This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream
media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously
biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in
each source note. Quotation marks are not used.
Source: Baltic Times
11-26-10
VILNIUS - Embassies from seven European countries have sent a joint letter of protest to the Lithuanian government and president over comments from a Lithuanian Interior Ministry official denying the holocaust.
In a column for Veidas, one of Lithuania's largest and most popular weeklies, historian and interior ministry advisor Dr Petras Stankeras said that the holocaust was a "legend" and that the Nuremberg trial was "the biggest legal farce in history"....
Source: Boston Globe
11-28-10
During a 1962 news conference, a reporter asked President John F. Kennedy if he’d consider locating his presidential library in Washington, D.C., after leaving the White House so scholars and historians would have the broadest possible access to it. No, he replied playfully, “I’m going to put it in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”...
A four-year, $10 million effort to digitize the JFK Library and Museum’s archives, making hundreds of thousands of documents, photographs, and recordings ava
Source: Politico
11-28-10
Presidential biographer Edmund Morris delivered one of the more, well, colorful lines on this week's Sunday morning shows.
On CBS's "Face the Nation," host Bob Schieffer, anchoring an authors roundtable discussion with the likes of Bob Woodward and Arianna Huffington, kept engaging the panelists in discussion about how America’s Founding Fathers would have felt about today’s political climate.
“What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today’s politics, Edmund?”
Source: Houston Chronicle
11-28-10
HOUSTON — In retrospect, Raul Ramos says his first eight years at the University of Houston were spent in "blissful ignorance."
"I didn't know how parking works, how the dining halls work, how financial aid works," said the associate professor of history. "Now I do."
Ramos, 43, is fully immersed in campus life, living in a dorm for the first time in more than two decades, along with his wife, Elizabeth Chiao, and their sons, Noe and Joaqui
Source: Yale Daily News
11-29-10
History professor Jon Butler will become Acting University Librarian Dec. 1, just months after stepping down as dean of the Graduate School.
Butler, whose six-year term as dean ended this June, was on leave to write a book, but has agreed to assume leadership of Yale’s libraries after the sudden death of University Librarian Frank Turner GRD ’71 from a pulmonary embolism Nov 11. Until a new librarian is found, Butler said he will work full time in the post and will resume his leave
Source: Columbia Journalism Review
11-29-10
If there were prizes given for the most one-sided, misleading story about Social Security this year, a segment aired on the CBS Evening News before Thanksgiving would make a great candidate.
In a breathless recitation of the horrors befalling the system, CBS painted a grim picture of Social Security, using scare words and phrases like “the system is headed for a crisis,” “the government is confronting a painful reality,” and “there’s no debating that we’re running out of time.” How’
Source: International Business Times
11-30-10
After enjoying nearly two decades of an unprecedented economic prosperity at home, many Irish are now seeking to leave for greener pastures elsewhere as the nation finds itself on the brink of an economic collapse.
This new phenomena actually would restore the paradigm Ireland has historically been associated with ever since the potato famine of the 1840s -- a country of mass emigration....
The story of Irish emigration stretches back 170 years to the tragic days of the
Source: NYT
11-29-10
ATLANTA — The Civil War, the most wrenching and bloody episode in American history, may not seem like much of a cause for celebration, especially in the South.
And yet, as the 150th anniversary of the four-year conflict gets under way, some groups in the old Confederacy are planning at least a certain amount of hoopla, chiefly around the glory days of secession, when 11 states declared their sovereignty under a banner of states’ rights and broke from the union....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
11-29-10
He is celebrated as the humble Italian weaver who ended up discovering the Americas.
But the conventional wisdom relating to Christopher Columbus is under threat after academics concluded the explorer was actually a Polish immigrant.
An international team of distinguished professors have completed 20 years of painstaking research into his beginnings....
‘Another nutty conspiracy theory! That’s what I first supposed as I started to read... I now believe that
Source: Juneau Empire
11-29-10
Bob DeArmond, a prolific writer about the history of Alaska and one of the founding fathers of the city of Pelican, died Friday at home in Sitka. He was 99.
DeArmond also wrote for several Southeast Alaska publications, including the Empire and the Ketchikan Daily News....
Source: NYT
11-29-10
The documents of Mozart’s life — letters, memoirs of friends, portraits, bureaucratic files — have long been scrutinized at a microscopic level. So when his name was discovered two decades ago in a Viennese archive from 1791, it caused a stir.
The archive showed that an aristocratic friend and fellow Freemason, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, had sued Mozart over a debt and won a judgment of 1,435 florins and 32 kreutzer in Austrian currency of the time (nearly twice Mozart’s yearly income)
Source: NYT
11-27-10
Margaret T. Burroughs, a founder of the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, one of the first museums devoted to black history and culture in the United States, died on Sunday in Chicago. She was 95.
Her death was confirmed by her grandson Eric Toller.
Mrs. Burroughs, an artist and high school teacher, shared with her husband, Charles, an interest in history and a desire to celebrate the achievements of black Americans. In 1961, using their own collect
Source: Fox News
11-24-10
As families across America gather to give thanks this Thursday, one star who is determined to make sure her family doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving is Angelina Jolie, according to a report from PopEater.com....
“Jolie hates this holiday and wants no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans,” the friend said. “To celebrate what the white settlers did to the native Indians, the domination of one culture over another, just isn’t her style. She definitely doesn’t want to tea
Source: National Security Archive at GWU
11-16-10
Washington, D.C., November 16, 2010 - To counter a Soviet bomber attack, U.S. war plans contemplated widespread use of thousands of air defense weapons during the middle years of the Cold War according to declassified documents posted today at the National Security Archive's Nuclear Vault and cited by a recently published book, Continental Defense in the Eisenhower Era: Nuclear Antiaircraft Arms and the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan) by historian Christopher J. Bright. The U.S. government public
Source: WaPo
11-22-10
CHICAGO -- A founder of one of the oldest African-American history museums in the country has died.
A spokesman for the DuSable Museum of African American History in Chicago, Raymond Ward, says Margaret Burroughs died in her sleep at her Chicago home Sunday morning at age 93.
Further details were not immediately available.
President Barack Obama said in a statement that Burroughs was "widely admired for her contributions to American culture as an estee
Source: NYT
11-21-10
...Forget what you learned about the first Thanksgiving being a celebration of a bountiful harvest, or an expression of gratitude to the Indians who helped the Pilgrims through those harsh first months in an unfamiliar land. In the Tea Party view of the holiday, the first settlers were actually early socialists. They realized the error of their collectivist ways and embraced capitalism, producing a bumper year, upon which they decided that it was only right to celebrate the glory of the free mar
Source: Telegraph (UK)
11-20-10
Nothing can dampen Simon Schama's enthusiasm for telling stories – not even being caught in a south Indian rainstorm. When I meet him at The Week Hay Festival in Kerala, his white, Indian-style shirt is soaked and his greying hair is dripping. But the 65-year-old professor of history and art history at Columbia University cannot wait to defend his latest project.
When Michael Gove, the Education Secretary, appointed him in October as a government adviser on history teaching in schoo
Source: AOL News
11-19-10
WASHINGTON (Nov. 18) -- As the baby boomers who gave us the term "generation gap" turn 65, a new divide is opening between young and old over everything from health care to gay rights to the right to get high.
Republicans and Democrats alike insist it's time to stop piling debt onto future generations, yet political observers say the electoral clout of seniors may prove the biggest obstacle to reining in government spending. And just as in the 1960s, when many older Americ
Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
11-19-10
...As Kate Middleton and Prince William have thrilled the British public this week with the news of their engagement, there's been barely a whisper about the fact that they've been co-habitating on and off for years.
"It's amazing how little one has heard about the co-habitation issue," said Deborah Cohen, a professor at Northwestern University who specializes in modern British history. "The modernization of the monarchy has developed very quickly in the last 30-plus
Source: NYT
11-18-10
A man convicted of impersonating a New York University scholar in a debate over the Dead Sea Scrolls was sentenced on Thursday to six months in jail and five years’ probation.
The man, Raphael Haim Golb, was taken from a courtroom in State Supreme Court in Manhattan in handcuffs, after which one of his lawyers headed to the appellate division to ask that he be allowed to remain free pending appeal.
Mr. Golb, 50, a real estate lawyer, was convicted in September on 30 of
