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: Falkirk Herald
6-11-13
An amateur archaeologist from Bonnybridge is hoping his remarkable discoveries can shed more light on one of the most famous episodes in Scottish history.James Bayne (64) used a metal detector he was given as a birthday present three years ago to unearth a number of number of intriguing artefacts from the site of the Battle of Bannockburn, the great conflict in 1314 in which the Scots army under the command of Robert the Bruce vanquished the much larger force of King Edward II of England.The retired maintenance engineer has unearthed a variety of items including a bronze pendant and the remains of a brutal medieval dagger known as a ‘bodkin’....
Source: BBC News
6-12-13
Seventy-five years ago in Fascist Italy, a group of gay men were labelled "degenerate", expelled from their homes and interned on an island. They were held under a prison regime - but some found life in the country's first openly gay community a liberating experience.Every summer, tourists are drawn to the beauty of a tiny string of rocky islands in the Adriatic.But just recently a group of visitors came to the Tremiti archipelago not so much to enjoy the peace and calm of this remote place as to remember.These were gay, lesbian and transgender rights activists....
Source: AP
6-12-13
WARSAW, Poland — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began his two-day visit to Poland, which Germany’s Nazis occupied during World War II and where they committed the worst crimes ever against the Jewish people, with a stern warning about a potential Holocaust from Iran.Netanyahu said Wednesday the upcoming “so-called” Iranian presidential election will “change nothing” in the Islamic republic’s quest for nuclear weapons and that the regime will continue to pursue a bomb aimed at destroying Israel. Iran insists its uranium enrichment program has only peaceful goals.Iran’s election overseers have approved a list of would-be hopefuls, most of them loyalists favored by both the theocracy and the military, and any future president will likely side with the supreme leadership’s nuclear aspirations....
Source: AP
6-10-13
For 50 years Peggy Wallace Kennedy has lived in the shadow cast by her father, Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, when he stood in a doorway and tried to stop two black students from integrating the University of Alabama.That single episode in the American civil rights movement — his infamous “stand in the schoolhouse door” — attached an asterisk to her name, she says. It’s a permanent mark she can never erase, despite her own history as a moderate Democrat who gave early support to candidate Barack Obama for president in 2008.“If you’re George Wallace’s daughter, people think the asterisk will always be there. ‘Oh, your father stood in the schoolhouse door,’” she said in a recent interview.Kennedy was just 13 at the time. Her mother, Lurleen Wallace, had whisked her away to a lake fishing cabin with her three siblings that day, so they would be nowhere near the wrenching historic drama in which her father played a leading role....
Source: WaPo
6-13-13
OSWIECIM, Poland —For decades, the Communist-era memorial to Jewish victims at the barracks known as Block 27 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex of death camps stood dilapidated and mostly ignored.“No one visited. They opened the doors, that was it,” said Avner Shalev, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s vast and authoritative Holocaust memorial museum and research center.Key artifacts had gone missing. The history presented in the signage was inaccurate, at best, and dominated by Soviet propaganda....
Source: WaPo
6-12-13
BOSTON — James “Whitey” Bulger is an old man now.He wears reading glasses. His hair is pure white, but not much remains. And when he stood up in a federal courtroom Wednesday morning to finally face the music, to stand trial for a lifetime of gangster crimes, he rose slowly, no longer the menacing Irish mob boss who allegedly scratched out 19 lives while the FBI looked the other way.Wearing a long-sleeved green shirt, jeans and sneakers, Bulger sat passively as a prosecutor described his younger, more sinister years as leader of the Winter Hill Gang, including the time he allegedly marched a safecracker named Arthur “Bucky” Barrett to a set of cellar stairs after torturing him in a chair in pursuit of $40,000 from a bank robbery....
Source: Irish Times
6-13-13
What would Kaiser Bill say? Nearly a century after marching into a world war that ended in defeat and Wilhelm II’s abdication, Germany has begun rebuilding the Prussian palace in Berlin vacated in 1918 and demolished in 1950.German president Joachim Gauck yesterday laid the foundation stone for the palace 2.0, dubbed the Humboldt Forum and planned as a museum for non-European art. Berlin’s original palace expanded over the centuries, reflecting the rise of the ruling Hohenzollern family and Prussia. Like Prussia, however, the ruined palace vanished after the war – dynamited by East Berlin as an unwelcome symbol of German imperialism. They used the site as a parade ground and later for its own parliament complex, the Palace of the Republic.Following German unification a decade of debate over the site ended with a 2002 Bundestag vote to demolish the East German structure and rebuild the Prussian palace....
Source: Press Release
6-12-13
NEW YORK CITY—June 12, 2013—The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation announced today the establishment of the Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History, which carries an award of $50,000. The prize will be awarded annually in recognition of the best book in the field of military history published in English during the previous calendar year. The inaugural award will be made in February 2014 for a book published in 2013. “It is our hope that the establishment of this prize will draw public attention to the field's continuing utility as an important staple of education in international politics, diplomacy, and conflict, and to assist in the restoration of military history to an important place in university curricula,” said Josiah Bunting III, president of the foundation. “If we do not learn from the conflicts of the past, we will be doomed to repeat them. For the sake of all, we cannot allow this area of scholarship and thinking to atrophy in the United States or abroad.”
Source: Marshall Foundation
6-12-13
National Historic Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) awarded the George C. Marshall Foundation continuing support of $33,000 in the 2013-2014 year for editing and preparing for publication volume 7, the final volume of The Papers of George Catlett Marshall. Volume 7 is expected to be published in 2015. NHPRC has been a significant contributor to the project since 1977.
Editor of The Marshall Papers is Mark A. Stoler, Ph.D., a distinguished military and diplomatic historian who wrote the acclaimed biography of Marshall, George C. Marshall: Soldier-Statesman of the American Century. Managing editor is Daniel D. Holt, who recently retired as director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum and is an expert in the era to be covered in the remaining papers. Mame Warren, previously director for Hopkins History Enterprises at the Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University, is assistant editor
Source: Reuters
6-11-13
(Reuters) - German outrage over a U.S. Internet spying program has broken out ahead of a visit by Barack Obama, with ministers demanding the president provide a full explanation when he lands in Berlin next week and one official likening the tactics to those of the East German Stasi.German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman has said she will raise the issue with Obama in talks next Wednesday, potentially casting a cloud over a visit that was designed to celebrate U.S.-German ties on the 50th anniversary John F. Kennedy's famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.Government surveillance is an extremely sensitive topic in Germany, where memories of the dreaded Stasi secret police and its extensive network of informants are still fresh in the minds of many citizens....
Source: NYT
6-10-13
MOISÉS VILLE, Argentina — At its height in the 1940s, this outpost on Argentina’s grasslands had four synagogues for a population of 5,000, a theater for Yiddish-language acting troupes, a newspaper filled with feverish debates about the creation of the state of Israel and saloons where Jewish gauchos galloping in from the pampas could nurse a drink alongside fellow cowhands.Now, Moisés Ville, founded in 1889 by Jews fleeing the pogroms of the Czarist Russian empire, has only about 200 Jews among its 2,000 residents. The last regularly functioning synagogue lacks a rabbi. The Hebrew school halted classes this year because of the dwindling number of Jewish children. Some of the last remaining Jewish gauchos have swapped their horses for Ford pickup trucks, and they now ponder the future of their way of life.
Source: Fox News
6-11-13
The oldest and most widespread collection of prehistoric cave and rock art in the United States has been found in and around Tennessee, according to a new paper in the journal Antiquity that documents the art. It provides intriguing clues about what life was like for Native American societies more than 6,000 years ago. That is the age of the newly discovered cave art, one of which is seen here, showing what appears to be a human hunting. Other images are of a more direct spiritual/mythological nature.Lead author Jan Simek, president emeritus and a distinguished professor of science at the University of Tennessee’s Department of Anthropology, told Discovery News, “The discoveries tell us that prehistoric peoples in the Cumberland Plateau used this rather distinctive upland environment for a variety of purposes and that religion was part of that broader sense of place.” Jan Simek, Alan Cressler, Nicholas Herrmann and Sarah Sherwood/Antiquity Publications Ltd.A very large polychrome pictograph depicts humans, serpents and circles. The image, from the same overall site, but extending into Alabama, likely illustrated a myth spread across generations via word of mouth, with such permanent imagery further preserving its meaning, lost to history....
Source: National Geographic
6-5-13
A benign bone tumor that afflicts modern-day humans has now been found in one of our ancestors: a Neanderthal more than 120,000 years old.The discovery of a fibrous dysplasia in a Neanderthal rib is the earliest known bone tumor on record, predating other tumors by more than 100,000 years. The rib, recovered from a site in Krapina, Croatia, indicates that Neanderthals were susceptible to the same types of tumors modern-day humans get, despite living in a remarkably different environment."They didn't have pesticides, but they probably were sleeping in caves with burning fires," says David Frayer, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas and the co-author of a new paper about the discovery. "They were probably inhaling a lot of smoke from the caves. So the air was not completely free of pollutants—but certainly, these Neanderthals weren't smoking cigarettes."...
Source: AP
6-11-13
BERLIN (AP) — Adolf Hitler's mountain retreat in Bavaria is getting a makeover, with a 17-million euro ($22.5 million) renovation project that will enlarge the historical information center now there.The Bavarian government said Tuesday that building should begin in 2015....
Source: AP
6-11-13
WASHINGTON (AP) — Oprah Winfrey is giving $12 million to a museum being built on Washington's National Mall that will document African-American history, officials said Tuesday.The media mogul and former talk-show host previously gave $1 million to the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and the museum says her $13 million total contribution is its largest to date. As a result, the museum's 350-seat theater will be named after Winfrey, who is also a member of its advisory council.Construction on the $500 million museum began in early 2012. When it's finished in 2015, the museum will be the 19th Smithsonian museum. The U.S. government is providing half of the funding. To date, about $140 million has been raised in private funds....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
6-11-13
GCSEs will feature more British history, a study of classic literature and an increased focus on spelling, punctuation and grammar as part of a major drive to raise standards in schools, it was announced today.Qualifications sat by 16-year-olds in England will be dramatically overhauled to make exams comparable with the toughest tests sat elsewhere in the world, ministers claimed.A series of course documents published by the Department for Education showed that GCSEs – taught for the first time from 2015 – would place a renewed focus on traditional subject knowledge.The new history course will feature a minimum of 40 per cent British history – up from 25 per cent at the moment – and require pupils to show a basic understanding of chronology....
Source: Fox News
6-11-13
REX, Ga. – Police in Georgia are investigating after a monument dedicated to one of first lady Michelle Obama's relatives was knocked over in suburban Atlanta.Clayton County Commissioner Sonna Singleton tells WSB-TV that a stone monument to Michelle Obama's great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia Shields, was pushed over and will need to be inspected for cracks. The report was aired Monday.Officials say Shields was born into slavery in the mid-1800s and later settled in Rex, Ga., -- about 15 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta....
Source: Discovery News
6-10-13
Ötzi the Iceman, Europe's oldest mummy, likely suffered a head injury before he died roughly 5,300 years ago, according to a new protein analysis of his brain tissue.Ever since a pair of hikers stumbled upon his astonishingly well-preserved frozen body in the Alps in 1991, Ötzi has become one of the most-studied ancient human specimens. His face, last meal, clothing and genome have been reconstructed — all contributing to a picture of Ötzi as a 45-year-old, hide-wearing, tattooed agriculturalist who was a native of Central Europe and suffered from heart disease, joint pain, tooth decay and probably Lyme disease before he died.None of those conditions, however, directly led to his demise. A wound reveals Ötzi was hit in the shoulder with a deadly artery-piercing arrow, and an undigested meal in the Iceman's stomach suggests he was ambushed, researchers say....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
6-11-13
The last words of Eva Braun, Hitler’s long time mistress and wife of a few hours, charting her fear of their certain death, have been discovered....The letters are thought to have been written by Braun to her friend Herta Schneider.Third Reich expert Anna Maria Sigmund insists the letters are genuine and were shown to her by descendants of Schneider.She has published the series of letters in a book called The Women of the Nazis, and told the Daily Mail: “I have no doubt the letters are genuine and Eva Braun has typed them, correcting her faults by hand....
Source: CNN.com
5-31-13
Most documentaries record and preserve history – only a few change the arc of history.In Guatemala in the early 1980s, a young American documentary filmmaker named Pamela Yates bore witness to massive crimes and atrocities at great personal risk to make her film.This year, a quarter-century later, her footage became critical evidence used to convict a military dictator of genocide. The Central American country had been torn apart by decades of U.S. funded civil war when General Efrain Rios Montt seized power in 1982 and launched a scorched earth campaign against the Mayans and leftist guerillas....
