2002 May to December

Week of 12-23-02

NASA cancels history of the moon landing, which was supposed to answer kooks who say man never walked on the moon.

Bertelsmann AG (Germany), which formerly claimed it had been shut down because of its opposition to Nazi regime, has publicly thanked independent commission that set record straight on company's extensive collusion with Nazis.

Britons furious over documentary that speculated that the Virgin Mary was raped by a Roman soldier.

Civil Rights Museum Planned for King Home

Book With Swastika Angers the Swiss; Swiss historian Jean-François Bergier, called the cover"simply outrageous."

Debate Erupts Over Authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

National Security Archive: Historians discover that Nixon secretly put the US on high nuclear alert in 1969 to impress Soviets.

CIA surveillance imagery of USS Puebelo after its capture disclosed.

REVEALED: A British journalist who tried in early 1938 to report from China that the Imperial Japanese Army killed 300,000 in late 1937 was blocked by authorities.

Prominent pro-secularist historian, Necip Hablemitoglu, shot in the head in Ankara, leading to fears of renewed political violence.

John Downing Weaver, 90, Is Dead; cleared names of wronged Brownsville Soldiers found guilty by Teddy Roosevelt.

FBI's Nazi war crimes records transferred to National Archives.

Valley Forge to get a new $8 million museum.

PBS to air documentary about Emmett Till, the black 14 year old killed in Mississippi in 1955 for allegedly whistling at a white woman.

Denver psychotherapist reveals a rare stash of Nazi propaganda films.

The remains of Carol II, Romania's most controversial monarch, will be returned to his homeland from Portugal

Week of 12-16-02

Russian Presidential commission says it has evidence which will absolve Nicholas II of crimes and rehabilitate the last tsarist family.

HNN POLL: 61% of readers say Knopf should not withdraw Bellesiles book from circulation.

Wall Street Journal leaps to KC Johnson's defense.

British Crown to release papers related to the abdication of the Duke of Windsor.

MI5 has taken the safe option by choosing Christopher Andrew, professor of history at Cambridge University and well-known writer on the security and intelligence agencies, as its first official historian.

Wall Street Journal editorializes against PBS documentary on Mohammad.

Daniel Pipes blasts PBS show"Muhammad: Legacy of a Prophet" as biased.

A proposal by the Italian parliament aimed at eliminating alleged leftwing bias from school history books has prompted a massive and furious reaction from the country's academics.

Swiss may sue Stuart Eizenstat, author of a new book about Swiss-Nazi financial ties; Swiss upset with book jacket that lays Nazi symbol over flag.

New Discovery Channel documentary claims Caesar was killed because of his left-wing reforms; historian:"that Caesar was ready to become a king-- this is total nonsense."

Controversial Australian historian Keith Windschuttle has been accused of plagiarism by one of his critics, La Trobe University professor Robert Manne.

Louisiana planning 600 events to mark the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase.

Kentucky to feature larger-than-life bronze statue of York, a slave who was an integral part of the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Archeologists will use mine surveying technology in an attempt to pinpoint the location of the sprawling underground tomb of China's first emperor.

CBS names actors to be used in controversial Hitler miniseries.

SAC headquarters for the East Coast, carved into a mountain in Massachusetts in 1957 and used in the Cuban Missile Crisis, being converted by colleges into a massive underground library.

Norway's parliament today voted to compensate the so-called"German children," the offspring of Nazi soldiers and Norwegian mothers. Between 10,000 to 12,000 children were born of relationships between Norwegian mothers and occupying troops.

U.S. and Russian officials have met to discuss a joint historical project to document Soviet-American relations during the years 1969-1976.

The U.S. Department of State has just published the most recent volume of its official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series.

Planned BBC film about Hitler's youth cancelled after Murdoch Withdraws financing; Jews assailed.

Anti-Semitism on the rise in Japan, where a book about a Japanese Schindler who saved 10,000 Jews in WWII has landed the author in court.

New book challenges hoary myth that south Australian pioneers were convict-free.

An historical marker for a woman who killed 10 Indians after she'd been kidnapped has become the fulcrum of a debate on the interpretation of the history of Indians; whose history should be told?

Radical historians call for a meeting at the AHA to denounce a war with Iraq.

Week of 12-9-02

Dee Brown has died.

Columbia University rescinds the Bancroft Prize awarded to Michael Bellesiles's Arming America.

Kissinger steps down from 9-11 commission.

Museums rallying to fight the demand that they return artifacts to their place of origin.

BBC documentary about Jesus is raising hackles; claims he was born in Nazareth and that Mary was 12 or 13 when she was sold into marriage.

Germany's Schroeder compared to the prewar chancellor Heinrich Bruening, whose failures historians say contributed to the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler.

Did Allies By Mistake Sink the Athabaskan? Ship's remains to be examined by documentary-maker.

Discovery of Lake Huron shipwreck some 200 years old--oldest found yet.

Doubts raised about the effectiveness of the academic boycott of Israel.

Iron Age man was Britain's first TB victim.

Controversy over the National Museum of Australia: Is it under pressure to sanitize the history of Aborigines?

Historian: Trent Lott made the same statement about Thurmond in 1980.

Russia's Perm 36 now a museum.

Historian assails claim that what New Zealand's colonial settlers did to the Maori was comparable to what the Taliban did to the Bamiyan Buddhas.

Biographers at war over who is - or isn't - a great Briton Controversy as classic book's new editor vows to include"the unorthodox and the unhonoured."

Kuwaitis wondering if war with Iraq will lead to the return or permanent loss of the historic treasures stolen in the Gulf War.

Questions in Japan being raised about the upcoming 100th anniversary of the 1904-05 Russo-Japanese War--should this example of Japanese militarism be remembered?

Another useful bit of Oxford radiocarbon dating, this time from Jerusalem, suggests that the Old Testament does record genuine historical events.

Doubts about the Jesus burial box.

A new documentary reveals that Jews under threat in Nazi Germany found refuge in China under Japanese rule.

The skipper of the Sequoia under Kennedy says he destroyed the ship's personal log of visitors after the assassination, on orders of a Navy lawyer.

Her support for David Irving may cost a wealthy Australian membership in the prestigeous British Reform Club.

Revealed: secret diaries of quiet man who was Britain's wartime spymaster: Guy Liddell's remarkable journals, released this week.

MI6 urged Churchill to nuke Berlin The fear of Germany's V2 rockets in 1944 led Britain to consider the ultimate reprisal.

A historian confirms a long-disputed story of a German atrocity in World War I involving a murdered Canadian soldier.

Week of 12-2-02

Michelangelo complained in his old age that he was living in poverty, but a historian who found his bank books says the artist had amassed a massive fortune.

New Zealand worried about historians' reaction to change in the holiday that they celebrate Nelson's Trafalgar victory.

Saburo Ienaga, a historian who devoted his life to battling government censorship of Japan's wartime atrocities in school textbooks, has died.

"The most influential Australian historian of his generation, Henry Reynolds has admitted misquoting the colonial governor of Van Diemen's Land in a history of the Aboriginal-settler relations."

Brooklyn College has reappointed popular history professor KC Johnson for another year after scholars and students protested his dismissal (subscribers only).

Iran-contra figure Elliott Abrams, who has served in the White House for more than a year, has been promoted to a key post among President Bush's national security aides.

Churchill's cousin"gave information to Russian agents."

Indians finally got their say Friday on what they regard as the"My Lai" of the 19th century with the installation of a plaque at a Civil War Memorial at Colorado's State Capitol.

Battle to save a few blood-drenched acres Civil War buffs, soldiers' families fight to save site of tragic campaign from sprawl .

Bruce Craig's summary of developments at the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

Bruce Craig's Summary of history projects on-hold in Congress.

Texas family claims their ancestor flew a plane before the Wright Brothers.

Oregon's governor, John Kitzhaber, apologizes and says the state was wrong when it forcibly sterilized residents of state institutions.

New evidence suggests the British did not sink the Bismarck in WWII; it was scuttled by the crew.

Mormon Scholar May Be Excommunicated for Questioning Belief About American Indians' Ancestry (subscribers only).

Bush expected to sign bill providing $10 million to save Civil War battlefields.

A new book accuses the archaeologist who orchestrated the excavation of Masada in Israel of professional misconduct and says he conducted"a scheme of distortion which was aimed at providing Israelis with a spurious historical narrative of heroism."

US compiled secret reports on novelist Graham Greene for 40 years, FBI files show.

Yale's Glenda Gilmore accused of trying to silence her critics.

Ed Morgan hits the NYT Best Seller List for the 1st time.

Week of 11-18-02