latina enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1861 as Lieutenant Harry T. Buford , without her husband's knowledge.
``When I heard about Loreta, I was like, ` Why would a Cuban woman join the Confederacy? What is a Velazquez doing in 19th - century America?' " says Maria Agui Carter , a filmmaker and former producer for WGBH-TV (Channel 2).
That intrigue led Carter on a historical and personal journey into the life of this un- Southern belle.
Monday, August 21, 2006
A Decade After Welfare Overhaul, a Shift in Policy and Perception
Source: NYT (8-21-06)
Ten years after a Republican Congress collaborated with a Democratic president to overhaul the nation’s welfare system, the implications are still rippling through policy and politics.
The law, which reversed six decades of social welfare policy and ended the idea of free cash handouts for the poor, was widely seen as a victory for conservative ideas. When it was passed, some opponents offered dire predictions that the law would make things worse for the poor. But the number of people on welfare has plunged to 4.4 million, down 60 percent. Employment of single mothers is up. Child support collections have nearly doubled.
Montreal Gazette: Blanket pardons are revisionism
Source: Montreal Gazette (8-21-06)
Doesn't the British government have anything more pressing to attend to? It plans to make the wrong-headed and pointless gesture of giving pardons to 306 British and Commonwealth soldiers executed for desertion or cowardice in the First World War.
The government of Britain has promised to consult Canada, because 23 of those on the list were Canadians. Greg Thompson, our veterans affairs minister, should do the same thing his Liberal predecessor Ron Duhamel did in 2001, the last time this idea surfaced - reject it. (Duhamel did have Ottawa issue an apology.)
British Defence Secretary Des Browne appears to have been stampeded after media attention to one British case. It is true that many of those executed for cowardice or desertion in the First World War would today be seen as mental-health cases, not cowards or traitors.
As recently as the Second World War, the official term for some who snapped under the mental pressure of real or anticipated combat was "lack of moral fibre." Today we speak of "post-traumatic stress disorder" and know that combat can be deeply damaging even for those without a scratch: World war veterans showed high rates of social problems, from alcoholism to spousal abuse to suicide.
But while a few men broke and ran in th First World War, many others did not. Experts say the main reason soldiers risk their lives is not patriotic zeal nor to protect their families at home, but rather their sense of loyalty to their squad-mates.
PM Howard accused of bullying on history (Australia)
Source: Australian (8-21-06)
THE states are continuing to claim the Howard Government is bullying them into reinstating traditional history teaching in schools, despite having been officially invited to contribute to last week's history summit in Canberra.
The Australian has learned that federal Education Minister Julie Bishop wrote to all states and territories last month to seek their input to the summit.
''I am very willing to work with the states and territories ... to further strengthen the place of history in the Australian classroom,'' Ms Bishop said in her letter.
As 2nd Hussein Trial Starts, Kurds Are Fixated
Source: NYT (8-21-06)
Facing a charge of genocide for trying to annihilate Iraq’s Kurdish minority, Saddam Hussein defiantly refused to enter a plea as his second trial began today, and insisted that he was still president of the country.
Mr. Hussein sat stone-faced in a courtroom in the fortified Green Zone of Baghdad, listening as prosecutors gave a detailed account of how Mr. Hussein and six co-defendants embarked on an eight-stage military campaign in 1988 to eliminate the Kurds from swaths of their mountainous homeland in northern Iraq. Prosecutors said the campaign, called Anfal, killed at least 50,000 Kurds and resulted in the destruction of 2,000 villages.
Here in Iraqi Kurdistan, people sat in cafes, homes and offices fixated to the television screen, watching as the former dictator and some of his most feared aides underwent questioning before black-robed judges. On a main thoroughfare in downtown Sulaimaniya, young men hung up a black banner bearing Mr. Hussein’s face and slogans saying that the voices of the dead would finally be heard.
Vast Smithsonian archive of photographs goes online
Source: Wa Po (8-20-06)
Spread across the Smithsonian's 18 museums, nine research centers and the National Zoo are 13 million photographs. In the hallways and laboratories are about 700 collections of photos. Harnessing them into a form that gives researchers and the public some access has long been a goal for Smithsonian caretakers.
But like a lot of things at the Smithsonian, you had to know where to go to find what you were looking for. Some photos were locked away in the researchers' storehouses.
Tomorrow, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative is launching an electronic means of looking at a small part of this vast collection. A Web site, http://www.spi.si.edu/ , will provide access to 1,800 digital images, the work of 100 photographers, who used 50 different processes.
Famed Iwo Jima photographer dead at 94
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (8-21-06)
Retired Chronicle photographer Joe Rosenthal, who won the Pulitzer Prize and international acclaim for his soul-stirring picture of the World War II flag-raising on Iwo Jima, died Sunday in Novato.
Rosenthal, 94, retired from The Chronicle in 1981 after a distinguished 35-year career and many professional honors, but the flag-raising picture was his masterpiece for which he will always be remembered.
The Pulitzer Committee in 1945 described the photo as "depicting one of the war's great moments," a "frozen flash of history."
Rosenthal, born Oct. 9, 1911, in Washington, D.C., was found dead at about 10:45 a.m. in his bed at his home in the Atria Tamalpais Creek assisted living center.
Cold War Missiles Target of Blackout: Documents Altered To Conceal Data
Source: Wa Po (8-21-06)
The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive. The archive is a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.
Harvard to Get Paintings by Artist Controversially Linked to Ripper
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (8-21-06)
The crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has promised to donate 82 works by the English Impressionist painter Walter Sickert to Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, The Art Newspaper reports. The collection, which the British newspaper says is worth millions of dollars, was assembled while Ms. Cornwell was writing a controversial book in which she concludes that Sickert was Jack the Ripper. The book, Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, was published in 2002.
Hawaii shipwreck discovery revives unusual survival tale
Source: CDNN (8-20-06)
The ocean has revealed a secret 120 years old on the most remote island in the Hawaiian chain. In July, state workers happened upon the wreck of the full-rigged ship Dunotter Castle, vintage Falls of Clyde, in 25 feet of crystal clear water off Kure Atoll, the last island beyond Midway.
The wreck made headlines in 1886 after seven survivors sailed 52 days and 1,200 miles in an open boat and were picked up off Kaua'i. A voyage to rescue crew members remaining on Kure set out the next day via the steamer Wai'ale'ale.
King Kalakaua himself came down to see the Wai'ale'ale off. The ship carried an artist, lumber to install a shelter with water catchment for future castaways on Kure, and a flag to claim the island for the kingdom.
Today, underwater archaeologist Hans Van Tilburg, who was at Kure with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, says Dunotter Castle is the best-preserved wreck of a 19th-century ship he's ever seen.
Prehistoric tools, weapons discovered in Peruvian Andes
Source: Middle East Times (8-21-06)
A team of Peruvian and US archaeologists have discovered prehistoric stone tools and weapons some 10,000 years old in an Andean town, the National Institute of Culture announced Friday.
Stone axes, spearheads, and weapons were found in the main square of San Pedro de Chavin de Huantar, an Andean town some 400 kilometers (250 miles) north of Lima, officials said.
"This discovery represents exceptional evidence of the presence of inhabitants in the Pleistocene era," the Institute said in a statement.
The Pleistocene went from about 1.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago, when the last ice age ended.
Jewish Groups Implored to withdraw Invitations to Mel Gibson
Source: Press Release -- The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies (8-21-06)
In the wake of the new disclosure that Mel Gibson has been involved with a Holocaust-denial group in Australia, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies is urging Jewish and other organizations that recently extended speaking invitations to Gibson to withdraw them.
Wyman Institute director Dr. Rafael Medoff said: "Holocaust-denial is a form of antisemitism, and Gibson's involvement with Holocaust-deniers in Australia indicates that his apology for his recent antisemitic outburst was not sincere. Gibson seems to be hiding a closet full of extremist and antisemitic connections. Under these circumstances, those groups which sought reconciliation and invited him to speak should cancel those invitations."
Who You Gonna Call?
Source: Time (8-6-06)
It's not hard to understand the vogue for spiritualism that developed in the late 19th century. With religion under serious challenge from science, the afterlife--which religion affirmed and science scoffed at--became a subject of nervous fascination. Respectable people held parlor séances. Celebrity spiritualists like D.D. Home even made house calls. In 1869 three witnesses in a London residence reported that Home levitated, floated out a window and drifted back in through the window of another room.
It was all spine-tingling fun. But was any of it real? A handful of scientists and scholars brave enough to risk their reputation entered the field to find out. In her fascinating new history, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death (Penguin; 370 pages), Deborah Blum, a Pulitzer prizewinning science reporter, tells the story of their decades-long effort to establish whether supernatural forces were more than sideshow illusions. They never came to firm conclusions, but their struggle to connect the dots makes for a captivating and even poignant tale.
Hundreds gather to celebrate the start of a movement that culminated in the creation of the NAACP
Source: Baltimore Sun (8-20-06)
Harpers Ferry, W.Va -- Retracing early path of civil rights group
The elderly woman sat in the shade, painstakingly penning her autograph onto yet another program.
Precisely 100 hundred years ago, in almost the exact spot, her grandfather, W.E.B. Du Bois, spoke words that electrified the civil rights movement at a historic meeting that many people have never heard of.
"We will not be satisfied to take one jot or tittle less than our full manhood rights," Du Bois Irvin's grandfather told a small but influential group of African-Americans who called themselves the Niagara Movement. "We claim for ourselves every single right that belongs to a freeborn American ... and until we get these rights, we will never cease to protest and assail the ears of America."
The 1906 meeting at what is now Harpers Ferry National Historical Park inspired those in attendance to aggressively fight for equality and led to the formation a few years later of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Hundreds gathered at the park on the Potomac River this weekend for a four-day commemoration, which ends today, of the Niagara Movement.
Yesterday, Irvin and other Niagara descendants signed autographs, posed for pictures and did their best to touch and educate and inspire a new generation.
"They got together, and they were willing to risk their homes and their money and their stature to lift up African-Americans," said William Hart, a Washington software company CEO whose great-grandfather, William Henry Harrison Hart, was one of the Niagara founders. He calls the work of his great-grandfather "one of the lost and hidden details of the civil rights movement."
"We need to educate the community more on what these heroes did for us and for American liberty."
Du Bois planted the seed for the movement in 1905 when he asked a select group to meet him in Buffalo, N.Y., to brainstorm ways to seize civil rights for blacks.
The 29 men, denied a place to meet in Buffalo, ended up in Ontario, from which the Niagara Movement got its name. A year later, the group, more than doubled in size and with women this time, reconvened at Harpers Ferry, where in 1859 militant abolitionist John Brown raided a federal arsenal, hoping to arm slaves. His plan was thwarted, and he was convicted of treason and hanged.
The 1906 meeting concluded Aug. 19 with Du Bois' fiery speech. The group broke up a few years later when many of its members began the NAACP.
In 1906, William Wesley's grandmother, Louisa Jackson Dennis, taught at Storer College, the Harpers Ferry school for former slaves. Believing she wouldn't have missed the Niagara meeting at her doorstep, Wesley strolled through the event yesterday on something of a personal journey.
As Files on Nazi POWs Are Declassified, Their Interrogators Break Their Silence
Source: Wa Po (8-20-06)
For more than 60 years, they kept their military secrets locked deep inside and lived quiet lives as account executives, college professors, business consultants and the like.
The brotherhood of P.O. Box 1142 enjoyed no homecoming parades, no VFW reunions, no embroidered ball caps and no regaling of wartime stories to grandchildren sitting on their knees.
Almost no one, not even their wives, in many cases, knew the place in history held by the men of Fort Hunt, alluded to during World War II only by a mailing address that was its code name.
But the declassification of thousands of military documents and the dogged persistence of Brandon Bies, a bookish park ranger determined to record this furtive piece of history, is bringing the men of P.O. Box 1142 out of the shadows.
Sunday, August 20, 2006
Documents show troops who reported abuse in Vietnam were discredited even as the military was finding evidence of worse
Source: Deborah Nelson and Nick Turse in the LA Times (8-20-06)
In early 1973, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams received some bad news from the service's chief of criminal investigations.
An internal inquiry had confirmed an officer's widely publicized charge that members of the 173rd Airborne Brigade had tortured detainees in Vietnam.
But there was a silver lining: Investigators had also compiled a 53-page catalog of alleged discrepancies in retired Lt. Col. Anthony B. Herbert's public accounts of his war experiences.
"This package … provides sufficient material to impeach this man's credibility; should this need arise, I volunteer for the task," wrote Col. Henry H. Tufts, commander of the Army's Criminal Investigation Division.
Now, declassified records show that while the Army was working energetically to discredit Herbert, military investigators were uncovering torture and mistreatment that went well beyond what he had described.
The abuses were not made public, and few of the wrongdoers were punished.
Lydia, Duchess of Bedford, 88, Pioneer in Noble-Tourism, Dies
Source: NYT (8-20-06)
Lydia, Duchess of Bedford, an English aristocrat who helped transform Woburn Abbey, her second husband’s ancestral home in Bedfordshire, into a pioneering and satisfyingly lucrative example of blueblood tourism, died July 25 in Chertsey, Surrey, England. She was 88.
Her death came after she was injured in a fall, said Paul de Fraine, personal assistant to the present duke.
After inheriting Woburn Abbey in 1953, with its staggering estate taxes and annual heating bills of $14,000, Ian Russell, 13th Duke of Bedford, a former newspaper reporter and rent collector, decided to make the dilapidated property pay for itself by reinventing it as a tourist attraction. It was not easy; half the building had been demolished because of dry rot.
The estate, with more than 10,000 acres of land, had been in the Russell family since 1547, and when the new duke and duchess, who had been farming in South Africa, were called home to do their dynastic duty, they literally rolled up their sleeves and washed antique porcelain dinner services and dusted off the paintings by Canaletto, Landseer and Van Dyck.
Six months of cleaning later, Woburn Abbey’s doors were opened to the public in 1954. The entrance fee was a half-crown, about 35 cents; it is now £10.50, about $20.
Argentina’s Dictatorship Stands Trial
Source: NYT (8-20-06)
LA PLATA, Argentina, Aug. 14 — The horrific events under a military dictatorship — murders, kidnappings, torture, rapes, the abduction and sale of infants — had gone unpunished for nearly 30 years. But last year Argentina’s Supreme Court overturned a pair of amnesty laws, and now the trials of military and police officials accused of human rights violations are finally under way.
What Bush Is Reading
Source: NYT (8-20-06)
Two books on Lincoln and one on polio. Oh, and a Camus novel. It was “The Stranger” that caught everyone’s attention when the White House told of the books that President Bush was taking to Texas on his ranch vacation. Last year, he toted books about a czar, a plague and salt — no French philosophers.
Swiping at Industry From Atop the Stump
Source: NYT (8-20-06)
BUSINESS bashing by politicians in America has a long history, including rhetoric far more inflammatory than the denunciations being directed at Wal-Mart this year by some Democrats, who sometimes sound as if they are running against the company instead of another politician.
A NEW CAMPAIGN Protesters against Wal-Mart in Illinois this summer objected to the health care coverage provided to workers.
Wal-Mart is under attack for paying too little, providing benefits that are too small and even exploiting illegal immigrants. Laws have been written with Wal-Mart in mind, and more are being proposed.
The company may not appreciate the honor, but its place in the political debate reflects its revolutionary effect on the American economy.
Minorities seek history class changes
Source: Yahoo (8-20-06)
American students often get the impression from history classes that the British got here first, settling Jamestown, Va., in 1607. They hear about how white Northerners freed the black slaves, how Asians came in the mid-1800s to build Western railroads.
The lessons have left out a lot.
Forty-two years before Jamestown, Spaniards and American Indians lived in St. Augustine, Fla. At least several thousand Latinos and nearly 200,000 black soldiers fought in the Civil War. And Asian-Americans had been living in California and Louisiana since the 1700s.
Now, more of these and other lesser-known facts about American minorities are getting more attention. The main reason is the nation's growing diversity.
Friday, August 18, 2006
Blackboard jumble yields schools' past (Maryland)
Source: Baltimore Sun (8-13-06)
With its pillars and stone walls on a prominent hilltop in Ellicott City, the Patapsco Female Institute was once a 19th-century vision of a Greek temple: an academy to educate and refine young ladies and "future mothers."
But in southern Anne Arundel County, a humble, even homely one-room structure built several decades later was all the Nutwell School could offer its students.
Gunter Grass says he met the Pope as POW in 1945
Source: freeforumzone (8-15-06)
Two German teenagers meet each other at a POW camp among tens of thousands of fellow soldiers rounded up by the Allies at the end of the Second World War. One ends up being Germany's most celebrated postwar writer and 1999 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, and the other becomes Pope.
Here is the translation of a most interesting story from AGI, an Italian news agency...
The Archives Sleuth Had a Secret
Source: Wa Po (8-18-06)
Amateur historian Matthew M. Aid made news this spring by exposing a secret federal program to remove thousands of public documents from the National Archives. It turns out that Aid harbored a secret of his own.
Twenty-one years ago, while serving as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Air Force in England, Aid was court-martialed for unauthorized possession of classified information and impersonating an officer, according to Air Force documents. He received a bad-conduct discharge and was imprisoned for just over a year, he confirmed in an interview Monday.
Romania's elite rush to confess links to Securitate
Source: Telegraph (UK) (8-18-06)
ROMANIA'S leading political and media figures are rushing to confess that they were informers for the feared Securitate as the nation prepares for the files of the old secret police to be opened.
Several well-known politicians and journalists in recent days have admitted co-operating with the Securitate - desperate to pre-empt disclosures that would reveal their role as spies for the former Communist regime.
MP asks for WWII Scottish pardons (UK)
Source: BBC (8-17-06)
An MP is asking the UK Government to investigate pardoning soldiers who took part in the biggest mutiny of WWII, BBC Scotland has learned.
Anne Begg, who represents Aberdeen South, believes almost 200 Scottish soldiers who refused orders at Salerno in Italy in 1943 were not cowards.
Every man involved would have been court martialled, imprisoned and some were sentenced to execution.
Ms Begg spoke out after it emerged shot WWI soldiers would be pardoned.
The infamous WWII incident happened when hundreds of soldiers lined up for parade in a field in southern Italy.
They were to reinforce the US Army which was in a battle at the city of Salerno.
Lost diary found in charity shop (UK)
Source: BBC (8-17-06)
A lost diary documenting the last days of a famous Scottish physician has been discovered in a second hand bookshop.
The diary depicts the life of Sir James Young Simpson, who discovered the anaesthetic properties of chloroform in Edinburgh in the 19th Century.
It was handed in to the Shelter bookshop in the Stockbridge area of the city by an anonymous donor.
Park Service is 1 step closer to creating Heritage Area in state
Source: Boston Globe (7-25-06)
A National Park Service advisory panel will recommend today that the agency be given the power to designate National Heritage Areas without congressional approval, a move that could give the green light to long-delayed plans for a Heritage Area west of Boston.
Recognition as a National Heritage Area -- a geographic area of national historical significance that qualifies for millions of dollars in federal grants -- requires an act of Congress, a process that preservation groups say is often cumbersome and has led to a backup of about 20 areas waiting for federal approval.
The proposed ``Freedom's Way" region in New England covers an area of 45 towns in Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire that were hotbeds of support for Patriot forces against the British during the American Revolution, as well as for the abolition of slavery and women's suffrage during the 19th century.
Portrait of Mary Queen of Scots rediscovered
Source: cronaca (8-17-06)
A painting of Mary Queen of Scots, one of only two thought to have been made in her lifetime, has been discovered - in the National Portrait Gallery's very own store. The portrait was bought for £50 by the gallery in 1916 at Christie's. But later it was written off as an 18th century fake and was left to gather dust.
Columbus, the tyrant
Source: Guardian (8-7-06)
Christopher Columbus, the man credited with discovering the Americas, was a greedy and vindictive tyrant who saved some of his most violent punishments for his own followers, according to a document uncovered by Spanish historians.
As governor and viceroy of the Indies, Columbus imposed iron discipline on the first Spanish colony in the Americas, in what is now the Caribbean country of Dominican Republic. Punishments included cutting off people's ears and noses, parading women naked through the streets and selling them into slavery."Columbus' government was characterised by a form of tyranny," Consuelo Varela, a Spanish historian who has seen the document, told journalists.
One man caught stealing corn had his nose and ears cut off, was placed in shackles and was then auctioned off as a slave. A woman who dared to suggest that Columbus was of lowly birth was punished by his brother Bartolomé, who had also travelled to the Caribbean. She was stripped naked and paraded around the colony on the back of a mule.
Lost Maltese catacomb rediscovered
Source: cronaca (8-16-06)
After almost 50 years, one of Malta’s most intriguing Roman catacombs has been re-discovered by officers of the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage within a traffic roundabout close to the Malta International Airport on Friday.
The important archaeological discovery was made at Hal Resqun, a site on the outskirts of Gudja. The discovery consists of a Roman Catacomb which had been originally excavated by Sir Temistocles Zammit in 1912. However since then the catacomb has been completely obliterated under a wave of debris and asphalt.
Read the rest here.
Swiss high court rejects Gypsy Holocaust suit versus IBM, cites time limit
Source: Business Week (8-18-06)
Switzerland's supreme court dismissed a lawsuit accusing International Business Machines Corp. of aiding the Nazi Holocaust because too much time has elapsed, the Gypsy organization that filed the case said Friday.
Gypsy International Recognition and Compensation Action said it had been given notice of the decision by the Federal Tribunal in Lausanne that the statute of limitations applied to the case. It said the court's explanation would be released in several weeks.
The organization said the ruling ends the legal case before any study of the merits of the case.
Review of Landmark Study Finds Fewer Vietnam Veterans With Post-Traumatic Stress
Source: NYT (8-18-06)
Far fewer Vietnam veterans suffered from post-traumatic stress as a result of their wartime service than previously thought, researchers are reporting today, in a finding that could have lasting consequences for the understanding of combat stress, as well as for the estimates of the mental health fallout from the Iraq war.
The report, published in the journal Science and viewed by experts as authoritative, found that 18.7 percent of Vietnam veterans developed a diagnosable stress disorder that could be linked to a war event at some point in their lives, well under the previous benchmark number of 30.9 percent. And while the earlier analysis found that for 15.2 percent of the veterans the symptoms continued to be disabling at the time they were examined, the new study put that figure at 9.1 percent.
Postmark Could Help Prove Rare Stamps Are Authentic
Source: NYT (8-18-06)
Two philatelic experts have announced a discovery that seems likely to renew one of the longest-running controversies among stamp collectors.
Ken Lawrence and Richard C. Celler, both respected for their expertise in 19th-century stamps, have found evidence that a group of stamps long held to be fakes may be genuine and potentially worth as much as $10 million.
“This is one of the most exciting stamp stories of the last 100 years,” said Donald Sundman, president of the Mystic Stamp Company, which is holding the stamps on behalf of the owners and will put them on exhibit this month at a philatelic convention in Chicago.
The discovery concerns one of the early Hawaiian stamps known as the Missionaries, printed by the islands’ nascent postal service in 1851 largely for correspondence from missionary settlers to the United States.
Thursday, August 17, 2006
Book About East Timor Jabs Indonesia’s Conscience
Source: NYT (8-17-06)
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 14 — For more than two decades, the brutal military occupation of East Timor, a distant, impoverished territory, brought Indonesia little but disdain and dishonor on the world stage.
Bodies Yield Evidence of Hussein-Era Killings
Source: NYT (8-17-06)
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Aug. 11 — Beneath the clinical glare of fluorescent lights in a collection of makeshift laboratories here, the victims of mass murder under Saddam Hussein are slowly brought back to life.
More Tapes From 9/11: ‘They Have Exits in There?’
Source: NYT (8-17-06)
In what might be the final major disclosure of records from New York’s worst calamity, the city yesterday released recordings of 1,600 emergency calls made on Sept. 11, 2001. With the voices of callers removed for privacy considerations, only the 911 operators can be heard on most of the calls.
Alfredo Stroessner, Paraguayan Ex-Dictator, Dies
Source: NYT (8-17-06)
Gen. Alfredo Stroessner, the former president of Paraguay whose harsh and capricious 35-year hold on power made him South America’s most enduring dictator during the cold war and gave him the aura of a character out of a Gabriel García Márquez novel, died yesterday. He was 93.
The cause of death was a stroke, The Associated Press said, citing information from a grandson, Alfredo Domínguez Stroessner.
General Stroessner had lived in Brazil since 1989, moving there after his ouster by his second in command, Gen. Andrés Rodríguez, a relative by marriage.
Formally, General Stroessner was a fugitive from justice, wanted by the Paraguayan courts for trial on charges of homicide. Despite an extradition treaty between Brazil and Paraguay, however, there were never any serious moves to bring the general to justice in his home country, where his cabinet members and associates remained the stewards of government long after his fall.
The black sheep of the family? The rise and fall of Hitler's scouse nephew
Source: Independent (UK) (8-17-06)
He was born in Liverpool in 1911, a product of the romance between the Fuhrer's brother and his Irish sweetheart. Now the extraordinary story of William Patrick Hitler is coming to the stage.
SS past of Grass 'was about to be uncovered'
Source: Telegraph (UK) (8-17-06)
THE German author Günter Grass admitted that he had been in the Waffen-SS to pre-empt the release of the information from the East German secret police archive next year, a regional newspaper claimed.
The information about Grass's past is contained in Nazi era records compiled by the Stasi, the secret police of the communist government of former East Germany. The files were used for blackmail, the Kölner Stadtanzeiger wrote.
Historians have been working through the archive's 800,000 files since 2001 and they are to be made public by the end of March. Grass would normally have to give his permission for his file to be made accessible to the public.
But researchers said the likelihood was that he would not have been able to keep his files a secret.
In separate records from the US military archives published yesterday, the "prisoner of war'' Günter Grass is identified as a former private in the Waffen-SS on files compiled while he was held captive by allied troops in what is now the Czech Republic.
States told to rewrite history (Australia)
Source: Australian (8-18-06)
THREE state governments risk losing billions in schools funding after dismissing the finding of a summit of historians that recommended postmodern subjects be replaced with a traditional history course.
The history summit communique foreshadowed a massive shift in the teaching of history, as well as a new level of commonwealth interference in state and territory education systems.
But the Queensland, South Australian and West Australian education ministers yesterday dismissed the need for a stand-alone subject.
Apart from NSW and Victoria, the states and territories have replaced stand-alone history offerings with cross-disciplinary, outcomes-based subjects with titles such as Studies of Society and its Environment.
Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford said it would be "educational vandalism" for the federal Government to force on the states the separate study of history.
Ancient, decrepit brothel arouses debate in China
Source: Reuters (8-17-06)
BEIJING (Reuters) - A centuries-old brothel teetering on the verge of collapse has red-faced Chinese officials pondering heritage versus morality behind closed doors, state media reported Thursday.
A local government in Jinggang, a town in central Hunan province, must decide whether to restore crumbling Hongtaifang, a brothel established in 1733, and face the ire of residents who see it as debauched, Xinhua news agency said.
"The brothel was a place where women were humiliated in the old society," Xinhua quoted Xiao Yisheng, a retired university professor, as saying.
"Its restoration could be seen as promoting prostitution."
The Iron Knight (ship): identity discovered
Source: Narooma (8-17-06)
THE deep waters off Bermagui continue to give up some their secrets with specialist divers in recent months positively identifying the shipwreck of the Iron Knight.
While trawlers have for decades known about the shipwreck located due east off Bermagui, the Iron Knight has now been formerly declared a protected site with relatives of the lost sailors able to lay flowers at the site of sinking.
The ship was transporting iron ore and associated materials up the coast on February 8, 1943 when its convoy was attacked by a Japanese submarine with torpedoes hitting the ship.
The Iron Knight sank quickly in 125 metres of water with 36 of its 50 crew not able to escape a watery grave.
Mysteries of History Who Was First
Source: US News & World Report (8-14-06)
US News & World Report's cover story features stories about firsts in history.
Who was first to the top of the world?
The mystery of 4,000 miles
Digging for old treasures
Washington? Get in line
Did Darwin get scooped?
Shining light on the "dark lady of DNA"
The sound and fury of HIV
After lots of small steps, it adds up
No, it was not Al Gore
Contrary to myth, baseball may have had no single inventor
The most influential song you have never heard
Musings for the millions
When famous beats first
Places of our dreams
Does being first matter?
Ammunition find excites Grand Pre archeologists
Source: CBC News (8-15-06)
A new discovery at Grand Pre has archeologists wondering if they've unearthed "ground zero" of the Acadian deportation of 1755.
Jonathan Fowler, a Nova Scotia archeologist, and his team recently discovered about 15 musket balls in the ruins of an old house.
"This volume of musket balls is a little bit strange for the usual domestic occupation," he told CBC News on Tuesday.
When Fowler compared the find to those at other Acadian archeological sites, he felt the team may have found the British headquarters for the deportation.
"It leads one to believe ... that we may have evidence of these New Englanders," he said.
But it's difficult to prove, Fowler added.
The team is now hoping to find evidence of a palisade, a fence the archeologists believe the British built around two houses, a church and a cemetery.
Iranian Exhibit Takes On the Holocaust
Source: Wa Po (8-17-06)
TEHRAN, Aug. 16 -- At the exhibition entrance, a poster shows a helmet with the Star of David lying on top of others carrying a Nazi swastika. Inside, the Statue of Liberty is pictured holding a Holocaust book while giving a Nazi salute.
Organizers say the exhibition of more than 200 entries from Iran's International Holocaust Cartoons Contest aims to challenge Western taboos about discussing the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a "myth."
Wednesday, August 16, 2006
Koizumi Exits Office as He Arrived: Defiant on War Shrine
Source: NYT (8-16-06)
With each annual visit Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has paid to the Yasukuni Shrine, the war memorial linked to Japan’s imperial past, the damage to the nation’s relations with China and South Korea has worsened.
Even as Mr. Koizumi claimed a more assertive role for Japan in the world — and called for China’s and South Korea’s endorsement to realize it — he chose to be unyielding on his visits to Yasukuni, the one issue that was certain to offend them to the core and stir up memories of exactly why they fear a newly assertive Japan.
One result was that by Mr. Koizumi’s last year in office, China’s and South Korea’s leaders refused to talk with him. But true to himself to the very end, Mr. Koizumi paid his sixth and most likely last visit as prime minister — he retires next month — to the shrine early Tuesday morning, on the anniversary of the end of World War II and East Asia’s liberation from Japanese rule.
Mr. Koizumi not only chose the most provocative of days, but responded angrily to his critics in a news conference after his visit. He blamed China and South Korea for worsening relations, saying he had always been ready to meet with their leaders despite their opposition to Japan’s efforts to gain a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council.
'Must do' history - Compulsory lessons needed, says minister (Australia)
Source: Courier-Mail (Australia) (8-17-06)
AUSTRALIAN history should be a compulsory, stand-alone subject at some stage during high schooling, Education Minister Julie Bishop said last night.
Opening Australia's History summit, Ms Bishop said she hoped the meeting would help to define the body of historical knowledge that should be taught to all Australian students.
''Yes, there will be controversy but I would hope we can find agreement on the main currents and big themes in our national story,'' she said.
''I believe that students should be given a good grounding in key dates, facts and events of Australian history.
Restore History as a subject or funding is history (Australia)
Source: Australian (8-17-06)
STATE Governments will be under pressure to reinstate history as a compulsory separate subject in schools or risk losing nearly $13 billion in federal funding as a summit of experts meet in Canberra today.
But in launching the history summit last night, federal Education Minister Julie Bishop told the 23 participants she was not in favour of ''creating some form of an official'' history.
''We start, however, with a strong view that Australian history should be a compulsory stand-alone subject during some period of high school,'' she said.
ABC to air mini-series on 9-11 based on commission report
Source: Cyrus Nowrasteh, the writer/producer of the ABC 6-hour miniseries The Path to 9/11 which will air September 10th & 11th; in an interview at frontpagemag.com (8-16-06)
This miniseries is not just about the tragedy and events of 9/11, it dramatizes "how we got there" going back 8 years to the first attack on the WTC and dealing with the Al Qaeda strikes against U.S. embassies and forces in the 90s, the political lead-up, the hatching of the terrorist plots, etc. We see the heroes on the ground, like FBI agent John O'Neill and others, who after the '93 attack felt sure that the terrorists would strike the WTC again. It also dramatizes the frequent opportunities the Administration had in the 90s to stop Bin Laden in his tracks -- but lacked the will to do so. We also reveal the day-by-day lead-up of clues and opportunities in 2001 right up to the day of the 9/11 attacks. This is a terror thriller as well as a history lesson. I think people will be engaged and enlightened.
Confederacy museum makes cuts (VA)
Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch (8-15-06)
For the first time in its 110-year history, the Museum and White House of the Confederacy will cut its operating hours.
The museum will close on Wednesdays, from Labor Day to Memorial Day. In addition, the White House will be closed for public tours in January and February.
The moves come a few months after approval of the state budget that awarded the museum just $50,000 of a $700,000 grant the downtown institution had requested for fiscal 2006-08. The money would have been used to reverse the museum's deficit, expected to reach $700,000 this year.
3000-year-old boat’s journey (Scotland)
Source: Courier (Scotland) (8-14-06)
REMARKABLE find recovered from the River Tay is undergoing the first stages of a painstaking preservation process.
In the culmination of a meticulous rescue plan, the 3000-year-old log boat was dug from its watery resting place over recent weeks before being floated and towed into Newburgh harbour on Friday evening.
With great care the boat, which was carved from a single oak, was lifted from the water by crane, an operation greeted with cheers and applause by a 100-strong crowd.
“This is among the oldest and best-preserved vessels of its kind ever found in Scotland, and we are sending it to the National Museum in Edinburgh where freeze-drying techniques will be used to preserve it intact,” said David Strachan of the Perth and Kinross Heritage Trust, which ran the operation.
Hundreds of soldiers shot for 'cowardice' to be pardoned (UK)
Source: Independent (UK) (8-16-06)
Pte Harry Farr, shot for cowardice during the First World War, is to be granted a pardon posthumously. His pardon came as Des Browne, Minister of Defence, said all 306 soldiers executed during the First World War for cowardice and military offences would be issued a group pardon.
Mr Browne said that the Armed Forces Bill will be amended . "Although this is a historical matter, I am conscious of how the families of these men feel today. They have had to endure a stigma for decades. That makes this a moral issue too, and having reviewed it, I believe it is appropriate to seek a statutory pardon," he said.
Pte Farr's family have fought for 14 years to clear his name, arguing that the soldier, from Kensington in London, who was 25 years old when he was executed for refusing to fight, had shell shock.
Britain to pardon WW I deserters
Source: Washington Times (8-16-06)
Britain's Ministry of Defense will grant pardons to 306 soldiers executed by the British army for cowardice or desertion during World War I.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
History Carnival #37
Source: Cliopatria (12-31-69)
The History Carnival is a twice-monthly roundup of blogging about history and historians. Caleb McDaniel hosts this edition.
Mission Indians live again by way of public database
Source: LAT (8-13-06)
SAN MARINO - Reclaiming a neglected part of California's past, historians have unveiled an immense data bank that for the first time chronicles the lives and deaths of more than 100,000 American Indians in the Spanish missions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Australian leader Bob Carr slams 'PC' view of history
Source: The Age (Australia) (8-14-06)
SOME historians have been guilty of "political correctness" in romanticising nomadic Aboriginal life before the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788, according to former NSW premier, Bob Carr.
Speaking last night on ABC radio's Sunday Profile program, Mr Carr said that some historians had "eliminated unattractive features of nomadic life of our accounts of pre-1788 Australia" out of a desire to avoid offending Aborigines.
A 5th-Century Apartheid May Explain Britons' Genes
Source: Wa Po (8-14-06)
Long before Adolf Hitler dreamed of doing it, Germans colonized Britain and probably instituted a South Africa style apartheid regime there, scientists have concluded.
Archaeologists and historians have long believed that no more than 200,000 Anglo-Saxons from Germany invaded Britain during a 300-year period starting in the 5th century. But given that there were 2 million native Britons at the time, biologists have puzzled over how -- in less than 15 generations -- 50 percent of the English gene pool has acquired Anglo-Saxon Y chromosomes.
Now researchers at University College London and other institutions have concluded that the only way to square those facts is by visualizing an apartheid regime, in which the invaders restricted intermarriage and instituted a brutal system of exploitation such that Anglo-Saxon offspring were far more likely to survive into adulthood than the children of local Britons, who were then called Welshmen. Legal texts from the time support the idea: Anglo-Saxon lives were valued two to five times as much as the lives of Welshmen.
Neolithic stone carving of Big Dipper discovered in northwest China
Source: Peoples Daily Online (8-15-06)
A neolithic stone carving of the Big Dipper star formation has been found on Baimiaozi Mountain near Chifeng City in northwest China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, according to experts.
The stone carving was discovered by Wu Jiacai, a 50-year-old researcher in literature and history with Wongniute Banner of Inner Mongolia.
Wu found a large yam-shaped stone, 310 centimeters long, onto which 19 stars had been carved. The representation of the Big Dipper is on the north face of the stone.
The stars are represented by indentations in the stone. The biggest indentation is 6 centimeters in diameter and 5 centimeters deep, said Wu.
"The stone was carved by neolithic dwellers," said Gai Shanlin, researcher with the Inner Mongolia Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology (IMICRA) and an expert in stone carving.
WA Gov. Gregoire, tribe announce settlement over Indian burial site
Source: AP (8-15-06)
PORT ANGELES - Washington state will pay more than $17 million to tribal and local officials to settle lingering disputes over the state's accidental disturbance of an ancient American Indian village and burial ground.
The settlement, announced Monday by Gov. Chris Gregoire, ends litigation surrounding the state Department of Transportation's abandoned bridge project and gives the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe control over most of the site.
Work on concrete pontoons for a Hood Canal bridge project stopped in 2003 after officials discovered human remains in the area. Construction resumed less than a year later, but was halted for good in December 2004.
Historians claim to have found fabled lost city
Source: Wales.co.uk (8-15-06)
WELSH historians believe they have uncovered the site of a 2,000-year-old city which they say is the most important location in ancient British history.
The Ancient British Historical Association (ABHA) claims that a field at Mynydd y Gaer near Pencoed is the fabled fortress city of King Caradoc I, or Caractacus, who fought the Romans between 42-51 AD.
The Roman leader at that time was the Emperor Claudius, immortalised by Derek Jacobi in the TV series and film I, Claudius, alongside Welsh actress Si n Phillips as his aunt Livia.
Historians Alan Wilson and Baram Blackett used old manuscripts to narrow their field of search and aerial photos obtained from Google Earth, which provides maps and satellite imagery, to find the exact spot.
Whites are smaller share of population
Source: USA Today (8-14-06)
The share of the U.S. population that is white but not Hispanic is declining as minority groups grow more rapidly.
[Click on the Source link above for a table showing the percentage of whites in each state, according to new census figures.]
Archaeologists Challenge Link Between Dead Sea Scrolls and Ancient Sect
Source: NYT (8-15-06)
New archaeological evidence is raising more questions about the conventional interpretation linking the desolate ruins of an ancient settlement known as Qumran with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in nearby caves in one of the sensational discoveries of the last century.
Plans for a Film About Nanking Massacre
Source: NYT (8-15-06)
A Chinese-American co-production of a film about the 1937 Japanese massacre of Chinese civilians known as the Rape of Nanking is on the drawing board, the Chinese state news media said yesterday. The report came on the 61st anniversary of Japan’s announcement of its surrender in World War II. The Xinhua news agency said the film would be the Chinese equivalent of “Schindler’s List,” Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Holocaust film, which won seven Oscars, including those for best film and best director.
Japan PM Defies China, S.Korea with War Shrine Visit
Source: Reuters (8-15-06)
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi paid his respects at Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine for war dead on Tuesday, the anniversary of his country's World War Two surrender, defying warnings from China and South Korea not to go.
The parting shot by the outgoing Japanese leader prompted angry protests from Beijing and Seoul.
Koizumi is set to step down in September, and China in particular appears to be counting on his heir apparent, Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, to help repair ties.
On Tuesday, Abe, 51 -- a security hawk who has visited Yasukuni himself in the past -- called for dialogue, but declined to say whether he would go there if he became premier.
Günter Grass Replies
Source: NYT (8-15-06)
The Nobel Prize-winning German author Günter Grass, stung by condemnation after his confession that he served with the elite Nazi Waffen SS in World War II, responded yesterday by saying: “It is surely also an attempt by some people to make me persona non grata. That is why I am grateful that there are also discriminating opposing views.” Agence France-Presse reported that Mr. Grass had told the German news agency DPA that his service in the Waffen SS shamed him, and that he had tried ever since to lead an upstanding life.
Yesterday Lech Walesa, the former president of Poland and a Nobel peace laureate, was joined by the ruling party of Poland in calling upon Mr. Grass, best known for his 1959 novel, “The Tin Drum,’’ to relinquish his honorary citizenship of his birthplace, the port city of Gdansk (formerly Danzig) in northern Poland. Mr. Walesa, also an honorary citizen of the city, where the defiantly anti-Communist Solidarity movement was born, said, “If it had been known he was in the SS, he would never have received the honor,” Agence France-Presse reported.
NASA Searching for Moon Landing Tapes
Source: AP (8-15-06)
NASA officials are searching for the original videotapes from the first moon landing in 1969 in the hopes that they can use modern technology to produce sharper images of the event.
The video, including footage of Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walking on the moon, was transmitted from the moon to tracking stations in California and Australia. The images that were then sent to Houston -- and seen by the rest of the world -- were substantially degraded.
The Nazis and the Salzburg Festival
Source: NYT Editorial (8-15-06)
The sunny headquarters of the American Friends of the Salzburg Festival are conveniently right across the street from the festival’s performance halls. The association between the festival and the Friends has been long and close. Until this summer.
Festival officials are miffed with the Friends over that group’s decision to present “The Salzburg Festival: A Short History,” a new documentary by the British filmmaker Tony Palmer. The festival has disavowed the film, partly because of what festival directors consider Mr. Palmer’s overemphasized and sometimes inaccurate account of the festival’s intertwined relationship with the Nazis.
Plan to restore glory of Tuileries Palace
Source: Daily Telegraph (8-14-06)
THE destroyed Tuileries Palace, once home to French kings and emperors, could be rebuilt after the French government formed a commission of eminent historians and politicians to draw plans for its restoration.
If approved, the 300 million euro ( pounds 200 million) construction project - between the Louvre museum and the Place de la Concorde - would create a replica of the palace before it was torched by a group of extremists in 1871.
The Palais des Tuileries was built for Catherine de' Medici in 1564. It was gradually extended over three centuries until it spanned 300 yards to link the north and south wings of the Louvre museum.
By the mid-nineteenth century the walls of this vast complex enclosed a square where today the Louvre pyramid stands.
Remembering the Anniversary of the Cultural Revolution
Source: AP (8-14-06)
Forty years ago, Chinese communist chairman Mao Zedong launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It's an unpleasant anniversary that official Beijing will not celebrate and most Chinese would rather forget.
Mao's objective: to purge the party of its moderate, pragmatic faction, which he said was leading China away from Marxism and toward capitalism and to make himself unassailable leader.
The bloody, chaotic decade between 1966 and 1976 which ensued was among the most violent, divisive and shameful in China's long, illustrious history.
Monday, August 14, 2006
Petition against destruction of cultural landmarks in Lebanon and Israel
Source: World Association for Tangible Cultural Heritage (8-14-06)
The loss of innocent civilian lives cannot be tolerated and must be stopped with an immediate cease fire preventing the continuation of the hostilities in the region and enabling sensible negotiations to resolve the issues.
Increasingly, Bush Escapes the Media Pack
Source: Wa Po (8-12-06)
On one of the scariest days yet in the five-year battle with terrorists, President Bush prepared to make a speech to reassure the American people. But the White House press corps was 1,000 miles away in Texas.
Bush had left his ranch vacation and jetted north for a scheduled closed-door fundraiser. No press plane accompanied him. And so when news broke that Britain had broken up a major terrorist plot, the only ones there to convey the president's reaction were a handful of local reporters and a few pool journalists who ride in the back of Air Force One.
Fathers Defeated, Democratic Sons Strike Back
Source: NYT Editorial (8-14-06)
In the history of the Democratic Party, the election of 1980 looms large: the year the party lost the White House, the Senate, a generation of Midwestern liberals and, in some ways, its confidence that it was the natural, even inevitable, majority party.Now, that election has a sequel.
Call it the return of the sons: Chet Culver, the Iowa secretary of state and the son of former Senator John C. Culver, is running for governor of Iowa. Senator Evan Bayh, son of former Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, is organizing and testing the waters for a possible presidential bid in 2008. And Jack Carter, the son of former President Jimmy Carter, has decided at the age of 59 to run an uphill race for the Senate in Nevada, his first foray into electoral politics.
NYT editorializes against new visitor center to "interpret" the Vietnam War
Source: NYT Editorial (8-14-06)
In 1982, the American public and the veterans of the Vietnam War were given what is perhaps the finest single memorial ever built in this country: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by Maya Lin. Its eloquence and its terseness — both a product of its simplicity — have moved nearly everyone who has ever been lucky enough to visit. But why stop with perfect? The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, established to raise money for the memorial, has proposed a new visitor center to help “interpret” the memorial and the war. The center, some 25,000 square feet in size, would be built underground just north of the Lincoln Memorial. The site was approved the other day, with many restrictions.
Ancient Britons' war paint drafted in to help battle against disease
Source: Scotsman.com (8-14-06)
Woad, once used as war paint by ancient Britons to strike fear into the hearts of their enemies, could now be used in the battle against cancer.
Scientists have discovered that the plant Isatis tinctoria, is a rich source of an anti-tumour compound glucobrassicin (GBS), which is also found in broccoli and Brussels sprouts, and is believed to be especially active against breast cancer. A recent paper from Dr Stefania Galletti's research team at the University of Bologna, Italy, found that woad contains 20 times more of the cancer- fighting compound glucobrassicin (GBS) than broccoli. Like its relatives, the woad plant uses the compound as a defence mechanism to ward off insect pests, releasing extra levels of GBS when damaged by chemicals or after physical injury.
Discovery of richest undisturbed cache of dinosaur fossils in North America
Source: Wa Po (8-13-06)
IT WAS THE PROSPECTOR WHO FOUND IT FIRST. Maybe 30 years ago, back when uranium was worth a lot, when people thought nuclear power was your friend. He was working a ridge up at Spring Creek, Wyo., looking for ore with a scintillometer, a modern-day Geiger counter. He was getting a lot of hits.
But there was something else. Big, off-color rocks in strange shapes were lying loose on the ground where the wind had blown the dirt off them. The prospector was a geologist. He knew what those were. Dinosaur bones. From big dinosaurs -- like the ones that fill up museum exhibits.
Tuskegee Airmen Still Waiting
Source: Wa Po (8-14-06)
Five months after Congress voted to bestow its highest honor on the Tuskegee Airmen -- pioneering aviators who during World War II broke the color bar banning black pilots in the U.S. military -- the Congressional Gold Medal is still not in their hands.
"Every time you pick up a newspaper, one or two more are gone," said retired Lt. Col. Spann Watson of Westbury, N.Y. "We'd like people who are still living to be able to receive them. I want to get my medal in my hand."
Three Affiliated Tribes ready for Lewis and Clark event
Source: AP (8-13-06)
NEW TOWN, N.D. (AP) — Tribal officials here will use a Lewis and Clark event to celebrate the life of the American Indian woman who guided the explorers from present-day North Dakota to the Pacific Northwest.
The event, titled "Reunion at the Home of Sakakawea" will be held Thursday through Sunday on the 4 Bears peninsula west of New Town. It is named for the woman Three Affiliated Tribes Chairman Tex Hall calls the most celebrated woman in American history.
"Her contributions are tremendous. Without Sakakawea, there would have been no Lewis and Clark military expedition," he said. "'Reunion' will pay tribute to her life, and you will hear from her descendants."
Google Wants to Digitize Every Book. Publishers Say Read the Fine Print First.
Source: Wa Po (8-13-06)
STANFORD, Calif. If it is really true that Google is going to digitize the roughly 9 million books in the libraries of Stanford University, then you can be sure that the folks who brought you the world's most ambitious search engine will come, in due time, for call number E169 D3.
Google workers will pull Lillian Dean's 1950 travelogue "This Is Our Land" -- the story of one family's "pleasant and soul-satisfying auto journey across our continent" -- from a shelf in the second-floor stacks of the Cecil H. Green Library. They will place the slim blue volume on a book cart, wheel it into a Google truck backed up to the library's loading dock and whisk it a few miles southeast to the Googleplex, the $100 billion-plus company's sprawling, campuslike headquarters in Mountain View. There, at an undisclosed location, it will be scanned and added to the ever-expanding universe of digitally searchable knowledge.
Abandoned mountain village found (UK)
Source: BBC (8-12-06)
The ruins of an extensive mountain village have been found on the slopes of the Sugar Loaf, near Abergavenny.
Scouts working with the British Trust for Conservation Volunteers have spent a week hacking back brambles to reveal the 25-house village.
It is thought the Y Graig settlement in Glangrwyne, Powys, was abandoned in the 19th Century after its landlord increased villagers' rent.
Conservationists believe there may be more buildings to be uncovered.
Officials seek to honor service of black soldiers
Source: Brownsville Herald (8-12-06)
Efforts to place a marker commemorating black soldiers who served at Fort Brown and other border outposts continue.
Although the fort’s service in the U.S-Mexican and Civil wars is well-documented, black soldiers’ four decades of service to the area are less so. They served there from 1865-1906.
The fort was the home of the 25th Infantry Regiment, a black unit that was stationed there during the Brownsville Raid in August 1906. Several months later, the Army temporarily closed the fort, only to reopen it because of unrest in Mexico and cross-border banditry.
The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College sits where the former fort stood until the city of Brownsville acquired it shortly after World War II. Jacob Brown Auditorium sits where barracks once stood and is the expected site of the marker.
Dig clues point to Roman murder (UK)
Source: BBC (8-12-06)
A crime that has remained undetected for 1,500 years has been uncovered by an archaeological team working at the village of Sedgeford, in Norfolk.
A human skeleton was found hidden in what would have been a Roman corn drier, and experts believe the person was deliberately put inside.
The six-week excavation on the former Roman farm will end this week.
The skeleton was found by a team from Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project (SHARP).
Revolution sites could see boost (SC)
Source: The State (SC) (8-7-06)
South Carolina is on the cusp of racking up another Revolutionary War victory, this one 225 years after the fact.
Legislation has passed both the U.S. House and Senate, in slightly different forms, for a study that could lead to more recognition for the dozens of prominent battle sites in South Carolina.
“The Revolution was largely won after the fall of Charleston in the backcountry,” said Rep. John Spratt, D-S.C., on the floor of the House last month of a bill that could lead to a Southern Campaign of the Revolution Heritage Area. “We need this national corridor to tell the story right.”
Drought unearths treasure trove of ancient monuments (Wales)
Source: Daily Post (Wales) (8-8-06)
THE summer drought has unearthed a treasure trove of finds for historians taking a birds eye view of Wales.
Heatwave conditions, which have parched the Welsh countryside, proved ideal for aerial archaeologists.
Last night they were described as the best for at least adecade with a host of buried sites revealed from the air.
The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales made major discoveries using light aircraft to survey the Welsh landscape.
ARCHAEOLOGISTS unearthed a hidden medieval settlement in Horsham town centre this week.
Source: http://www.horshamonline.co.uk (8-11-06)
Ruins of the previously undiscovered houses, in The Causeway, Horsham, have been buried in St Mary's Church Vicarage garden for over 600 years.
A team of historians from Archaeology South East found the small settlement during an investigative dig for developer Chalvington Barns, which is set to build three new homes on the site later this year.
Senior archaeologist Simon Stevens said the team had also unearthed two quarries that would have been used from as early as the 17th century to collect stone for the vicarage and other local buildings.
"It's been a fascinating dig," he said.
Old Boston State House in dire need, say preservationists
Source: Boston Globe (8-14-06)
The Old State House in Boston -- a grand national landmark and symbol of revolutionary Massachusetts -- needs $3 million in repairs to prevent it from rotting and crumbling, according to the Bostonian Society, the historical preservation group that manages the building.
Bell sounds in Australia's history wars
Source: Monsters and Critics News (8-14-06)
For some cultural warriors attending a crucial conference in Canberra this week on the teaching of history in schools, it comes down to this: Did Captain James Cook 'discover' Australia in 1770 and claim it for the British crown or did he 'invade' and steal ancient Gondwana from its dark-skinned inhabitants?
China to shoot movie on Nanjing Massacre
Source: China Daily (8-14-06)
China has decided to team up with the United States and Britain on putting Iris Chang's international bestseller, "The Rape of Nanking", on the silver screen, sources with the Chinese investor in the movie revealed on Monday, on the eve of the 61st anniversary of Japan's surrender in the World War II.
Nobel Prize Winner Grass Under Fire for Belated SS Confession
Source: Deutsche Welle (8-14-06)
Nobel prize winning author Günter Grass is facing a backlash from contemporaries and commentators after he admitted that he was drafted into Nazi Germany's notorious Waffen SS elite force during World War II.
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Novelist Guenter Grass admits he was a Nazi
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (8-12-06)
Gunter Grass, the German-born winner of the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature and author of such acclaimed novels as "Tin Drum," has admitted to joining the Waffen SS, a special force of the Nazi Party, as a 17-year-old.
Now 78 and preparing to publish his memoirs in September, Grass came forward with details of his past in an interview Friday with the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Having been a member of the SS had "oppressed" him, Grass said.
"My silence throughout all these years is one of the reasons I have written my autobiography. It finally had to come out," he said.
Bill would help study of ancient remains
Source: Yahoo (8-10-06)
YAKIMA, Wash. - A federal law governing protection of American Indian graves would be amended to allow scientific study of ancient remains discovered on federal lands if the remains have not been tied to a current tribe, under a bill proposed by U.S. Rep. Doc Hastings.
The bill marks the latest step in a dispute sparked by the discovery of Kennewick Man, one of the oldest and most complete skeletons ever found in North America. Indian tribes and researchers battled over rights to the 9,300-year-old remains for nine years before a federal court sided with the scientists, allowing them to study the bones.
Hastings, R-Wash., said his bill counters efforts in the Senate that would prevent ancient remains from being studied in the future. He cited a case in Nevada where tribal leaders have filed suit against the government to rebury the Spirit Cave Man remains, believed to be more than 10,000 years old.
Finding bolsters theory that China discovered paper
Source: Times Online (UK) (8-10-06)
CHINA’S claim to have invented paper was strengthened yesterday when archaeologists announced a discovery that suggests it was in use at least 100 years earlier than thought.
A scrap of paper made from linen fibre was found by archaeologists picking through an ancient rubbish tip at the Yumen Pass, the gate between China and Central Asia.
Measuring only 1.6sq in, it is believed to have been made in 8BC, or 113 years earlier than the first known paper. Fu Licheng, the curator of the Dunhuang Museum, said: “This is very important evidence to show that paper was invented in China.”
Artifacts support theory man came from Africa
Source: Independent (UK) (8-11-06)
Fragments of ostrich eggs, perforated beads and finely shaped arrowheads have provided the first firm archaeological evidence for the "out of Africa" origins of the world's human population.
Scientists have found stark similarities in the ancient cultural artefacts made and used by Stone Age people who migrated out of Africa and into Asia more than 50,000 years ago.
It is the first time that archaeologists have been able to link African and Indian artefacts so closely together even though they were discovered 3,000 miles apart - suggesting they were made by the same people, albeit of different generations.
Panel Suggests Using Inmates in Drug Trials as Clouds from the Past Hover
Source: NYT (8-13-06)
An influential federal panel of medical advisers has recommended that the government loosen regulations that severely limit the testing of pharmaceuticals on prison inmates, a practice that was all but stopped three decades ago after revelations of abuse.
An Antiwar Campaign That Takes a Page From the G.O.P. Playbook
Source: Sam Tanenhaus in the NYT (8-13-06)
JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN’S DEFEAT in the Senate Democratic primary in Connecticut is a reminder that intramural contests are often the most bruising in our two-party system, and can leave the party involved vulnerable to attacks from the opposition.
Indeed, those who feared that Senator Lieberman’s defeat would be exploited by Republicans eager to portray his opponent, Ned Lamont, as a stand-in for an entire party “soft” on terrorism, were vindicated, almost instantly, in the days following the vote.
More tellingly, the campaign offers an intriguing twist in the history of insurgency that has shaped the identities of both parties over the last several decades. Some commentators have portrayed the bloggers who led the charge against Senator Lieberman as the ideological descendants of the left-wing Democrats who nearly brought the party to its knees in the 1960’s and 70’s. But in strategic terms they resemble more closely the “movement conservatives” who transformed the Republican Party from 1955 to 1980, when it rose to dominate American politics.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Khmer Rouge’s Last Bastion Calls on Spirits for Luck
Source: NYT (8-12-06)
ANLONG VENG, Cambodia The site of Pol Pot’s cremation on this barren mountainside eight years ago is collapsing from neglect, its small fence broken, its low metal roof rusting and curling. But Pol Pot, who as the Khmer Rouge leader was one of the most brutal mass murderers of the last century, has become a sort of bookie for those who pray to him for numbers.
For many here in this former Khmer Rouge stronghold, he is the guardian spirit of the Dangrek Mountains, curing ailments and dispensing lottery numbers. People who live here say visitors have plucked the last bits of bone from among the cinders over the years and carried them home for good luck. A casino is being built nearby to capitalize on this spiritual bounty.
Friday, August 11, 2006
September 11 -- what year? 30 percent of Americans don't know
Source: Yahoo (8-9-06)
Some 30 percent of Americans cannot say in what year the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington took place, according to a poll published in the Washington Post newspaper.
While the country is preparing to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the attacks that claimed nearly 3,000 lives and shocked the world, 95 percent of Americans questioned in the poll were able to remember the month and the day of the attacks, according to Wednesday's edition of the newspaper.
But when asked what year, 30 percent could not give a correct answer.
Of that group, six percent gave an earlier year, eight percent gave a later year, and 16 percent admitted they had no idea whatsoever.
This memory black hole is essentially the problem of the older crowd: 48 percent of those who did not know were between the ages of 55 and 64, and 47 percent were older than 65, according to the poll.
Nation’s Memorial to Air Force Stretches Toward Space
Source: NYT (8-10-06)
From a promontory high above the Pentagon, three arching spires reach skyward, their elongated tips pointing to the infinity of space.
They appear as abstract art forms but only until their symbolism is made clear by their setting: They are the starring elements of a memorial to the United States Air Force, the only branch of the American military that has not had a prominent monument in the Washington area.
More than 14 years in planning, the memorial is in the final stages of construction and will be dedicated Oct. 14.
Museums Establish Guidelines for Treatment of Sacred Objects
Source: NYT (8-10-06)
When the Blackfoot Nation approached the Denver Art Museum about borrowing a horse shawl for a ceremony a few years ago, the museum faced a quandary. Curators were eager to oblige, but they worried that the ritual would expose the early-20th-century relic to the damaging effects of horse sweat. After a delicate negotiation, a compromise was reached: The tribe would use the object in the ceremony without actually putting it on the horse.
The story is not unusual. As American Indian and other groups have become increasingly assertive about guarding their cultural heritage, museums have struggled to strike a balance between the traditional practice of collecting indigenous objects as art and the often competing interests of the people whose ancestors produced them. In many cases federal laws have enabled tribes to reclaim works outright.
Now the issue has become pressing enough that the leading association of art museums is asking its members to take “special consideration” when dealing with what it terms sacred objects. In guidelines be released today, the Association of Art Museum Directors calls on museums to consult with indigenous groups to determine what works might fall into this category and to accommodate the wishes of these groups as far as possible in displaying, conserving and even discussing these works on museum labels and in catalogs.
Echoes of Early Design to Use Chemicals to Blow Up Airliners
Source: NYT (8-11-06)
JAKARTA, Indonesia, Aug. 10 — The plot to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic, uncovered by British authorities, bears a striking, if not eerie, resemblance to a plot hatched 12 years ago to simultaneously blow up a dozen airliners over the Pacific.
Army Engineers Taste History, Humility as They Explore the Ziggurat of Ur
Source: Wa Po (8-11-06)
Breathing a little easier as their convoy of armored sport-utility vehicles pulled through the gate of Tallil air base at 3:15 p.m., the engineers headed not for the comfort of their air-conditioned bunks but for an enormous mound of mud and brick tucked inside the base.
A few minutes later, they stood at the foot of the 4,100-year-old ziggurat, or temple tower, of Ur. They were no longer two dozen or so tired, sweaty soldiers toiling to rebuild a war-torn country. They were construction wonks returning to their oldest, deepest roots. Their sidearms and holsters could just as easily have been tool belts, their body armor, comfy denim or well-worn flannel.
Britain's 'forgotten' invasion of Argentina
Source: BBC (8-10-06)
It's 200 years since Britain's invading army was routed from Buenos Aires - a mere footnote in British history, but, says military historian Peter Caddick-Adams, a historic event in the forging of friendship between the two countries that eclipses the Falklands fall-out.
Fresh evidence that Charles V had gout
Source: USA Today (8-2-06)
A 450-year-old piece of Charles V's pinkie lends support to the theory that it was gout that led one of the most powerful rulers of all time to abdicate, Spanish researchers report.
Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, whose empire stretched across Europe and included Spanish America, was diagnosed with gout by his doctors in early adulthood. By the end of his reign in 1556, he was a crippled man who could barely walk at times or ride a horse, said Dr. Pedro Luis Fernandez, a pathologist at the University of Barcelona.
"His physical suffering influenced decisions that affected the future of many countries," Fernandez and his colleagues reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
To confirm the diagnosis of gout, a form of arthritis, the scientists did laboratory tests on a mummified piece of Charles V's little finger.
Scholars protest Chavez's comparison of Israel and Hitler
Source: News Release -- David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies (8-11-06)
Fifty-three leading Holocaust scholars from around the world have sent a letter to Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, denouncing his statements comparing Israel to the Nazis.
The signatories include two former senior officials of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Dr. Michael Berenbaum and Dr. Walter Reich; Journal of Genocide Research editor Henry Huttenbach; Genocide Watch president Gregory Stanton; Prof. David S. Wyman, author of the The Abandonment of the Jews; and numerous other prominent scholars, including Daniel Goldhagen, Richard Rubenstein, and Jacob Neusner.
The protest was organized by The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.
Thursday, August 10, 2006
Qualifications of Public Secondary School History Teachers, 1999–2000
Source: Education Gadfly, published by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation (8-10-06)
[An issue brief issued by The U.S. Department of Education: National Center for Education Statistics]' examines the qualifications of those who taught secondary school history during 1999-2000.
While earlier studies looked at the percentages of teachers ''in-field'' (those with a postsecondary major and state certification in the subject they were teaching) and ''out-of-field'' (those without), the extent to which out-of-field teachers have other training or skills related to their subject has gone mostly unexamined. This paper sifts through the data and presents some interesting findings. For example, only 45 percent of secondary school history students were taught by a teacher with a college major or minor in history. Of the 55 percent of students whose teachers lacked such degrees, 73 percent were taught by an instructor who had a major or minor in another social science. Eighty-six percent of secondaryschool history students had history teachers with state social studies certification (of course that figure is ten points lower in schools serving poor kids). Six percent of students had teachers with no certification at all. Overall, some 9 percent of secondary-level history students are taught by instructors with neither a certification in social studies nor a major or minor in history; that number climbs to 13 percent for high poverty schools. This short paper provides many more fascinating tidbits; for example, did you know that almost 12 percent of secondary school history teachers majored in phys ed? (If you've ever met a high school football coach, perhaps you did.) It remains to be seen whether NCLB's highly-qualified teacher provisions will change this situation--but we're not holding our breath).
5,000 year old dagger found in Bulgaria
Source: cronaca (8-8-06)
A 6-inch-long gold and platinum dagger believed to be 5,000 years-old has been unearthed in central Bulgaria, the archaeologist leading the excavations said Monday.
Archaeologist Martin Hristov said his team discovered more than 500 tiny golden rings that appeared to be pieces of ancient jewelry.
In China, a Growing Interest in All Things Jewish
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (8-10-06)
M. Avrum Ehrlich, a 37-year-old professor from Australia, is one of the first foreign academics to teach Hebrew Bible, Talmudic thought, and the Kabbalah in China. His ambitious plan is to put this sleepy provincial university on the map as an international center of Judaic studies.
Part of Mr. Ehrlich's pedagogy is to immerse his students in rituals central to Judaism. Thus he holds this weekly gathering at his apartment — complete with chopsticks.
"It's sort of a fusion Chinese Shabbat," he quips.
Doorstop is ancient artifact (Massachusetts)
Source: Saugus Advertiser (8-10-06)
A rock that has been propping open doors in the Zapolski household for decades is actually a 4,000-year-old Native American axe.
"My mother used it as a doorstop," said Kathy (Johnston) Zapolski this week.
Zapolski’s 90-year-old aunt, Adele Colby, recalls that some time in the early 1900s her father (Zapolski’s grandfather) was attempting to plant a garden in his backyard on Willis Street when he came across a slightly-rounded, carved rock that resembled part of an Indian tool, possibly an axe. Willis Street is located off Winter Street, less than a quarter of a mile from the Saugus River.
Robert McCullough--Civil rights sit-in protester dies at 64
Source: AP (8-9-06)
ROCK HILL, S.C. (AP) ˜ Robert McCullough, who led a group of black students in a landmark 1961 civil rights protest, choosing to serve jail time on a chain gang for the crime of sitting at a whites-only lunch counter, has died. He was 64.
McCullough died Monday, Robinson Funeral Home spokesman Samuel Reid said. He did not give a cause of death.
McCullough, along with eight other black students from Friendship Junior College, gained widespread attention when they used the "jail, no bail" technique after they were arrested in February 1961.
Wednesday, August 9, 2006
China's Earliest Handicraft Workshop Discovered?
Source: China.org (8-9-06)
One of the world's oldest handicraft workshops, dating back more than 3,600 years, may have been discovered by Chinese archaeologists in the country's Henan Province.
Covering about 1,000 square meters the workshop used turquoise to make elaborate and ornate works of art. The workshop was found in the village of Erlitou of Yanshi City and is part of the ruins of the imperial city belonging to the Xia dynasty (2100 BC-1600 BC), China's earliest. The imperial city was discovered two years ago.
Germans find fewer deaths at Berlin Wall
Source: Washington Times (8-9-06)
At least 125 persons died at the Berlin Wall in the three decades before the great symbol of divided Cold War Europe was finally torn down in 1989, German researchers said yesterday.
But the latest findings of a government-backed project hoping to close this chapter of German history suggest that fewer people died at the barrier between formerly communist East Berlin and free West Berlin than previously thought.
Although there are still 81 cases under investigation, the final figure expected to be published next year is set to fall below estimates that put the death toll at more than 200 during the 28 years when the wall was standing.
Air Force will not fund controversial FOIA study
Source: Newsletter of Secrecy News, which is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the (8-9-06)
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) said this week that it will not administer a grant to a San Antonio, Texas law school to study state freedom of information laws.
In a story that prompted new concerns about official secrecy, USA Today reported last month that the government was going to pay St. Mary's University School of Law $1 million to reevaluate state freedom of information laws in light of the threat of terrorism.
But the proposed freedom of information study "doesn't fit with the information research and development that we do," said Dan Emlin of the AFRL Information Directorate in Rome, New York.
France's new Stonehenge: Secrets of a neolithic time machine
Source: Independent (UK) (8-9-06)
A spectacular discovery of Stone Age menhirs in Brittany could unlock the code to one of the most puzzling chapters of human development, and transform our knowledge of mankind's early history.
Historic Soviet drawings stolen in £1.5m raid
Source: Independent (UK) (8-9-06)
Russia has suffered its second major art theft in as many weeks, with the plundering of hundreds of drawings worth at least £1.5m from the State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow.
The drawings were the work of the late Yakov Chernikhov, a leading artist and architect of the Soviet era who specialised in "constructivist" socialist design. The thief or thieves emptied hundreds of folders containing drawings, replacing them with worthless "dummy" sketches to delay the moment when the robbery would be discovered. It is estimated that about 1,500 of the 2,000 drawings in the collection were stolen; 274 have been recovered.
The robbery comes a week after the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg revealed that 221 items worth £2.7m had been stolen from its repository over a period of six years. Three people, including the husband and son of one of the museum's late curators, have been arrested in connection with the crime.
City Takes On U.S. in the Battle of Independence Square
Source: NYT (8-9-06)
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 7 — Hands off our Liberty. That is what Philadelphia officials are saying to a plan by the National Park Service to erect a seven-foot-tall fence behind Independence Hall. One effect of the project would be to bisect the historic square where the Declaration of Independence was publicly read for the first time, on July 8, 1776.
The plan calls for a wrought-iron fence about 130 feet behind the building, the original home of the Liberty Bell. The Park Service, which operates the site, says the fence is among $2 million in security precautions that the Department of Homeland Security has mandated at the Independence National Historical Park. It is not unlike antiterrorism steps being taken at other major landmarks around the country, parks officials say.
But city and state officeholders say the fence exceeds what is required and will turn an enduring symbol of American freedom into an eyesore.
John Howard's Australian History Summit is bound to be heated
Source: The Age (Australia) (8-6-06)
It's not quite the rumble in the jungle of Muhammad Ali fame, but the Australian History Summit set down for next week is shaping up as an academic prize fight of seemingly immense proportions.
With 23 of the biggest names in history (Geoffrey Blainey, Inge Clendinnen and Geoffrey Bolton, former NSW premier Bob Carr and social commentator Gerard Henderson are just some on the guest list) in the same room to settle once and for all what version of our nation's past schoolchildren should be learning, the debate is certain to be fiery.
Education Minister Julie Bishop, the summit's convener, says she can barely wait. "Suddenly everywhere I go people are wanting to talk history," she says enthusiastically down the phone from Perth.
Jewish references erased in newly found Nazi Bible
Source: Daily Mail (UK) (8-7-06)
An institute in Germany has unearthed a Nazi bible ordered by Adolf Hitler to replace the old and new testaments expunged of all references to Jews.
Hitler's race theorists even rewrote the 10 commandments and added two more for good measure in the book called ’German with God’ which was – alongside Hitler’ s autobiography – meant to be required reading in every home in his Third Reich.
Thou shalt not kill, coveting one's neighbour's wife, thou shalt not steal and all other others were scrapped by a regime that stole, murdered and plundered its way across the world.
Hitler admired the ceremony and majesty of the church – he admitted as much in Mein Kampf – but hated its teachings which had no place in his vision of Germanic supermen ruling lesser races devoid of 'outdated' concepts such as mercy and love.
Preserving History and a ‘Fantasy Feeling’
Source: NYT (8-6-06)
A JAPANESE pagoda sits perpendicular to a Swiss chalet, and they share a 32-acre historic campus with a Dutch windmill, a Spanish mission-style home, an American bungalow and an Italian villa. In all, there are 12 architecturally distinct homes placed randomly around the historic National Park Seminary in this city just outside Washington.
Nestled at the tip of Rock Creek Park, the bucolic if overgrown campus in the neighborhood of Forest Glen has been the victim of neglect and vandalism since the late 1970’s, when the Army all but abandoned the site as an annex to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. This once elegant sanctuary, established in 1887, also narrowly escaped demolition.
Organization Celebrates South Carolina's African American Civil War and Reconstruction Period Heroes
Source: Business Wire (8-8-08)
CHARLESTON, S.C.--Aug. 2, 2006--Before great Americans of our times like Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King made their mark on America's racial divide, there were men and women who dedicated their lives to ensuring liberty and justice for all Americans. When the Civil War battlefields fell silent these individuals struggled onward to reconstruct a better America. These men and women are true American heroes who over time have had little, if any, recognition.
One influential group of historians joined together and decided to celebrate the lives of these individuals and their quest for equal rights.
The group created the African American Historical Alliance, a nonprofit organization formally established earlier this year to increase awareness about the role of African Americans in the Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed the war.
Tuesday, August 8, 2006
Thieves steal medals awarded to famous Indian Civil War hero
Source: NBC affiliate (8-8-08)
hieves have stolen a pair of presidential medals awarded to a Seneca Indian from western New York who wrote the final draft of the surrender terms that ended the Civil War.
The medals were awarded after the war to Union officer Ely Parker, the son of an Iroquois chief who became General Ulysses S. Grant's right-hand man during the war.
Officials at the Niagara County Historical Society say the medals were stolen late Saturday afternoon from a Civil War display in one of the organization's buildings in Lockport. The head of the historical society says the items are "extremely valuable."
Parker was told he couldn't join the Union Army because he was an American Indian. Grant, his lifelong friend, intervened on his behalf and Parker rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
Hawaiian temples reveal Polynesian past
Source: ABC.net.au (8-4-06)
An ancient temple system on the Hawaiian island of Maui is about 400 years older than previously thought, according to an extensive archaeological study.
The finding contradicts a prior theory that Maui's temples were built within a span of just a few decades around the year 1600.
Some researchers now think the temples were built over the course of 500 years, with construction cycles peaking during periods of significant political change.
"We see construction phases that parallel shifts in political control," says Associate Professor Michael Kolb, who led the study, which has been accepted for publication in the journal Current Anthropology.
Conservative website blasts Episcopal leader for apologizing for Hiroshima
Source: frontpagemag.com (8-8-06)
In an article published on the homepage of David Horowitz's frontpagemag.com, Mark D. Tooley, who directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy, blasts Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold for managing to find the time during a busy month to apologize for Hiroshima. This is what he says:
Actor playing Churchill in London can't smoke cigar on stage, officials warn
Source: NYT (8-8-06)
Established history bowed to current correctness at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival yesterday when Mel Smith, an actor portraying Winston Churchill, drew back from his threat to light a Havana cigar onstage in defiance of a new Scottish antismoking law, the BBC reported. The Edinburgh City Council had warned it would shut the theater if the law was broken. William Burdett-Coutts, the artistic director of the theater, said he had been told he would lose his Fringe license permanently and be fined about $1,900 if Mr. Smith smoked during his performance in “Allegiance,” about a 1921 visit to London by the Irish leader Michael Collins. But Mr. Burdett-Coutts said he thought it was “stupid when smoking is an integral part of a show to enforce this law.” He added, “I am all for a smoking ban in bars, but not to have an actor smoking while he represents a character in history who did smoke is absurd.”
Hermitage Theft Leads to Curator’s Family
Source: NYT (8-8-06)
An investigation into the theft of 221 objects from the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, has led to the husband and son of a curator who had been responsible for the collection, confirming an initial police theory that the $5 million art theft was an inside job. The curator had been responsible for the Russian enamel and precious metal pieces dating from the middle ages to the 19th century, including delicate masterpieces of Russian Orthodox icon craftsmanship. The items slowly vanished over six years, according to an audit made public a week ago. The curator, identified as Larisa Zavadskaya, died during the audit. Over the weekend her son confessed, the newspaper Izvestia reported.
Victorian jokes reveal history of humour - but we are not amused
Source: Telegraph (UK) (8-8-06)
Question: What's the difference between Joan of Arc and a canoe?
Answer: One is Maid of Orleans and the other is made of wood.
It may not have you splitting your sides, but we are assured that it went down extremely well with audiences at Victorian circuses.
Another Ancient Tomb Discovered in Egypt?
Source: ABC News (8-7-06)
Just months after archaeologists gleefully clamored over the first tomb to be found in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since 1922, there may be another.
Located just meters from the last tomb — KV-63 excavated earlier this year — Nicholas Reeves of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project, working under the Valley of the Kings Foundation, claims the group has detected what he believes will turn out to be another tomb, and possibly a royal one at that.
"This new discovery is important on several levels," he said in an e-mail. "First of all, for what it might turn out to be — perhaps the burial place of Akhenaten's missing women and not impossibly Nefertiti herself, the most beautiful woman of the ancient world.
"Second, for what, in strategic terms, it might do for archaeology in the Valley of the Kings — by its staggering potential to pull Egyptologists up short and ensure that work in the Valley slows down, focuses itself, prepares adequately and doesn't miss a trick either within or outside the tombs when the digging begins."
World War II conference rescheduled for November
Source: neworleanscitybusiness.com (8-8-06)
NEW ORLEANS - The National World War II Museum will present a historic International Conference on World War II, Nov. 16-19.
The conference will be one of the largest gatherings of historians, journalists, Medal of Honor recipients and World War II veterans ever assembled since the end of the war more than 60 years ago. It was originally scheduled for October 2005.
Arab World Finds Icon in Leader of Hezbollah
Source: NYT (8-7-06)
The success or failure of any cease-fire in Lebanon will largely hinge on the opinion of one figure: Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hezbollah, who has seen his own aura and that of his party enhanced immeasurably by battling the Israeli Army for nearly four weeks.
Klimt Paintings Nazis Stole to Be Sold
Source: AP (8-7-06)
Four of five oil paintings by Gustav Klimt that were the focus of a restitution battle between the Austrian government and the artworks' Jewish heirs will be heading to Christie's for sale this fall, the auction house announced Monday.
Christie's has not determined whether the works -- three landscapes and a portrait worth an estimated $100 million -- will be auctioned or sold privately, said Steven Thomas, the Los Angeles attorney who represents the heirs.
''The family only recently decided to go ahead and sell the four paintings,'' Thomas said. ''It's quite possible some or all of them will go to auction in November.''
The four paintings are currently on display at the Neue Galerie, a New York museum of German and Austrian art, along with one of Klimt's most famous works, an ornate portrait of Viennese art patron Adele Bloch-Bauer from 1907.
Database Tells the Stories of 100,000 Mission Indians
Source: LAT (8-8-06)
Reclaiming a neglected part of California's past, historians Monday unveiled an immense data bank that for the first time chronicles the lives and deaths of more than 100,000 Indians in the Spanish missions of the 18th and 19th centuries.
In an eight-year effort, researchers at the Huntington Library in San Marino used handwritten records of baptisms, marriages and deaths at 21 Catholic missions and two other sites from between 1769 and 1850 and created a cross-referenced computerized repository that is now open to public access.
The Early California Population Project, its creators hope, will help bring the state's Spanish colonial and Mexican eras from out of the long shadows cast by the 13 English colonies on the East Coast.
Congress full of fortunate sons -- and other relatives
Source: USA Today (8-8-06)
In 1986, at least 24 U.S. senators and representatives were closely related to governors or other members of Congress, USA TODAY research shows.
Twenty years later, there are more than 50 -- among them four sets of siblings, four widows, dozens of offspring, the wife of a former Senate majority leader and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, wife of a former president and governor.
No official records are kept, but Senate historian Richard Baker says the concentration of relatives is extraordinary. "Sometimes the children of public figures are kept in the shadows," he says. "Now we're seeing this trend or pattern of all in the family."
Titanic director takes on the parting of the Red Sea
Source: The Australian (8-8-06)
James Cameron, the director of Titanic, is the executive producer of a new documentary that claims to have uncovered evidence confirming one of the most dramatic episodes in the Old Testament: the parting of the Red Sea and the Jewish exodus from Egypt.
In The Exodus Decoded, a 90-minute documentary to be shown in the US this month, Cameron and Canadian producer Simcha Jacobovici claim a volcanic eruption on the Greek island of Santorini triggered a chain of catastrophes recorded in the Bible as the 10 plagues God visited on Egypt for enslaving the Jews.
Cameron believes the parting of the Red Sea may have been a tsunami that destroyed the pharaoh's army as it pursued the escaping Jews. The documentary claims the episode occurred not at the Red Sea but at the smaller Sea of Reeds, a marshy area at the northern end of the Gulf of Suez.
Monday, August 7, 2006
Peru link to India archaeological find?
Source: BBC (8-3-06)
Geologists have discovered a striking archaeological feature on a hillock in the Kutch district of the western Indian state of Gujarat.
This feature is shaped like the Roman numeral VI. Each arm of this feature is a trench that is about two metres wide, two metres deep and more than 100 metres long.
The feature has evoked the curiosity of archaeologists because such signs have mostly been observed so far in Peru.
The team, led by Dr RV Karanth, a former professor of geology at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara, Gujarat, has been involved in a palaeoseismological study of the Kutch region for the past 11 years.
Archaeologists ponder Iron Age burial ritual (Scotland)
Source: orkneyjar.com (8-3-06)
After four weeks of excavation at the Knowe o' Skea in Westray, archaeologists Graeme Wilson and Hazel Moore can boast a remarkable statistic.
The burials they have unearthed at the Berstness site make of an incredible 90 per cent of the known Iron Age remains found in Scotland to date.
And this year, the bodies are still turning up.
Prior to the start of work in 2000, Iron Age burials were rare - in the whole of Scotland, let alone Orkney.
Prehistoric causeway is uncovered (UK)
Source: BBC (8-3-06)
Evidence of a prehistoric causeway has been uncovered during flood defence work on the marshes of Suffolk.
Contractors working on the Environment Agency's excavation of a new dyke on Beccles town marshes found timber remains which had been hand-sculpted.
Archaeologists said the wooden causeway was used from the Bronze Age in about 1000BC, through the Iron Age to Roman times and the 4th century AD.
The site will now be analysed and dated with the results published this year.
Cambridge scholar makes rare 30,000-year-old find
Source: physorg,com (8-1-06)
The thumbnail-sized bone fragments are engraved with parallel lines and match similar artefacts uncovered in the same area during the 19th century. They were carved by hunter-gatherers as they slowly made their way north in pursuit of moving populations of mammoth and reindeer 25-30,000 years ago.
The unusual find was made by a Cambridge scholar, Becky Farbstein, who has been working at Predmosti in north Moravia, in the Czech Republic. The excavation team comprises archaeologists from both the University of Cambridge and the Czech Republic.
Experts are, however, still not sure what significance the markings had and are trying to build up a collection to interpret their meaning. So far such finds have been few and far between.
“There has not been much in the way of decorated objects found at this site for a very long time,” Miss Farbstein said. “They are very similar in design to other decorations that were found a century ago. The designs are pretty enigmatic and understanding their meaning is still a problem. But for that reason any addition to the amount of art we have is valuable as it will enable us to piece that meaning together.”
Roads threatening 6000-year-old mound in northern Iran
Source: Tehran Times (7-31-06)
TEHRAN -- Road construction and railroad development are threatening the 6000-year-old Yaqut-Tappeh mound near Behshahr in Iran’s northern province of Mazandaran, the Persian service of CHN reported on Sunday.
A team of archaeologists recently began excavations at Yaqut-Tappeh to save artifacts from sections of the site which will be buried under the road being constructed for Amirabad Port.
Railroad construction previously destroyed over 3000 square meters of the site 70 years ago.
“However, some parts of the mound are still intact. The team has excavated the site and found evidence from the Chalcolithic period, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age,” team director Ali Mahforuzi said.
“The team has also unearthed a 40-centimeter black stratum, which is believed to be sediment brought by a flood over 30,000 years ago. We have discovered three graves dating back to the Iron Age. One of the graves is intact,” he added.
When wildfires put prehistoric sites at risk, archaeologists work with crews to help protect centuries of California's heritage
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (7-16-06)
Patterson , Stanislaus County -- As nearby hillsides were covered with orange flames and thick black smoke, two archaeologists stared with wonder -- not up at the raging forest fire but down at three prehistoric stone grinding tools they had just discovered on the ground.
"Look at these artifacts -- they are as well preserved as anything you could ever find," archaeologist Richard Jenkins said as he examined a mortar stone with a perfectly rounded indentation. "This whole settlement is in great shape. It's survived for hundreds of years. Hopefully it will make it through this fire without major damage."
As about 2,000 of their colleagues at the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection were fighting the Canyon fire all last week, Jenkins and Chuck Whatford searched the fire scene in the rugged mountains east of San Jose looking for archaeological sites worth documenting and -- if possible -- saving.
Jenkins and Whatford are two of six CDF archaeologists who document prehistoric and historic sites for firefighters to be aware of when fighting a wildland fire. On Friday, they used pink tape to warn their colleagues about three archaeological sites that were directly in the path of the Canyon fire.
New photo of 'Lady of the Lamp'
Source: BBC (8-6-06)
A previously unseen photograph of Florence Nightingale is going on display to mark the 150th anniversary of her return from the Crimean War.
Taken by amateur photographer William Slater, the picture shows the "lady of the lamp" sitting reading outside her family home in Embley Park, Hampshire.
The newly discovered photograph will go on display until 7 November at the Florence Nightingale Museum in London.
She gained worldwide renown for her work as a nurse during the Crimean War.
Dig turning up information on famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass
Source: AP (8-7-06)
EASTON, Md.--The Great House still stands on the plantation where Frederick Douglass spent his childhood. But the quarters where the famed abolitionist once lived along with other slaves are long gone from the 350-year-old estate.
While the history of the Lloyd family, which has owned the property since the 1600s, is well documented, much less is known about the daily lives of their slaves.
University of Maryland archaeologists hoping to flesh out the story of those who built and worked on the estate are wrapping up their second season at Wye House, guided in part by Douglass' account of his childhood in slavery.
Jennifer Babiarz, a university archaeologist supervising the dig, said slaves such as those who worked at the plantation were the backbone of Maryland's early economy.
"We were very interested in what daily life would have been like for people who were enslaved on this plantation and making sure that people knew the rich history, not just of the Lloyds, but of all the people who lived and worked here," Babiarz said.
Gibson linked to Holocaust deniers
Source: scotsman.com (8-7-06)
ACTOR Mel Gibson was once involved in providing support for a friend who was member of a far-right group in Australia known for its antisemitic views, according to newspaper reports.
The actor, who last week allegedly harangued police with an antisemitic outburst after being arrested on suspicion of drunk driving California, was said to have campaigned for Robin Taylor, a member of the Australian League of Rights, who stood unsuccessfully for a local government seat in northern Victoria in 1987.
Bones of a Georgia Saint?
Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (8-7-06)
he weathered skull in Chris Stojanowski's luggage passed through Atlanta's airport security without turning a single head.
As cold cases go, the cranium in his custom-made carry-on case was a classic. A long time ago, someone lost his head --- this particular head --- near present-day Darien, on the Georgia coast.
Now Stojanowski, a bioarchaeologist at Arizona State University's new School of Human Evolution and Social Change, wants to find out more about the brittle skull which, until recently, was gathering dust in a Georgia laboratory.
The Rev. Conrad Harkins is curious, too. For more than a decade, he has worked tirelessly to see that five Spanish missionaries killed by Indians on the Georgia coast in 1597 are recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as martyrs and, perhaps in time, as saints.
Are these the relics of a prospective saint, or just the bones of another sinner? Time --- along with some forensic investigation, a little DNA analysis and some luck --- may tell.
A half-century after the skull was unearthed at the site of a former Spanish mission near Darien, and 20 years after the Diocese of Savannah proposed beatification for the "Georgia martyrs," science and religion have found a common bond in their curiosity about the weathered remains.
Declassified papers show U.S. atrocities in Vietnam went far beyond My Lai
Source: LA Times (8-6-06)
A once-secret archive, assembled by a Pentagon task force in the early 1970s, that shows that confirmed atrocities by U.S. forces in Vietnam were more extensive than was previously known.
Shining a Light on the 'Dark Lady of DNA'
Source: US News (8-6-06)
Four people in England, back in 1953, gazed at the mysterious image called Photo 51. It wasn't much--a grainy picture showing a black X. But three of these people won the Nobel Prize for figuring out what the photo really showed--the shape of DNA, the basic unit of life on Earth. The discovery brought fame and fortune to scientists James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins. The fourth, the one who actually made the picture, was left out.
Her name was Rosalind Franklin. "She should have been up there," says Mary Ellen Bowden, a historian at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. "If her images hadn't been there, the others couldn't have come up with the structure." One reason Franklin was missing was that she had died of cancer four years before the Nobel decision, and it can't be awarded after death. But there is a growing suspicion among scholars that Franklin was not only robbed of her life by disease but robbed of credit by her competitors. She, as much as the men around her, was first in the race to understand DNA.
Ancient dagger found in Bulgaria
Source: BBC (8-6-06)
Archaeologists have discovered a precious golden dagger dated to about 3,000BC in a Thracian tomb in the centre of Bulgaria.
Sunday, August 6, 2006
Cuban Americans will have to craft a new identity if the island turns democratic
Source: LAT (8-6-06)
FIDEL CASTRO once famously acknowledged that his revolution required an "enemy," an "antithesis," a "counterrevolution" in order to develop. For nearly half a century, Cuban Americans have also largely defined themselves, socially and politically, in opposition to their enemy, Castro's regime.
Preferring to see themselves as exiles rather than as immigrants, Cubans in the United States cling to a powerful exodus story -- full of loss, longing and redemptive possibilities -- that has given meaning to their hardships and inspired their impressive climb up the American social ladder. Last week, news of Castro's incapacity sparked speculation about what a post-Fidel Cuba would look like. But there's another pressing question: What will become of Cuban Americans if and when the island opens up?
The Search For John Paul Jone's Lost Ship
Source: The Hartford Courant (8-6-06)
The Battle of Flamborough Head, as it came to be called, entered sailing history as one of the most epic single-ship actions ever, and made Jones a celebrity on both sides of the Atlantic. The Bonhomme Richard and its opponent, the HMS Serapis, each lost half its crew in a battle so improbably fearsome it would seem lifted from a Patrick O'Brian novel. For more than an hour, the two ships fought hull-to-hull, firing and on fire at the same time. Bound together by grappling hooks and fallen masts, the ships were so close that the Jones' crew could hack at the long ramrods British gunners wielded to reload their cannon.
Eventually the Serapis' heavier guns inflicted so much damage that their cannon balls began to fly straight through Jones' ship, touching nothing. When two of his junior officers tried to surrender, believing their captain dead and their ship lost, an enraged Jones leveled a pistol at one and pulled the trigger. Then, when the gun misfired, he threw it at the fleeing pair, breaking one's skull.
Now an attempt is underway to literally resurrect Jones' ship and its place in history. Since mid-July, an expedition launched from the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut in Groton has been searching the North Sea for the wreck of the Bonhomme Richard. Already sinking under its still fighting crew, it went down the next day, abandoned by Jones in favor of the captured Serapis.
The day before he left for England, the chief organizer of the hunt, Ret. Navy Capt. John ``Jack'' Ringelberg, turned on his office computer and punched up a map of the approximate search location. It is off Flamborough Head in water about 200 feet deep. The map showed a grid of overlapping rectangles plotted by computer from first-hand battle reports and estimates of where the Bonhomme Richard might have drifted in the 36 hours before it sank.
Playing a Historical Figure, You Can Copy ... or Conquer
Source: NYT (8-6-06)
AS the seasonal tide of film biographies begins to rise, Hollywood will soon be caught up in a favorite debate of recent years: Is it better to mimic or to transcend?
9/11 Commissioners Say They Went Easy on Giuliani to Avoid Public’s Anger
Source: NYT (8-6-06)
The independent federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks did not pursue a tough enough line of questioning with former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani during a hearing two years ago because its members feared public anger if they challenged him, according to a new book written by the panel’s leaders.
“It proved difficult, if not impossible, to raise hard questions about 9/11 in New York without it being perceived as criticism of the individual police and firefighters or of Mayor Giuliani,” wrote the chairman and vice chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican, and Lee H. Hamilton, a Democrat, in their book, “Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission.”
“We did not ask tough questions, nor did we get all of the information we needed to put on the public record,” they wrote.
Saturday, August 5, 2006
Beams Reveal Archimedes' Hidden Writings
Source: AP (8-4-06)
Previously hidden writings of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being uncovered with powerful X-ray beams nearly 800 years after a Christian monk scrubbed off the text and wrote over it with prayers.
Over the past week, researchers at Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park have been using X-rays to decipher a fragile 10th century manuscript that contains the only copies of some of Archimedes' most important works.
Culture Wars Seen Within Political Parties
Source: NYT (8-5-06)
"Despite talk of ‘culture wars’ and the high visibility of activist groups on both sides of the cultural divide, there has been no polarization of the public into liberal and conservative camps.”
That was the conclusion that researchers from the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life drew from the latest in their periodic surveys of public opinion, conducted from July 6 to July 19 and released Thursday.
Americans, the researchers wrote, “are conservative in opposing gay marriage and gay adoption, liberal in favoring embryonic stem cell research, and a little of both on abortion.”
Japan: Candidate in Secret War Shrine Visit
Source: NYT (8-5-06)
Shinzo Abe, the front-runner in the race to become the next prime minister, visited the Yasukuni Shrine war memorial in April, according to Japanese news reports. Mr. Abe, the chief cabinet secretary and a right-wing nationalist who is expected to succeed Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi when he retires next month, refused to confirm news of his visit, which was reported by all the major news media. The reports of the visit drew criticism from South Korean and Chinese officials, who regard the shrine, where Class A war criminals are deified, as a symbol of Japanese militarism.
Friday, August 4, 2006
The Hard Disk That Changed the World: 50th anniversary
Source: Newsweek (8-7-06)
IBM delivered the first disk drive 50 years ago. It was about the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton.
Conyers' Report Newly Updated: "Constitution in Crisis"
Source: Introduction to the newly revised report filed by Rep. John Conyers (8-3-06)
I (anti-immigrant “Palmer Raids”); World War II (internment of Japanese Americans); and the Vietnam War (COINTELPRO); the risks to our citizens’ rights today are potentially more grave, as the war on terror has no specific end point. - are quite serious. However, the current Majority Party has shown little inclination to engage in basic oversight, let alone question the Administration directly. The media, though showing some signs of aggressiveness as of late, is increasingly concentrated and all too often unwilling to risk the enmity or legal challenge from the party in charge. At the same time, unlike previous threats to civil liberties posed by the Civil War (suspension of habeas corpus and eviction of the Jews from portions of the Southern States); World War - even if presidential pardons ultimately prevented a full measure of justice.
The situation we find ourselves in today under the administration of George W. Bush is systemically different. The alleged acts of wrongdoing my staff has documented- which include making misleading statements about the decision to go to war; manipulating intelligence; facilitating and countenancing torture; using classified information to out a CIA agent; and violating federal surveillance and privacy laws Scandals such as Watergate and Iran-Contra are widely considered to be constitutional crises. They were in the sense that the executive branch was acting in violation of the law and in tension with the Majority Party in the Congress. But the system of checks and balances put in place by the founding fathers worked, the abuses were investigated, and actions were taken
Small Indiana town singing tune of racial, ethnic harmony
Source: USA Today (8-3-06)
Local folklore has it that the small town of Bluffton, Ind., once had an ordinance to keep blacks out, Mayor Ted Ellis says. He never found proof but says he wondered why Bluffton remained 96% white while many other cities became more diverse.
"I always thought that Bluffton was no more hostile than other communities around," Ellis says.
Then came an anonymous letter about 18 months ago. It was a photocopy of a newspaper clipping about the opening of a restaurant in this town of 10,000 people about 25 minutes south of Fort Wayne. A hand-printed message above the photo of the restaurant owner, a college professor who is a Sikh, read, "We don't wear turbans in Bluffton ... we speak English."
Ellis was appalled. "I just felt I had been hit in the gut when I got that," he says.
He invited the businessman to his state of the city address, seated him at his table and got his first standing ovation in 10 years as mayor.
"The leadership of the community has its heart in the right place," he says. "But it certainly illustrated that no matter how nice we are to one another, there still is an underlying current."
U.S. denies misuse of Law Regarding Those Who 'Espoused Terrorism'
Source: WaPo (8-4-06)
When Waskar Ari traveled to Bolivia last year, after completing a doctorate at Georgetown University, he meant to stay there for 10 days. The historian was due back last fall to start a professorship at the University of Nebraska. A year later, he is still waiting to return. Ari, an Aymara Indian, is one of a growing number of foreign scholars whose visas have been revoked or whose applications have been denied -- barred, according to civil rights and academic groups, for their ideological or political views. While the federal government denies this is happening, free-speech advocates and Ari's attorney say the practice is reaching near-epidemic proportions.
"We have a serious problem," said Robert Kreiser of the American Association of University Professors, who has written to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the issue and says the problem is growing. "This places a serious chill on the exercise of academic freedom." The American Civil Liberties Union is tracking up to 15 cases, including Ari's, in which it thinks people have been banned for their beliefs. While ideology is rarely given as the official reason, the ACLU said academics increasingly are being interrogated about their political beliefs when they apply for visas.
Paper set to restart history wars in Australia
Source: The Age )Australia) (8-4-06)
The history wars are about to be reignited, thanks to a paper that argues that Australian history in schools focuses "excessively" on topics such as the Vietnam War and the Whitlam government while ignoring issues such as economic development.
Advocates Say U.S. Bars Many Academics
Source: WaPo (8-4-06)
When Waskar Ari traveled to Bolivia last year, after completing a doctorate at Georgetown University, he meant to stay there for 10 days. The historian was due back last fall to start a professorship at the University of Nebraska. A year later, he is still waiting to return.
Ari, an Aymara Indian, is one of a growing number of foreign scholars whose visas have been revoked or whose applications have been denied -- barred, according to civil rights and academic groups, for their ideological or political views. While the federal government denies this is happening, free-speech advocates and Ari's attorney say the practice is reaching near-epidemic proportions.
Thursday, August 3, 2006
Group blasts Arizona for requiring flags in every classroom but not history
Source: American Council of Trustees and Alumni (7-24-06)
Arizona’s legislature recently earned national attention by requiring the American flag in all public classrooms. But according to the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Arizona’s leaders left a much bigger problem unsolved: None of the state’s major public universities requires the study of American history.
“The Arizona legislature’s desire to protect our national heritage is commendable,” ACTA president Anne D. Neal said. “But symbols of America are only valuable when students understand their significance, and we have no reason to believe that Arizona’s students do. The governor and the legislature should urge these institutions to fix this problem.”
On June 20, the Arizona House of Representatives and Senate approved House Bill 2583, which requires the prominent display of an American flag—as well as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—in every Arizona public school classroom from kindergarten through college. Gov. Janet Napolitano signed the bill into law on June 28.
Incumbent senators who have lost primary races: The List
Source: AP (7-29-06)
A list of incumbent senators who have lost their primaries since 1950:
Year Senator Party State
2002 Robert C. Smith R N.H.
1996 Sheila Frahm R Kan.
1992 Alan Dixon D Ill.
1980 Mike Gravel D Alaska
1980 Jacob Javits R N.Y.
1980 Donald Stewart D Ala.
1980 Richard Stone D Fla.
1978 Clifford Case R N.J.
1976 James Buckley C N.Y.
1974 J.W. Fulbright D Ark.
1974 Howard Metzenbaum D Ohio
1972 David Gambrell D Ga.
1972 Everett Jordan D N.C.
1970 Ralph Yarborough D Texas
1968 Ernest Gruening D Alaska
1968 Thomas Kuchel R Calif.
1968 Frank Lausche D Ohio
1968 Edward Long D Mo.
1966 Ross Bass D Tenn.
1966 A. Willis Robertson D Va.
1958 William Blakely D Texas
1954 Alton Lennon D N.C.
1952 Owen Brewster R Maine
1952 Kenneth McKellar D Tenn.
1950 Chan Gurney R S.D.
1950 Claude Pepper D Fla.
1950 Glen Taylor D Idaho
1950 Elmer Thomas D Okla.
___
Source: The Senate Historian's Office
The Search For John Paul Jones's Lost Ship
Source: Hartford Courant (8-3-06)
An attempt is underway to literally resurrect John Paul Jones' ship, the Bonhomme Richard, and its place in history. Since mid-July, an expedition launched from the Avery Point campus of the University of Connecticut in Groton has been searching the North Sea for the wreck of the Bonhomme Richard.
Library Reverses Rejection of ‘Potentially Incendiary' Book
Source: NY Sun (8-3-06)
The Brooklyn Public Library has agreed to stock a book that refers to London as a hotbed of terrorism, as an acquisitions librarian who initially rejected a patron's suggestion to buy the book, calling it "potentially incendiary," reversed his decision.
The librarian, Wayne Roylance, changed his mind days after the patron, disappointed with the decision, emailed him prominent critics' appraisals of the book, "Londonistan" by Melanie Phillips, a library spokeswoman said.
The 2006 book blames extreme multiculturalism for making the city what it calls a jihad Petri dish that produces attacks such as a transit bombing last July that killed 52 commuters. The library's spokeswoman, Stefanie Arch, defended the decisions leading to the "Londonistan" acquisition, noting that the library's procedures eventually worked, as the book was ordered.
"He misspoke when he used that term," Ms. Arch said, referring to the "potentially incendiary" characterization, "and he apologized."
Bronze Age boating in Scotland
Source: Scotsman.com (8-1-06)
IN ANCIENT times, when Scotland was virtually covered in dense forest, there was only one way to get around. Traveling by boat helped early Scots to find food and trade goods with their neighbours.
Now, with the excavation of a 3,000-year-old log boat, archaeologists are hoping to learn more about how prehistoric Scots used the vast network of rivers and lochs. . .
While the remains of 30 log boats survive today – the oldest was a stern portion of a log boat, carbon dated to 1800BC found in Dumfriesshire in 1973 – most are in extremely poor condition. The Carpow boat is not only still in one piece but it also has an intact transom board at the stern.
Full story here.
Greek Subway Dig Excites Archaeologists
Source: Guardian (7-27-06)
THESSALONIKI, Greece (AP) - Another subway in Greece, another look into the past.
Tunneling work to build a metro system for the country's second-largest city started Thursday, as Culture Ministry officials signed an agreement to protect antiquities they expect to be discovered during construction.
The agreement follows a massive horde of antiquities uncovered while building a new subway system in Athens, which opened in 2000, with extensions added before the 2004 Olympics. Some of the discoveries are on display at Athens stations.
The subway system for Thessaloniki, where some 1.3 million people live, will span about 6 miles with 13 stations and is due to be completed by 2012, at an estimated cost of $1.27 billion.
The history of England: Domesday goes digital
Source: Independent (UK) (8-3-06)
Tomorrow, 920 years after it was compiled by an anonymous scribe, William the Conqueror's epic audit of life in medieval times will become available on the internet.
Tree carvings reveal lives of Basque gold rush diaspora
Source: Independent (UK) (8-3-06)
For decades, anthropologists have combed the mountainous landscape of south-west France and the Spanish Pyrenees in an attempt to piece together the history of the Basque diaspora. Now, researchers are completing the puzzle with the help of a treasure trove of arborglyphs; thousands of 19th- and 20th-century tree carvings elaborately etched on to the trunks of aspen trees in the United States.
Some are rallying political cries for Basque solidarity, others depict the sexual fantasies of a lonely farmer, and many are no different from the graffiti found on school desks, simply stating such things as "Joxe was here".
Researchers cataloguing the arborglyphs say the carvings provide a blueprint for Basque immigration patterns and expose the psyche of the solitary sheepherder caught up in the Gold Rush that swept across the western US in the 1850s.
"The trees are a wonderful window into the Basque immigrant's way of life from the turn of the century to today. They provide insight into a group that is largely inaccessible in any other way" John Bieter, executive director of the Cenarrusa Centre for Basque Studies at Boise State University in Idaho, told The Independent.
Restored, an Emperor’s Lair Will Be Forbidden No More
Source: NYT (8-2-06)
John Stubbs, an American historic preservationist, had flicked on his flashlight and was slowly ascending a darkened staircase inside the Forbidden City when he stopped at a dusty paneled wall etched with elegant lines of calligraphy.
First official history of Iraq rebuilding effort
Source: NYT (8-2-06)
The United States should create a “deployable reserve” of contracting experts for emergency reconstruction efforts like the one in Iraq and should change federal law to remove the legal straitjackets that have helped slow the effort there, the first official history of the Iraq rebuilding effort has concluded.
Hermitage Is Reeling From Loss of Artworks
Source: NYT (8-2-06)
No more than four people at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg regularly visited the repository from which 221 objects have apparently been stolen, the museum’s director said on Tuesday.
Bush’s Embrace of Israel Shows Gap With Father
Source: NYT (8-2-06)
When they first met as United States president and Israeli prime minister, George W. Bush made clear to Ariel Sharon he would not follow in the footsteps of his father.
The first President Bush had been tough on Israel, especially the Israeli settlements in occupied lands that Mr. Sharon had helped develop. But over tea in the Oval Office that day in March 2001 — six months before the Sept. 11 attacks tightened their bond — the new president signaled a strong predisposition to support Israel.
“He told Sharon in that first meeting that I’ll use force to protect Israel, which was kind of a shock to everybody,” said one person present, given anonymity to speak about a private conversation. “It was like, ‘Whoa, where did that come from?’ “
Wednesday, August 2, 2006
Bush Makes Last Call at Briefing Room
Source: NYT (8-2-06)
President Bush offered White House reporters plush armchair seating in the West Wing briefing room, with suede or velvet upholstery, and double the space.
Then he took it all back.
''Forget it,'' the president said Wednesday, as he and reporters bid goodbye to the briefing room and work spaces that the White House press corps has occupied in some form since the Nixon administration. ''You get to work like the rest of us,'' Bush said.
What reporters hope the president and his aides don't take back are their promises that the media's eviction from West Wing quarters will not be permanent.
University of Texas gets new material on 1966 tower attack
Source: Bryan-College Station Eagle (8-2-06)
On the 40th anniversary of one of its darkest days, the University of Texas took possession of a box of documents related to the infamous massacre at the school's landmark tower. The university's Center for American History accepted the documents Tuesday from a bookstore chain pertaining to what was then the nation's worst mass shooting.
Long-forgotten papers may offer a new road map for Middle East peace
Source: The Age (Australia) (8-2-06)
The key to unlocking the Lebanese crisis may come down to a small plot of land, a badly drawn map, a softly spoken historian and some long-forgotten papers in an archive in Paris.
The presidential pen and signing statements: History makes a statement
Source: Salt Lake Tribune (8-2-06)
President Bush may have issued only one veto, but he has added more than 750 "signing statements" to new laws on issues such as detainee torture, the USA Patriot Act and whistle-blower protections. Last week, a task force from the American Bar Association came out against presidents using such statements to show their intention "to disregard or decline to enforce all or part of a law." The ABA also detailed how Bush is far from the first president to add his own interpretation to congressional legislation.
Group pushing for American History requirement for college graduation
Source: KVOA 4 (Tucson) (8-2-06)
A national group is asking Arizona's public universities to require at least one United States history course of every student before graduation.
Cracks May Force Replacement of Tomb
Source: NYT (8-2-06)
Most visitors are probably too busy watching the polished guards make their endless march in front of the Tomb of the Unknowns to see the cracks working their way across the monument. But each year those cracks creep farther and deeper.
The tomb, a must-see stop for the four million annual visitors to Arlington National Cemetery, is not in danger of crumbling anytime soon. But the cemetery is deciding whether to patch the fissures or replace the marble altogether.
“We know this is not a stagnant thing,” said John C. Metzler Jr., the cemetery’s superintendent. “This thing is continuing to move.” Mr. Metzler said he feared that some of the carved sculptures could eventually fall off.
New interest in alchemists
Source: NYT (8-1-06)
Historians of science are taking a new and lively interest in alchemy, the often mystical investigation into the hidden mysteries of nature that reached its heyday in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and has been an embarrassment to modern scientists ever since.
Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Art-history scholars face narrowing publishing venues and rising permissions costs. But a report signals that help is on the way.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed (8-1-06)
If scholarly publishing had an endangered-species list, the art monograph would be at the top. At least that's the perception of many art historians as they struggle to publish their work.
"Between dwindling sales and the soaring costs of acquiring illustrations and the permission to publish them, this segment of the publishing industry has become so severely compromised that the art monograph is now seriously endangered and could very well outpace the silvery minnow in its rush to extinction," writes Susan M. Bielstein in a recent call to arms, Permissions, A Survival Guide: Blunt Talk About Art as Intellectual Property, published this spring by the University of Chicago Press.
As the press's executive editor for art and architecture, Ms. Bielstein writes from the barricades. She knows that publishing art monographs costs a pretty penny. Art historians need high-quality illustrations to support their arguments, but in most cases, they must shell out for reproducible images, even of works in the public domain. And they, not their publishers, foot those bills. "It's not unusual for a scholar working on the Renaissance to pay $10,000 or $15,000 to illustrate a book that may sell only 400 or 500 copies," she says in an interview. Contemporary subjects still under copyright, and subject to an artist's or estate's whims, can prove to be an even costlier proposition.
Graves searched for 'black Paul Bunyan'
Source: AP (7-28-06)
EAST HADDAM, Conn. - Archaeologists have begun digging up the 200-year-old graves of a slave family in hopes of separating fact from fiction in the legend of "the black Paul Bunyan."
Skeptic on 9/11 Prompts Questions on Academic Freedom
Source: NYT (8-1-06)
MADISON, Wis., July 26 — Sipping on a bottle of water and holding a book about the history and future of Islam, Kevin Barrett ticked off a few examples of what he saw as evidence that the Sept. 11 attacks had been an “inside job.”
As children zoomed by on tricycles and shot basketballs at a community center near his home, Mr. Barrett, 47, described how some news orgainzations (the French daily newspaper Figaro and Radio France International, in fact) had reported that an agent from the Central Intelligence Agency visited with Osama bin Laden two months before the attacks. He also said fires could not have caused the collapse of the World Trade Center towers at free-fall speed, as reported by the special Sept. 11 commission. “The 9/11 report will be universally reviled as a sham and a cover-up very soon,” said Mr. Barrett, who has been a teacher’s assistant or lecturer on Islam, African literature and other subjects at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1996. “The 9/11 commission has its conspiracy theory, and we have ours.”
Mr. Barrett’s views, which he described on a conservative radio talk show in June, have outraged some Wisconsin legislators and generated a fierce debate about academic freedom on a campus long known as a haven for progressive ideologies and student activism.
“They apparently have no limits to what can be taught in the classroom,” Representative Steve Nass said of the university’s decision to allow Mr. Barrett to teach a class this fall titled “Islam: Religion and Culture.”
Irish bog bodies help unlock secrets of Iron Age
Source: Yahoo News (8-1-06)
Life in the Iron Age may have been nasty, brutish and short but people still found time to style their hair and polish their fingernails -- and that was just the men. These are the findings of scientists who have been examining the latest preserved prehistoric bodies to emerge from Ireland's peat bogs -- the first to be found in Europe for 20 years.
California to establish a Hall of Fame, Disney, Reagan and Alice Walker among 1st inductees
Source: San Francisco Chronicle (8-1-06)
California joined the ranks of the National Football League and Major League Baseball on Monday, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and first lady Maria Shriver announced the creation of a hall of fame to honor great Californians.
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