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: Lee White for the National Coalition for History
August 30, 2012
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) recently announced a $1 million award to support the incorporation and launch of the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), a groundbreaking project that seeks to digitize and bring together the contents of our nation’s libraries and archives, and make them freely available to all online.To be created through a coalition of libraries, archives, museums, and other nonprofit and academic entities in coordination with the Open Knowledge Commons, the Digital Public Library of America will ultimately serve as a single portal for diverse, interdisciplinary digital archives from a range of institutions. It would allow scholars, students, and lifelong learners to simultaneously access multiple collections. For example, a scholar researching the roles African Americans played during the Civil War would be able to search a wide range of collections with relevant materials, potentially ranging from military records and photographs to newspapers and early 20th century recollections.
Source: Jakarta Post
August 31, 2012
Nearly five decades after the 1965 abortive coup, which was blamed on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), historians, observers and direct witnesses are still unable to agree about the masterminds behind the historical events.Speaking at the launch of Jusuf Wanandi’s memoirs Shades of Grey in Jakarta on Thursday, panelists recounted the confusing state of events during those fateful days.Jusuf maintains that then president Sukarno could not have been solely responsible for the actions of the PKI due to his ailing health and the rapidity of events....
Source: Scotsman (UK)
September 4, 2012
Support has flooded in for a campaign to stop the Capital’s historic trenches from being lost forever.A network of trenches at Dreghorn Woods in Colinton, which it is estimated would cost around £10,000 to
save, could soon disappear as they become overgrown by trees.The drive to save them, which is being backed by the Evening News, is being led by writer and historian Lynne Gladstone Millar, whose father William Ewart Gladstone Millar was trained in the trenches before he was sent to the Battle of the Somme.Jack Alexander, author and a member of the McCrae’s Battalion Trust – which commemorates the men of the 16th Battalion The Royal Scots who lost their lives at the Battle of the Somme – said: “It is so important to preserve anything that is connected to the First World War – we can’t afford to lose the little we have left....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 3, 2012
The Diary of Anne Frank, written by one of the most revered victims of the Holocaust, is being released next month as an interactive app.The app has been authorised by the Anne Frank Foundation, which was founded by Otto Frank following the death of his daughter Anne in Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, aged 15, from typhus and malnutrition after hiding for two years from the Nazis in an Amsterdam attic. The diary, which was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life from 12 June 1942 until 1 August 1944. It was first published in 1947 and then translated from its original Dutch and published in English in 1952 as The Diary of a Young Girl....
Source: NYT
September 3, 2012
LONDON — To stroll out of Carlton Gardens into the elegant confines of the Royal Society is to find a trove of centuries-old wonders, from Sir Isaac Newton’s reflecting telescope to the first electric machine to fantastical illustrated catalogs of fish and birds.Then you enter the sunlight-suffused office of the society’s president, Sir Paul Nurse. With his spiky mass of white hair, broad nose, ready smile and thick work boots, he looks the part of old-fashioned knight of science ready to tramp through the fens. But this Nobel Prize winner in medicine offers a very 21st-century lament.
Source: NYT
September 3, 2012
A fractured skull and a thighbone hacked in half were found at the lake.Although that may sound like the opening scene of a crime drama, the human remains, along with axes, spears, clubs and shields, were unearthed at an archaeological site in the wetlands of Denmark, and date to the birth of Jesus.The recent findings most certainly indicate that the 2,000-year-old site was the scene of a major battle, said Mads Kahler Holst, an archaeologist at Aarhus University in Denmark and one of the leaders of the excavation. They also point to the involvement of religious sacrifices....
Source: NYT
September 3, 2012
ABOARD THE SEA DRAGON, 1,000 miles east of Japan — After narrowly avoiding a typhoon, battling seasickness and being pelted by rain for days on end, crew members aboard the Sea Dragon were galvanized by the sight of a stranded boat.The 150-pound piece of a skiff, torn in half and adorned with Japanese characters, was most likely a remnant of the tsunami that struck eastern Japan last year.This scientific expedition was unusual in many ways, including the fact that it didn’t contain any scientists. Members of the volunteer crew hailed from six countries and lived on a yacht for a month in hopes of finding an array of debris they could photograph and blog about....
Source: NYT
September 3, 2012
A Renaissance drawing from a prized British collection is being sold at Sotheby’s in London on Dec. 5, the auction house is expected to announce on Tuesday.Raphael’s “Head of an Apostle,’’ dating from around 1519, was created as a study for a figure in one of the artist’s greatest late paintings, “Transfiguration,’’ that belongs to the Vatican Museum in Rome. The drawing, which was executed in black chalk, is from Chatsworth, the Derbyshire home of the Duke of Devonshire (who also happens to be deputy chairman of Sotheby’s board of directors.) Estimated to sell for $15.8 million to $23.8 million, it has belonged to the Duke’s family since William Cavendish, the 2nd Duke of Devonshire, acquired it sometime in either in the late 17th or early 18th centuries....
Source: NYT
September 3, 2012
The Modernist architect Frank Lloyd Wright wasn’t a hoarder. But he did save just about everything — whether a doodle on a Plaza Hotel cocktail napkin of an imagined city on Ellis Island, his earliest pencil sketch of the spiraling Guggenheim Museum or a model of Broadacre City, his utopian metropolis....Now that entire archive is moving permanently to New York in an unusual joint partnership between the Museum of Modern Art and Columbia University’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library, where it will become more accessible to the public for viewing and scholarship.The collection includes more than 23,000 architectural drawings, about 40 large-scale, architectural models, some 44,000 photographs, 600 manuscripts and more than 300,000 pieces of office and personal correspondence. Acquiring the archive of a seminal 20th-century architect is a boon for both the museum and the library....
Source: NYT
September 3, 2012
If newspaper articles had routinely carried reporters’ bylines 100 years ago, there would be no question now about who got one of the biggest scoops of the early 20th century, the April 18, 1912, interview with the surviving telegraph operator from the Titanic.It was published the morning after survivors of the disaster arrived in New York aboard the Carpathia, the ship that had rescued them in the Atlantic Ocean. The account, a high point of The New York Times’s coverage of one of the defining events of the years before World War I, was important enough to rate a byline — unusual in those days.But the article was written in the first person. So the byline was that of the telegraph operator, Harold Bride — not that of the reporter who had taken down Bride’s words.Who was the reporter?...
Source: NYT
September 3, 2012
DUBLIN — To visit Graham Usher’s dream apartment in Priory Hall, the most notorious of Ireland’s ruined ghost developments, is to see what Ireland aspired to be, and what it became instead....If Ireland’s rise was one of the most spectacular in Europe, its fall was one of the most precipitous, with a boom in the 1990s leading to a housing bubble in the 2000s that burst spectacularly when the banks fueling it threatened to collapse. In 2008, the government made an emergency decision to guarantee the banks’ debts, thus condemning the country to brutal austerity that has left it impoverished and weighed down by debt of its own.
Source: Telegraph (UK)
September 4, 2012
Campaigners calling for an official investigation into the alleged massacre of 24 Malaysian rubber plantation workers by British troops more than 60 years ago lost a High Court fight today.Relatives of victims challenged a Government decision not to hold an inquiry into the shootings at Batang Kali, Malaya, in December 1948.Judge ruled against them following a hearing in London in May.British troops were conducting operations against communist insurgents during the Malayan Emergency when the plantation workers were killed, judges heard....
Source: NYT
September 3, 2012
Bargain hunting online? How about an original Rembrandt for $900 (“you can clearly tell its age by the paper,” the seller of this etching attests), or a signed piece in ink by Matisse for $1,250. (The artist’s work is, the online seller notes, “radical and unprecedented in the history of Western art.”)Yes, Sotheby’s can command more than $100 million for a Picasso at auction. But shoppers on the Web can find an “original” painting by that master for a mere $450 — less than a pair of designer shoes.Every day works labeled “original” and “authentic” and attributed to titans of the art world are offered at closeout prices by online galleries and auction sites. And every day people buy them....
Source: NYT
September 1, 2012
IN 1961, when Ronald Reagan was defining himself politically, he warned that if left unchecked, government would become “a Big Brother to us all.” But previously undisclosed F.B.I. records, released to me after a long and costly legal fight under the Freedom of Information Act, present a different side of the man who has come to symbolize the conservative philosophy of less government and greater self-reliance.When Reagan needed government help, he was happy to take it, which is particularly interesting in light of the current debate over “entitlements,” and which might give pause to members of both political parties who speak glowingly of the Reagan legacy.The documents show that Reagan was more involved than was previously known as a government informer during his Hollywood years, and that in return he secretly received personal and political help from J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime F.B.I. director, at taxpayer expense....
Source: NYT
September 2, 2012
MEXICO CITY — The skeleton is that of a young woman, perhaps an Aztec noble, found intact and buried in the empire’s most sacred spot more than 500 years ago. Almost 2,000 human bones were heaped around her, and she is a mystery.There are other discoveries yet to be deciphered from the latest excavation site at the heart of this vast metropolis, where the Aztecs built their great temple and the Spanish conquerors laid the foundation of their new empire.Before announcing the finding of the unusual burial site and the remains of what may be a sacred tree last month, archaeologists had also recently revealed a giant round stuccoed platform decorated with serpents’ heads and a floor carved in relief that appears to show a holy war....
Source: NYT
September 1, 2012
An artichoke and an elevator. A Checker taxicab and a conductor’s baton. A MetroCard and a mastodon tusk. Inspired by “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” the British Museum’s BBC radio series and book, we recruited historians and museum curators to identify 50 objects that could embody the narrative of New York. (Recalling that adage about great minds: In March, Leonard Lopate asked his WYNC radio listeners to participate in a similar project.)...
Source: NPR
September 1, 2012
Today, George Takei is best known for his role as Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek series and, more recently, his hugely popular Facebook and Twitter feeds.But his latest project aims to bring a different kind of story to the stage, one with personal and historical resonance. The actor was born in Los Angeles to a Japanese-American family just a few years before Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor. After that 1941 attack, he and his family were among the tens of thousands of U.S. citizens of Japanese descent who were forced to move to internment camps.Now, Takei's childhood experience living in camps in Arkansas and California has inspired a new musical called Allegiance. Previews of the show are set to begin Sept. 7 at The Old Globe Theatre in San Diego....
Source: NYT
August 28, 2012
AFFILE, Italy — This village in the rolling hills east of Rome is known for its fresh air, olive oil and wine — and its residual appreciation of Benito Mussolini, whose image adorns some wine bottles on prominent display in local bars.This month, the town’s fascist sympathies became the subject of intense debate when its mayor unveiled a publicly financed memorial to one of its most controversial former citizens: Rodolfo Graziani, a general under Mussolini who was accused of war crimes at the end of World War II and earned the title of “the Butcher” in two campaigns during Italy’s colonization of North Africa in the 1920s and ’30s.
Source: NPR
August 30, 2012
Scientists in Germany have been able to get enough DNA from a fossilized pinky to produce a high-quality DNA sequence of the pinky's owner."It's a really amazing-quality genome," says David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston. "It's as good as modern human genome sequences, from a lot of ways of measuring it."The pinky belonged to a girl who lived tens of thousands of years ago. Scientists aren't sure about the exact age. She is a member of an extinct group of humans called Denisovans. The name comes from Denisova cave in Siberia, where the pinky was found....
Source: Detroit News
August 30, 2012
Labor Day has multiple meanings for me. It marks the turning of the year, a closing summer picnic, the first day of school, the last day of my home state fair, the first inkling of autumn, and the day when the presidential campaign begins, as they say, "in earnest."This year, we have had no interruption in electoral politics. No matter. Labor Day remains that day when we experience both the full-throated pleasures of summer and the deep-voiced arguments of a colder season. Picnics, parades and politicians compete for our attention.Labor Day's conflicted purposes date back to its origins. Created during the troubled labor times of the late 1800s, the holiday was a tribute to all workers and, more importantly, to working-class voters. It was meant to honor wage-earners, those who, in labor's point of view, "created all value."...
