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: Guardian (UK)
7-13-13
One of the world's largest collections of Wild West memorabilia, including a poker table that belonged to Wyatt Earp and weapons from Custer's Last Stand at the Battle of Little Bighorn, is to be auctioned off next week, to help pay down a Pennsylvania city's burgeoning debts.A former mayor of Harrisburg, Stephen Reed, amassed the artefacts with a view to displaying them in a museum he wanted to build, in order to draw in history-seeking visitors and help revitalise the fortunes of the economically depressed city. But with Harrisburg's debts passing $370m, city leaders voted to put the collection under the hammer. The auction represents an attempt to recover $8m in redevelopment funds that Reed spent on about 10,000 items, during a buying spree in western states."Every item you're able to purchase is an investment in our future," said Linda Thompson, the city's new mayor, who is a vocal opponent of Reed's museum project. "These artefacts had been in the city's archives for a very long time. Here we are at that important moment to see what Harrisburg's history looks like and the opportunities ahead."...
Source: NZ Herald
7-13-13
Intriguing photographs have surfaced of a young woman wearing the uniform of a New Zealand military officer in the Somme region of northern France where the horrendous battle of World War I was fought.Her identity is not known. In one of four photographs which are almost 100 years old, the woman, wearing the distinctive "lemon-squeezer" New Zealand military hat, salutes while holding a cane in front of a tree in a walled garden. In contrast with the usual battlefield pictures, she is standing in a relaxed setting outside a house with shuttered windows.The woman, who wears a wedding ring, is shown both in uniform and wearing a blouse and skirt, in the four grainy black and white glass negatives found in the village of Hallencourt, which was a base behind the lines during the 1916 battle....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-12-13
Christian Thompson and Robbie Cribley, both 13, originally thought they had found an animal skull, but forensic experts believe the pair happened upon human remains which are 700 years old.The pair were in their dingy on the River Coln near their homes in Fairford, Gloucestershire, on Sunday evening, when they became stuck in an overhanging tree and saw the skull in the water.When they returned to the site with local television crews they unearthed the spine, arm bone and the rest of the body....
Source: Guardian (UK)
7-12-13
Sometime in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare's death, the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell published Mr William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies – what we now know as the First Folio. It was the literary event of the century, recording for all time the sound of Shakespeare's English and the sweep of his imagination: Elsinore, Egypt and the Forest of Arden; a balcony, a spotted handkerchief and a skull.
Source: BBC News
7-11-13
Kurt Eppinger's community of German Christians arrived in the Holy Land to carry out a messianic plan - but after less than a century its members were sent into exile, the vision of their founding fathers brought to an abrupt and unhappy end.The Germans were no longer welcome in what had been first a part of the Ottoman Empire, then British Mandate Palestine and would soon become Israel."On 3 September 1939, we were listening to the BBC and my father said: 'War has been declared' - and the next minute there was a knock at the door and a policeman came and took my father and all the men in the colony away."Aged 14 at the time, Kurt was part of a Christian group called the Templers. He lived in a settlement in Jerusalem - the district still known as the German Colony today....
Source: CBS
7-11-13
America's first president foresaw the need for a place for his papers and books; it will finally open this fall at Mount Vernon.
Source: Boston.com
7-11-13
Albert H. DeSalvo’s body will be exhumed to allow for new forensic testing that may conclusively prove DeSalvo murdered Mary Sullivan in her Boston apartment in 1964, the last killing attributed to the Boston Strangler who terrorized Greater Boston for two years in the early 1960s.Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said that a DNA match has been made between DeSalvo, the self-confessed Boston Strangler, and the murder of 19-year-old Sullivan, who was raped and murdered and “her body desecrated” in her Charles Street home on Jan. 4, 1964....
Source: Reuters
7-10-13
(Reuters) - An Alaska glacier is exposing remains from a military air tragedy six decades later.Relics from an Air Force cargo plane that slammed into a mountain in November 1952, killing all 52 servicemen on board, first emerged last summer on Colony Glacier, about 50 miles east of Anchorage.That discovery, by Alaska National Guard crews flying training missions out of Anchorage, put into motion a sophisticated recovery program carried out by the Hawaii-based Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command.After last year's initial work - when nearly everything that rose to the glacier's surface was picked up - the JPAC team came back this summer to collect additional relics pushed out of the ice since then.
Source: Kansas City Star
7-9-13
Independence wants its pioneer woman back.The recent theft and apparent destruction of the 6-foot bronze statue that for more than 20 years stood sentinel outside the National Frontier Trails Museum has been taken personally by residents and overland trails buffs.Museum officials are discussing a possible fundraising campaign to finance a replacement pioneer, and three sculptors already have volunteered their services....Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/07/09/4337559/replacement-considered-for-stolen.html#storylink=cpy
Source: Al Jazeera
7-11-13
Tens of thousands have gathered in Bosnia to rebury 409 newly identified victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre on the 18th anniversary of the atrocity in which about 8,000 Muslims were slaughtered.Among the victims are 43 teenage boys and a baby that was born during the ordeal. They are being laid to rest at a special cemetery near Srebrenica where victims are buried as their remains are gradually found in mass graves."This year we are going to bury the youngest victim of the genocide, the Muhic family's baby," Kenan Karavdic, the official in charge of the burial ceremony, said on Thursday....
Source: BBC News
7-11-13
Alfred Hitchcock's nine surviving silent films will join artefacts such as the Domesday Book in representing the cultural heritage of the UK.Hitchcock's films - the British director's earliest works - premiered at the British Film Institute last summer following extensive restoration.They have now been added to the Unesco UK Memory of the World Register.The register "reflects the richness of UK culture and history, from medieval manuscripts to ground-breaking cinema"....
Source: The Scotsman (UK)
7-9-13
A UNIQUE collection of burgh records - the only archive to have survived in Scotland dating back to the 14th Century - has been ranked alongside the Domesday Book and Winston Churchill’s archive in Britain’s list of globally important documents.The ancient collection of Aberdeen burgh records, now held by Aberdeen City and Aberdeenshire Archives, has been chosen for inclusion on an eleven-strong list of treasured documents on the UK Register of Important Documentary Heritage, part of the UNESCO’s online Memory of the World Programme.Written in Latin and old Scots, the archives cover eight volumes, dating from 1398 to 1509, and represent the oldest and most complete set of burgh records in Scotland, charting local government in the Granite City in medieval times....
Source: Guardian (UK)
7-10-13
Arnold Harvey is waiting for me outside his flat overlooking Clissold Park in north London. With beard, lank grey hair and a large stomach that may be the product of eating too many fry-ups at the greasy spoon next door, he looks like a bucolic version of William Golding. It is his first ever interview and he is nervous, expectant. After a lifetime of what he believes to be academic condescension – or worse, conspiracy – he sees me as a possible source of redemption. This could be tricky.Harvey, who has written most of his books using the initials AD rather than his first name Arnold, which he dislikes, has been exposed in the Times Literary Supplement as the possessor of multiple identities in print, a mischief-maker who among other things had invented a fictitious meeting in 1862 between Dickens and Dostoevsky. This startling encounter was first written up by one Stephanie Harvey in the Dickensian, the magazine of the Dickens Fellowship, in 2002, and quickly hardened into fact, cited in Michael Slater's biography of Dickens in 2009 and repeated by Claire Tomalin in her biography two years later....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-11-13
It was one of the most captivating mysteries of the modern age, requiring three detectives and 52 years to solve. Along the way, there was magnificent obsession, bitter disappointment, world-shaking triumph and swift, unexplained death.At the centre of the mystery lay a set of clay tablets from the ancient Aegean, inscribed more than 3,000 years ago and discovered at the dawn of the 20th century amid the ruins of a lavish Bronze Age palace.Written by royal scribes, the tablets teemed with writing like none ever seen: tiny pictograms in the shapes of swords, horses’ heads, pots and pans, plus a set of far more cryptic characters whose meaning is still debated today....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-11-13
The inscriptions were found on pieces of pottery and rock dug up from the Zhuangqiao excavation site in the eastern province of Zhejiang and could date back to one of China's oldest civilisations, the Liangzhu.There is still no consensus among Chinese academics as to whether the markings represent mere symbols or in fact a primitive written language from which today's written characters originate.The inscriptions could represent "the earliest record of Chinese characters in history, pushing the origins of the written language back 1,000 years," according to China's official news agency Xinhua....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-1-13
A skull found on the banks of a river in rural Australia is believed to date from the 1600s and has challenged the view that Captain Cook was the first white person to set foot on the country’s east coast.Carbon dating showed the skull belonged to a Caucasian male and had an 80 per cent chance of dating back to the 1600s, long before Captain Cook first reached Australia in 1770.The tests were ordered by local police after the intact skull was found near Taree, a town about 200 miles north of Sydney. No other skeletal remains were found....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
7-11-13
The 300,000 Britons who fought in the American Civil War are to be remembered on both sides of the Atlantic.Two war memorials - one in Liverpool and the other in the US state of Virginia, where much of the fighting took place - are being proposed by a British group of historians.Although Britain was officially neutral in the conflict, thousands of men born in Britain but living in America at the time fought for both President Lincoln's anti-slavery Federals and the pro-slavery southern Confederates.Basil Larkins of the American Civil War British Memorial Association is trying to raise £10,000 for the monuments....
Source: Japan Times
7-10-13
YOKOHAMA – An almost perfectly preserved frozen mammoth, excavated from the permafrost in eastern Siberia, was unveiled to the media Tuesday in Yokohama, where it will be on display from Saturday.The 3-meter-tall mammoth is a 10-year-old female and is presumed to have died about 39,000 years ago. The frozen carcass, named “Yuka” after Russia’s Sakha (Yakutia) Republic where it was discovered, is believed to be one of the world’s largest.Excavated in 2010, Yuka has a long trunk, arms and legs preserved in almost perfect condition. Since then, the carcass was conserved and studied by researchers at an institute in Russia....
Source: Media Matters
7-9-13
Jack Hunter, a congressional aide to Sen. Rand Paul with a history of "neo-Confederate" and "pro-secessionist" views, has produced dozens of articles and video commentaries for The Daily Caller and appeared as what one Fox Business host termed a "regular" guest on that network. He also helped then-Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), currently the president of The Heritage Foundation, write his most recent book.The conservative Washington Free Beacon reported today that Hunter, a "close" Rand Paul aide who also co-wrote the Kentucky Republican's 2011 book, "spent years working as a pro-secessionist radio pundit and neo-Confederate activist ... Hunter was a chairman in the League of the South, which 'advocates the secession and subsequent independence of the Southern States from this forced union and the formation of a Southern republic.'"...
Source: NYT
7-10-13
CABANAS DE VIRIATO, Portugal — Lee Sterling knew that his sister had not survived the harrowing journey 73 years ago that allowed him and his parents to escape Nazism by traveling from their home in Brussels to Lisbon and eventually on to New York.He was just 4 years old and is barely able to recall her now, but after consulting Portuguese archives, he found that his sister, Raymonde Estelle, had spent six weeks in a hospital before dying of septicemia, at age 7. “I hadn’t cried in years, but when I found out, I just couldn’t stop,” he said.Mr. Sterling, who lives in California, was among 40 people who made an emotional pilgrimage last month to retrace their families’ pasts. They also wanted to pay homage to the man who saved their lives: Aristides de Sousa Mendes....
