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: NPR
October 18, 2008
Retired U.S. Marine Col. Timothy Geraghty says the morning of Oct. 23, 1983, was a bright one — before a truck filled with explosives slammed into the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Hundreds of U.S. troops were killed in what was the deadliest day for America's military since 1945.
Geraghty was in command of the 24th Marine Amphibious Unit in Beirut at the time of the attack. He says the massive explosion — nearly 25 years ago to the day — blew out the windows of his office.
Source: AP
October 17, 2008
It's long been a mystery why the H.L. Hunley never returned after becoming the first submarine in history to sink an enemy warship in 1864, but new research announced Friday may lend credence to one of the theories. Scientists found the eight-man crew of the hand-cranked Confederate submarine had not set the pump to remove water from the crew compartment, which might indicate it was not being flooded.
That could mean crew members suffocated as they used up air, perhaps while waitin
Source: http://www.historynet.com (date uncertain)
September 13, 2008
General Thomas J. Jackson is fascinating for many reasons. He was a brilliant tactician, a very determined student, a man intent on improving himself, a man enamored of home and family, a Virginia gentleman. In today’s language, Jackson’s vision of how the Civil War should be fought would be called guerilla warfare.
Housed in Special Collections, University of Virginia Library are two memoirs about Jackson written by Clement Daniels Fishburne (1832-1907), a good friend from Lexingto
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 16, 2008
A politician's call for British history to become the focus of world history lessons in Australian schools has angered the country's academics.
Tony Abbott, an Opposition frontbencher, had said the history component of a new draft national curriculum failed to give Britain due credit for shaping Australia.
He said Australians were "a product of English-speaking civilisation" and that English history should be at the core of history classes – a claim strongly d
Source: Reuters
October 17, 2008
In the past two and a half thousand years, the temples of the Acropolis have suffered fire, bombing and earthquake. Now, scientists are trying to save them from a new modern enemy: pollution.
Standing on a hilltop at the centre of Athens, a city of 4 million people, the Acropolis' elaborately sculptured stones have fallen prey to a film of black crust from car exhaust fumes, industrial pollution, acid rain and fires.
A team of Greek engineers and restorers are using an
Source: Science News Daily
October 17, 2008
According to legend, Genghis Khan lies buried somewhere beneath the dusty steppe of Northeastern Mongolia, entombed in a spot so secretive that anyone who made the mistake of encountering his funeral procession was executed on the spot.
Once he was below ground, his men brought in horses to trample evidence of his grave, and just to be absolutely sure he would never be found, they diverted a river to flow over their leader's final resting place.
What Khan and his follow
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
October 17, 2008
Archaeologists working at Hampton Court Palace have uncovered the earliest foundations ever found at King Henry VIII's famous royal residence.
The significant 13th century building remains predate any other finds made at the palace by nearly 200 years.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 17, 2008
Gerald Fredrick Toben, 64, was arrested at Heathrow at the request of German authorities for publishing "anti-Semitic and/or revisionist" material between 2000 and 2004.
Holocaust denial is an offence in Germany where Dr Toben faces up to five years in prison if found guilty.
The Australian citizen was arrested while travelling from America to Dubai under a European Arrest Warrant designed to fast-track extraditions.
Dr Toben is due to appear before Cit
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 16, 2008
Researchers examining coroners' reports from Sussex between 1485 and 1688 found 30 per cent of deaths were a result of injury involving travelling on land.
Accidents included falling into ditches and being hit by a horse and cart.
The study found 413 of around 1,000 adult inquests involved unintentional injuries, with 124 from land travel.
Of those, eight died when falling from horses and carts, while 43 were the result of falling from farm wagons.
Despite centu
Source: Terry Teachout in the WSJ (click on the link to listen to select audiotapes.)
October 11, 2008
Archeophone Records, a wonderfully adventurous Illinois-based label that specializes in exhuming long-forgotten but fascinating sound recordings of the past, has done historians of American politics an inestimable service by releasing "Debate '08: Taft and Bryan Campaign on the Edison Phonograph," which contains all 22 of the speeches recorded by the two men for Edison in 1908. (You can order it by going to www.archeophone.com.) If you have th
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 16, 2008
The 1,800-year-old stone mausoleum on the banks of the River Tiber was hailed by experts as an "extraordinary discovery" and one of the most important Roman finds for decades.
It was built to contain the remains of Marcus Nonius Macrinus, a proconsul and a favourite of Marcus Aurelius, who ruled as emperor from 161 AD to his death in 180 AD.
Macrinus was born in Brescia, in northern Italy, and won victories leading Roman legions into battle.
He
Source: FoxNews.com
October 16, 2008
Workers renovating a rugby stadium have uncovered a vast complex of tombs beneath Rome that mimic the houses, blocks and streets of a real city, officials said Thursday as they unveiled a series of new finds here.
Culture Ministry officials said that medieval pottery shards in the city of the dead, or necropolis, show the area may have been inhabited by the living during the Dark Ages [HNN Editor: sic] after being used for centuries for burials during the Roman period.
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 16, 2008
The posters on Claudio Velardi's office walls mix alluring Neapolitan sites with phrases like "Monnezza a chi?" (Who are you calling trash?) Velardi, a public relations whiz recruited from Rome, runs the regional tourism office here. His advertising campaign to counter images that have plagued Naples since last year - the endless news photographs of rotting garbage in the streets - clearly hasn't done much, not yet, anyway, to turn around the city's fortunes. Tourists still stay away i
Source: International Herald Tribune
October 16, 2008
CUMBERLAND ISLAND, Georgia: John Fry mashes the brakes and curses under his breath as a pack of wild hogs scurries across the narrow dirt road, where spiky palmetto fronds claw at both sides of his National Park Service pickup truck.
It takes nearly an hour to drive the bumpy 13-mile (21-kilometer) Main Road on wild Cumberland Island. Fry's truck passes within inches (centimeters) of burly live oak branches drooping overhead. Backpackers hiking the route are forced to step off and l
Source: L.A. Times
October 17, 2008
BEIRUT -- A new report based on previously classified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations created conditions that helped destabilize Iran in the late 1970s and contributed to the country's Islamic Revolution.
A trove of transcripts, memos and other correspondence show sharp differences over rising oil prices developing between the Republican administrations and Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi in the mid-1970s, says a report to be published today in the fall issue o
Source: AFP
October 16, 2008
Ancient history is getting in the way of construction in Beirut's building boom as new archaeological discoveries delay the springing up of long-planned high rises.
And the delays can be long, frustrating and expensive.
Construction on a luxury 23-storey residential building in the heart of the Lebanese capital, for example, has been stalled for 15 months after excavators stumbled on a 2,000-year-old Roman bath house.
"Imagine a developer waiting a yea
Source: AP
October 15, 2008
BERLIN — East German leader Erich Honecker famously proclaimed in 1989 that the Berlin Wall could remain in place for another 100 years.
It turns out that his faith in East German construction was almost as off the mark as his political instincts. The Wall opened for traffic a few months after Honecker spoke. And now the remaining pieces are crumbling physically.
On Wednesday, some 19 years after the barrier was opened, restoration work began on the longest remaining st
Source: Telegraph (UK)
October 16, 2008
The Second Kushite Kingdom controlled the whole Nile valley from Khartoum to the Mediterranean from 720BC to 660BC.
Now archaeologists have discovered that a region of northern Sudan once considered a forgotten backwater once actually "a real power-base".
They discovered a ruined pyramid containing fine gold jewellery dating from about 700BC on a remote un-navigable 100-mile stretch of the Nile known as the Fourth Cataract, plus pottery from as far away as Tur
Source: Times (UK)
October 17, 2008
The remains of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and others buried in mass graves during the Civil War are to be exhumed as part of an investigation into mass killings, a judge has ordered.
Judge Baltasar Garzon authorized the opening of the graves containing remains of the victims of General Franco’s victims all over Spain, including one where Lorca is thought to lie in Viznar near Granada.
Lorca was shot dead for being a leftist and homosexual in August 1936, one m
Source: Times (UK)
October 17, 2008
Archeologists say that they have found the underground passage in which the Emperor Caligula was murdered by his own Praetorian Guard to put an end to his deranged reign of terror.
Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (AD12–AD41), known by his nickname Caligula (Little Boots), was the third emperor of the Roman Empire after Augustus and Tiberius, and like them a member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
His assassination was the result of a conspiracy by members of the
