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: AP
8-30-12
ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) — The Cuomo administration is hoping a new statewide series of roadside signs designed to promote New York's rich history will help boost the state's economy by steering visitors to historic sites and cultural attractions.More than 200 signs were unveiled this week in Albany as part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo's "Path Through History" program, a $1 million initiative that will split the funding between 10 regional heritage tourism marketing plans across the state.The new signs planned for installation near Thruway exits and other New York highways highlight some of the state's most significant sites and historic milestones. State officials hope the briefly worded signs, along with related high-tech tools such as websites and applications for handheld devices, will entice travelers to seek out places where history was made in New York....
Source: CNN.com
8-29-12
London (CNN) -- In 1948, a hospital outside London witnessed the birth of the Paralympic movement, as a Jewish doctor who had fled Nazi Germany sought to change the lives of patients with spinal injuries -- and inspire new hope in them through sport.The first "Stoke Mandeville Games" were organized in 1948 to coincide with the London Olympics, the second to be held in Britain.Named for the hospital in Buckinghamshire where Prof. Ludwig Guttmann's pioneering spinal injuries unit was based, the competitors in those initial Games -- 14 men and two women -- took part in a wheelchair archery contest....Four years later, inspired by Guttmann's vision, the first official Paralympic Games were held in Rome in tandem with the Olympics....
Source: WaPo
8-25-12
After dark had come, the cries of men fighting for their lives burst from the field hospitals, and the glow of distant lanterns floated over the battlefield.As men picked their way among the bodies, looking for wounded on that night nearly 150 years ago, it must have seemed that only the very fortunate had survived unscathed the carnage of the Second Battle of Bull Run.On Saturday, people again sought out the fields around Manassas, searching for insight into the bloody Civil War battle and marking its sesquicentennial.The battle from Aug. 28 to 30, 1862, was spread over the same ground as a major clash a year earlier. The second was much deadlier, although both were triumphs for the Confederacy....
Source: WaPo
8-28-12
MANASSAS, Va. — The Civil War Trust is rolling out a new “battle app” to mark the 150th anniversary of the Second Battle of Manassas.The battle application making its debut Tuesday includes video featuring top historians and topographical maps, among other features. The free smartphone application is the latest in a series developed by the trust on key Civil War battles....
Source: Yahoo News
8-30-12
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — It could hardly have been a riskier mission: infiltrate Auschwitz to chronicle Nazi atrocities. Witold Pilecki survived nearly three years as an inmate in the death camp, managing to smuggle out word of executions before making a daring escape. But the Polish resistance hero was crushed by the post-war communist regime — tried on trumped-up charges and executed.Six decades on, Poland hopes Pilecki's remains will be identified among the entangled skeletons and shattered skulls of resistance fighters being excavated from a mass grave on the edge of Warsaw's Powazki Military Cemetery. The exhumations are part of a movement in the resurgent, democratic nation to officially recognize its war-time heroes and 20th century tragedies....
Source: Washington Examiner
8-29-12
A two-year archeological investigation of Fort Ward Park in Alexandria yielded a total of 43 previously lost graves, only three of which were marked.The dig, which began after descendants of those believed to be buried in the park asked city officials to locate the graves of their relatives, revealed artifacts and gravesites of Native Americans, Civil War soldiers and a post-war African-American community.And although city archeologist Pam Cressey said there are no plans to excavate or immediately identify the newly-discovered graves, she said she's grateful that the families of those who used to live in the area now have some closure....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
8-7-12
Following a pilot study on his short novel, The Chimes, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, researchers have decided that significant lost passages might be unlocked from the original manuscripts of his great novels, including Bleak House.The tantalising new technology did not produce any significant finds during the first crawl, besides a few interesting word changes. One sentence, “Years … are like Christians in that respect” originally read: “Years … are like men in one respect.”However, Rowan Watson, a senior curator at the V&A, described the technology in The Independent today as “ingenious and inspiring”. The manuscripts show Dickens “almost thinking aloud on to paper,” he said....
Source: Global Toronto
8-28-12
OTTAWA - There was a war in 1812? Really?The Harper government has been highlighting a war with our American neighbours 200 years ago, but the relevance of commemorating the event seemed lost on almost all of those who participated in a comprehensive survey for National Defence.The poll, conducted annually, measures impressions of the Canadian military, its missions, equipment and important events.Few people who took part in the survey, and in related focus groups, were aware of the anniversary "and even fewer could identify the War of 1812 by name," said the research conducted by Phoenix Strategic Perspectives Inc....
Source: NYT
8-28-12
One party platform stated that Hispanics and others should not “be barred from education or employment opportunities because English is not their first language.” It highlighted the need for “dependable and affordable” mass transit in cities, noting that “mass transportation offers the prospect for significant energy conservation.” And it prefaced its plank on abortion by saying that “we recognize differing views on this question among Americans in general — and in our own party.”The other party platform said that “we support English as the nation’s official language.” It chided the Democratic administration for “replacing civil engineering with social engineering as it pursues an exclusively urban vision of dense housing and government transit.” And its abortion plank recognized no dissent, taking the position that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed.”
Source: AP
8-28-12
WASHINGTON (AP) - "2016: Obama's America," a new conservative film exploring the roots of President Barack Obama's political views, took in $6.2 million to make it one of the highest-grossing movies of last weekend. The film, written and narrated by conservative scholar Dinesh D'Souza, argues that Obama was heavily influenced by what D'Souza calls the "anti-colonial" beliefs of his father, Barack Obama Sr., a Kenyan academic who was largely absent from the president's life.To document that claim, D'Souza travels to Kenya to interview members of Obama's extended family as well as to Hawaii and Indonesia, where Obama grew up. He also cites several actions and policy positions Obama has taken to support the thesis that Obama is ideologically rooted in the Third World and harbors contempt for the country that elected him its first black president.The assertion that Obama's presidency is an expression of his father's political beliefs, which D'Souza first made in 2010 in his book "The Roots of Obama's Rage," is almost entirely subjective and a logical stretch at best....
Source: Yahoo News
8-28-12
PARIS (AP) — French prosecutors opened a murder inquiry into the death of Yasser Arafat on Tuesday, his widow's lawyer said, after she and a TV investigation raised new questions about whether the Palestinian leader was poisoned.Many in the Arab world have long suspected that Arafat was poisoned, and a Swiss lab's recent finding of elevated levels of polonium-210 — a rare and highly lethal radioactive substance — on Arafat's clothing has fed those claims.However, the Institute of Radiation Physics said its findings were inconclusive and that only exhuming Arafat's remains could bring possible clarity. Palestinian officials have waffled on that matter — initially approving the exhumation and then saying the matter needed more study — only further fueling suspicions....
Source: Chicago Tribune
8-27-12
In 1997, Darlene Clark Hine came across an essay in which Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps argued that black Chicago had its own, little-known renaissance that began in the 1930s and rivaled the famous one that occurred in 1920s New York."I read this and said, 'What in the world?'" said Hine, a professor of history and African-American studies at Northwestern University. "Bontemps was saying that Chicago had a major black arts movement without finger bowls and highfalutin intellectuals. Most of Chicago's artists were hardworking, working-class people creating the people's art."...
Source: WaPo
8-26-12
WASHINGTON — When man first harnessed fire, no one recorded it. When the Wright Brothers showed man could fly, only a handful of people witnessed it. But when Neil Armstrong took that first small step on the moon in July 1969, an entire globe watched in grainy black-and-white from a quarter million miles awayWe saw it. We were part of it. He took that “giant leap for mankind” for us....“It’s a human achievement that will be remembered forever,” said John Logsdon, professor emeritus of space policy at George Washington University. Those first steps were beamed to nearly every country around the world, thanks to a recently launched satellite. It was truly the first global mass media event, Logsdon said. An estimated 600 million people — 1 out of every 5 on the planet — watched....
Source: WaPo
8-27-12
Charlie Crist and Artur Davis belong to the 2012 class of convention renegades — politicians who have spurned their former political parties to appear at rival nominating conventions....Crist and Davis each stand out this year. But this isn’t the first time a high-profile pol has disavowed his or her former affiliation on the national convention stage. Here’s a look back through history at a handful of memorable defectors:* Joesph Lieberman, 2008: Declaring “country matters more than party,” Lieberman, who eight years prior was the Democratic vice presidential nominee, delivered a defense of Arizona Sen. John McCain’s record at the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn. Lieberman, a longtime friend of McCain’s and a senator from Connecticut lost in the Democratic Senate primary two years prior, but won reelection as an independent in the general election....
Source: Opposing Views
8-27-12
Speaking, last night, at the Prayer Rally for America’s Future in Tampa’s River Church, self-proclaimed historian David Barton claimed that the Seventh Amendment bans abortion, reports RightWingWatch.org....
Source: NorthJersey.com
8-28-12
METTAWA, Ill. (AP) — The home of former Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson could be named a National Historic Landmark.Historian Robie Lange says despite Stevenson failed bids for the presidency in 1952 and 1956, he meets the criteria as a nationally significant individual of the mid-20th century....
Source: Atlantic Cities
8-27-12
With the peak month for global hurricanes nearly upon us, now is a good time to reflect upon all the thrashing tropical storms of yesteryear. Here's a way of looking at the atmosphere's tumultuous timeline that you've probably never seen before, courtesy of John Nelson at the "data viz" website IDV User Experience.Nelson has taken storm-path data from NOAA from 1851 to 2010 that includes all recorded tropical storms and hurricanes, and laid it on a "South Pole stereographic" map of the world. (If you're having trouble getting oriented, that's Antarctica in the middle, Asia on the left and the Americas on the right.) The color of the points represents a system's intensity, with the darkest, faded blue being a tropical storm and the iridescent green the equal of a most-potent Category 5 hurricane....
Source: Scientific American
8-27-12
Right now, one half of all Americans are on a diet. The other half just gave up on their diets and are on a binge. Collectively, we are overweight, sick and struggling. Our modern choices about what and how much to eat have gone terribly wrong. The time has come to return to a more sensible way of eating and living, but which way? An entire class of self-help books recommends a return to the diets of our ancestors. Paleolithic diets, caveman diets, primal diets and the like, urge us to eat like the ancients. Taken too literally, such diets are ridiculous. After all, sometimes our ancestors starved to death and the starving to death diet, well, it ends badly. The past was no panacea; each generation we made do with the bodies and foods available, imperfect bodies and imperfect foods. Yet, the idea that we might take our ancestral diet into consideration when evaluating the foods on which our organs, cells and existence thrive, makes sense. But what did our ancestors eat?...
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
8-27-12
The Dark Lady who inspired some of Shakespeare’s romantic sonnets may have had a rather unladylike profession.An expert on the Bard suggests she may have been a notorious prostitute called ‘Lucy Negro’ or ‘Black Luce’ who ran a brothel in Clerkenwell, London.Shakespeare scholar Dr Duncan Salkeld said he had unearthed documents that indicate she is ‘the foremost candidate for the dubious role of the Dark Lady’.Many of the sonnets 127 to 152 are addressed to an unidentified woman with whom Shakespare imagines having an affair....
Source: NYT
8-27-12
Nikola Tesla electrified the world with alternating current, then slipped into obscurity, dying penniless in 1943 on the 33rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel in Manhattan. But though his fame was eclipsed by other inventors, he was never forgotten: A hardy band of enthusiasts has long sought to give this eccentric genius his due.Now his devotees are making headway in their efforts to create a lasting memorial to Tesla by buying and restoring Wardenclyffe, the overgrown 16-acre estate on the North Shore of Long Island that features his only surviving workshop.Three fund-raising efforts are under way. All envision turning the rundown laboratory into a museum or educational center, but each has a distinct way of raising the money — online donations; foreign contributions; and simple philanthropy, in the form of a feature film that would memorialize Tesla, a bold visionary of Serbian birth....
