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: NYT
1-10-13
When Elizabeth Keckley, a former slave turned professional dressmaker and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, published her memoir, “Behind the Scenes,” in 1868, the response was vitriolic. One Washington reviewer called Mrs. Keckley “treacherous” and asked: “What family of eminence that employs a Negro is safe from such desecration? Where will it end?”What a difference 145 years make.The memoir is now ensconced as a historic literary treasure, and in pop culture’s most recent outbreak of Lincoln fever, Mrs. Keckley is logging significant time onstage, on screen and on the page, where her remarkable life has allowed other writers to explore the complicated intersections of race and power in 1860s America.“She had always prided herself on her integrity and dignity, and to suddenly be dismissed as a lowly servant telling tales was quite a shock,” said Jennifer Chiaverini, whose novel “Mrs. Lincoln’s Dressmaker” is being published by Dutton on Tuesday....
Source: NYT
1-9-13
LONDON — The Simon Wiesenthal Center has prompted an outraged debate in Germany after it included a prominent German journalist’s remarks in its annual top 10 list of anti-Semitic and anti-Israel slurs.The Los Angeles-based organization, named for a celebrated Nazi-hunter and dedicated to fighting anti-Jewish bigotry, listed Jakob Augstein, a well-known editor and columnist, among 2012’s top perpetrators of the slurs.It ranked his comments alongside those of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn movement, racist European soccer fans and Louis Farrakhan....
Source: WaPo
1-10-13
Not for the first time, I’m confused. My search for a gin distillery has led me to a quiet residential street in West London. Can this really be the place? I check my dog-eared A-Z map again. Yeah, this is right: The garage in front of me — little more than a lean-to, really — is the spot.This is the home of Sipsmith, the first copper-pot distillery to open in London in almost 200 years. This is where London’s recent gin revival began....It’s a great story, not least because London, home of the world’s most popular gin style (London Dry), is so inextricably linked to the juniper-infused spirit. The city’s residents have been knocking the drink back in varying quantities ever since the end of the 17th century, when William of Orange arrived from the Netherlands bearing muscular Protestantism and a drink called Jenever. William’s obsequious courtiers soon began drinking Jenever, and his thirsty subjects followed suit. By the middle of the 18th century, everyone was drinking gin, and plenty of people were making it: One house in every four in the City of London reputedly contained distilling equipment.
Source: WaPo
1-11-13
“Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005, half of all of them in the history of the country.”— Former President Bill Clinton, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Jan. 9, 2013A colleague spotted this eye-popping statistic by the former president and wondered if it was correct.... In the highly charged debate over guns, it is important for politicians on both sides to get their facts straight. In this case, the available data shows that Clinton was way off-base in his assertion, making an exaggerated claim — which his office would not even defend. Ordinarily, this might have been a Four Pinocchio claim. Given the fuzziness of the data and questions about definitions, we are going to cut Clinton a bit of slack in the final ruling. But such uncertainty in the data means politicians need to be very careful in making claims about gun violence.
Source: WaP
1-10-13
Students at St. Mary’s College of Maryland think they may have found the site of the home of Thomas Gerard, who oversaw thousands of acres known as St. Clement’s Manor when Maryland was still a colony.Despite his land wealth and political influence, Gerard joined a brief rebellion against the Calvert family, which established the colony. The land where Gerard is thought to have lived is now home to Levi and McCue, two American paint horses off Oscar Hayden Road, near Bushwood.The archaeological group of the anthropological research methods class from St. Mary’s College spent several Saturdays digging around the Foxwood Farm in the fall. The landowners, James and Gena Clifton, said they had suspicions 10 years ago that there was a deeper history to the property. They opened their land and home to the students while they worked....
Source: WaPo
1-10-13
HONOLULU — Herbert Yanamura is an American, born and raised among the coffee farms of Hawaii’s Kona district. Yet the U.S. government branded him an “enemy alien” after the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor because he looked like the invaders.So Yanamura volunteered to join the Army to prove his loyalty.Nearly 70 years later, that same government honored him and the thousands of other Japanese-Americans who served in World War II with one of its most elite rewards: the Congressional Gold Medal....
Source: AP
1-12-13
HARTBEESPOORT, South Africa — Do you remember your first kiss? If you have a few years under your belt, maybe you stole it in the back of the movie theater, the projector whirring in the darkness. Or rather, back of the “bioscope,” a word for the cinema in South Africa in the old days.The fantasy world of “Pretville,” a Grease-style film musical in the Afrikaans language, celebrates 1950s Americana, the thrill of first love and foot-tapping classics that evoke innocence and discovery.It is also an affirmation of an Afrikaner identity that spent years in the doghouse after 1994 elections and the end of apartheid, the system of white minority rule imposed by Afrikaner nationalists in 1948. And while most of the actors are white, two who are not play authority figures, lampooning the now-discarded racial order....
Source: WaPo Answer Sheet
1-11-13
Why do so many students find history boring? Here’s why, from David Bernstein, a nonprofit executive who lives in Gaithersburg, Md., and has two sons, ages 7 and 15. By David BernsteinWhen I took high school history in the early 1980s, the job of the history teacher was to provide a steady stream of facts, and the job of the student was to commit those facts to memory. Even though I was deeply interested in public affairs, I found both American and World history boring and irrelevant. But later in life, I came to realize, like so many others, that it was impossible to understand modern politics and the interplay of ideas without some grounding in the subject.
Source: Fox News
1-10-13
Residents of a town under siege by the Roman army about 2,000 years ago buried two hoards of treasure in the town's citadel — treasure recently excavated by archaeologists.More than 200 coins, mainly bronze, were found along with "various items of gold, silver and bronze jewelry and glass vessels" inside an ancient fortress within the Artezian settlement in the Crimea (in Ukraine), the researchers wrote in the most recent edition of the journal Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia."The fortress had been besieged. Wealthy people from the settlement and the neighborhood had tried to hide there from the Romans. They had buried their hoards inside the citadel," Nikolaï Vinokurov, a professor at Moscow State Pedagogical University, explained....
Source: Fox News
1-10-13
A long-awaited article on a Coptic papyrus fragment believed to reference the wife of Jesus has been left out of the Harvard Theological Review, furthering doubts about the artifact’s authenticity.The scholarly journal was slated to publish a major article on the finding this month after Karen King, a professor of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School (HDS), announced in September the discovery of a 4th century fragment of papyrus indicating that some early Christians believed Jesus was married. The text, written in Coptic and likely translated from a 2nd century Greek text, contains a dialogue in which Jesus refers to "my wife," whom he identifies as Mary....
Source: Fox News
12-30-12
ALBANY, N.Y. – The upstate New York village that bills itself as the birthplace of the U.S. Navy hasn't done much to preserve one of the service's oldest warship relics: the hull of a schooner that was the first in a long line of American vessels to carry the name Ticonderoga.The wooden remains of the War of 1812 ship are displayed in a long, open-sided shed on the grounds of the Skenesborough Museum in Whitehall. They've been stored there since being raised from the southern end of Lake Champlain by a local historical group more than 50 years ago. Now, with the approach of 200th anniversary of the battle at which the first Ticonderoga gained its fame, a maritime historian is hoping something can be done to stem the deterioration of a rare naval artifact."It was recovered for all the right reasons but before we knew all the implications of a shipwreck and bringing it up into an air environment," said Arthur Cohn, senior adviser and special projects developer at the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum in Vergennes, Vt....
Source: Fox News
1-1-13
LOUISVILLE, Ky. – The Hatfield clan New Year's attack on Randolph McCoy's cabin marked a turning point in America's most famous feud -- the homestead was set ablaze, and two McCoys were gunned down. Hatfield family members and supporters were soon thrown in jail.Artifacts recently unearthed appear to pinpoint the location of the 1888 ambush in the woods of Pike County in eastern Kentucky. Excavators found bullets believed to have been fired by the McCoys in self-defense, along with fragments of windows and ceramic from the family's cabin."This is one of the most famous conflicts in American history, and we've got bullets fired from one of the key battles. It doesn't get any better than that," said Bill Richardson, a West Virginia University extension professor who was part of the recent discovery....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
12-31-12
A new documentary has cast doubt on Neil Armstrong's claims that he came up with his iconic 'one small step' line hours after touching down on the surface of the moon.The first man on the moon had stubbornly maintained up until his death in September that his historic words were unplanned, but a recent interview with his brother claims that he thought up the famous speech months before the July 1969, Apollo mission - and that the phrase he planned to utter did include an 'a'.Hundreds of millions around the world heard the NASA astronaut say, 'That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind', but Armstrong insisted that he said 'a man' but that the 'a' was not heard because of static.In a rare interview three months after the NASA pioneers death, his brother, Dean, recalled that Neil showed him a written version of the speech months before the Apollo 11 launch, clearly stating, 'that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.'...
Source: Discovery News
1-1-13
Two centuries after the French people beheaded Louis XVI and dipped their handkerchiefs in his blood, scientists believe they have authenticated the remains of one such rag kept as a revolutionary souvenir.Researchers have been trying for years to verify a claim imprinted on an ornately decorated calabash that it contains a sample of the blood of the French king guillotined in Paris on January 21, 1793.The dried, hollowed squash is adorned with portraits of revolutionary heroes and the text: "On January 21, Maximilien Bourdaloue dipped his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation"....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
1-3-13
Cristina Kirchner, the Argentine President, has been left “frustrated” by the refusal of other Latin American nations to back Argentina’s long-standing claim to the Islands, Klaus Dodds, Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, said.An emotional open letter from Kirchner to David Cameron demanding the return of the Islands which she claims were “forcibly stripped” from her country, published today in the Guardian newspaper, is a sign of “profound weakness,” Prof Dodds said.The Islands had no established Argentine population at the time the British took control - and Mrs Kirchner's country was itself an ambitious colonial power in the nineteenth century, he added....
Source: CNN.com
12-31-12
(CNN) -- Forty years after they were convicted by a jury of firebombing a grocery store in Wilmington, North Carolina, civil rights activists who became known as the "Wilmington 10" were pardoned Monday by the state's outgoing governor."These convictions were tainted by naked racism and represent an ugly stain on North Carolina's criminal justice system that cannot be allowed to stand any longer," said Gov. Beverly Purdue. "Justice demands that this stain finally be removed."In 1972, nine black men and one white woman were convicted in the store firebombing in the coastal city despite their claims of innocence and their supporters' vehement argument that the defendants were victims of racially biased prosecutors....
Source: CNN.com
1-3-13
(CNN) - One of the most anticipated articles in religion circles will be absent from the pages of the January edition of the Harvard Theological Review. Harvard Divinity School professor Karen King's final article on the "Jesus wife" fragment did not make the scholarly journal because further testing on the Coptic papyrus fragment has not been finished.King announced the findings of the 1.5-by-3 inch, honey-colored fragment in September at the International Association for Coptic Studies conference in Rome. In a draft version of the article submitted for publication in the January edition, King and her co-author said the scrap had written in Coptic, a language used by Egyptian Christians, "Jesus said to them, 'My wife," but was then cut off.King said the fragment dates to the 4th century but could be a copy of an early gospel from the 2nd century. King and her research partners dubbed the hypothetical text "the Gospel of Jesus' Wife."Despite King's insistence, the discovery did not prove anything definitive on the marital status of Jesus....
Source: Yahoo News
1-9-13
A collector of vintage photography equipment got an extra bonus when he picked up a French camera at an antique store: never-before-seen images circa World War I France.Anton Orlov details the story of the lucky find on his blog the Photo Palace, where all of the eight photos from the Jumelle Belllieni stereoscopic camera can be seen.Orlov writes in his blog that he came across the images completely by accident, as he was cleaning the recently purchased camera. He opened up the film chamber and found the negatives on a stack of glass plates....
Source: WaPo
1-9-13
LONDON — Busy, congested, stressful. This is how the world’s first subway system was depicted by London newspapers in 1863. It’s a situation that would be familiar to nail-biting passengers of the present as the Tube turned 150 years old Wednesday.“The constant cry, as the trains arrived, of ‘no room,’ appeared to have a very depressing effect upon those assembled,” The Guardian newspaper reported on the public opening of London’s Metropolitan Line on Jan. 10, 1863. The first stretch of rail had opened the day before, on Jan. 9.The line — the first part of what is now an extensive London transport network that has shaped the British capital and its suburbs — ran 120 trains each way during the day, carrying up to 40,000 excited passengers. Extra steam locomotives and cars were called in to handle the crowds....
Source: Religion News Service
1-9-13
Whether by accident, serendipity or divine design, four future heavyweights of American Catholicism found themselves in the Class of 1962 at St. John’s Seminary.Momentous societal changes were surfacing all around the young men, but seminary life for George Niederauer, Roger Mahony, William Levada and Tod Brown continued much the same as it had for centuries. The four friends — a pair of cardinals-to-be, a future archbishop and bishop — were assigned alphabetically to desks and dorms. They arose at 5:30 a.m. and, within a half hour headed to the chapel for prayers and Mass. Silence was required during meals and after 7:30 p.m. Moral theology and philosophy classes were taught in Latin.The priests-in-waiting had neither televisions nor telephones and were forbidden to leave the campus in Camarillo, Calif., without permission. They could read about current events — such as the 1960 election of the first Catholic to the White House — but only in clips from approved newspapers....
