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: Yahoo News
June 4, 2012
PEARL HARBOR, Hawaii (AP) — Six months after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan sent four aircraft carriers to the tiny Pacific atoll of Midway to draw out and destroy what remained of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.But this time the U.S. knew about Japan's plans. U.S. cryptologists had cracked Japanese communications codes, giving Fleet Commander Adm. Chester Nimitz notice of where Japan would strike, the day and time of the attack, and what ships the enemy would bring to the fight.The U.S. was badly outnumbered and its pilots less experienced than Japan's. Even so, it sank four Japanese aircraft carriers the first day of the three-day battle and put Japan on the defensive, greatly diminishing its ability to project air power as it had in the attack on Hawaii....
Source: Cleveland Plain Dealer
June 3, 2012
Grab your passport and go to -- Ohio?The Ohio Historical Society started its first-ever Passport to Your Ohio History program on May 24. The free program is designed to continue for about two years."We were looking for a way for people to learn about the sites and learn about Ohio," said Jane Mason, spokeswoman for the Ohio Historical Society. "It's a great way for people to travel around Ohio and see the wonderful sites."...
Source: NYT
June 3, 2012
LONDON — Braving a day of bone-chilling, rain-dampened weather, a crowd estimated by the police at more than a million people lined the banks of the Thames on Sunday to acclaim Queen Elizabeth II as she marked 60 years on the throne with a royal river pageant of a kind last seen 350 years ago.The stirring flotilla of a thousand boats, the highlight of a four-day holiday to celebrate the monarch’s diamond jubilee, combined with the familiar miseries of the British climate to produce a vignette that some embraced as a demonstration in minor key of the character of Elizabeth’s reign: unflappable steadiness. The monarch, who is 86, and her husband, Prince Philip, 90, never donned coats through the hours they spent on the open deck of the royal barge as it made its way down the seven-mile course of the pageant, waving at crowds that shouted “God save the queen” and hoisted a forest of plastic Union Jacks. Neither did they sit in the thronelike red velvet chairs set in the prow, apparently reluctant to claim a luxury not available to the onlookers....
Source: NYT
June 3, 2012
TOKYO — The police on Sunday arrested one of the two remaining fugitive suspects from the doomsday cult behind the 1995 nerve-gas attack on the Tokyo subway, Japanese media reported.The reports said the police in the Tokyo suburb of Sagamihara arrested Naoko Kikuchi, 40, a former top member of the Aum Shinrikyo cult. Ms. Kikuchi is accused of manufacturing the sarin gas used in the attack, which killed 13 commuters and sickened at least 5,000 more.Ms. Kikuchi had eluded the police for 17 years, even though her photograph has appeared on wanted posters across the nation. Her arrest came five months after another cult member wanted in connection with the attack, Makoto Hirata, surrendered to the police....
Source: NYT
June 3, 2012
“New York is a city of contrasts,” the analysis began. “An amazing, infinite, inspiring, shocking, beautiful, ugly, old, new city of seven million plus.” Seven decades later, it still is. The same adjectives apply, but the city is even bigger: The population has grown to a record 8.3 million.That description of the city came from a market analysis produced by The New York Times and several other newspapers, aimed at advertisers. It was drawn from the 1940 census....
Source: NYT
June 2, 2012
TA-NEHISI COATES, a senior editor for The Atlantic and author of “The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood,” had only a passing interest in the Civil War when he picked up James M. McPherson’s “Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era” three years ago. By its end, he had become “fanatical.”“I went through all the books I could,” Mr. Coates said. “I was driving my wife crazy, my son crazy.” So he took his obsession on the road.For the last three summers he has traveled with his family to Civil War battlefields. This summer he’ll be doing the same. A collection of essays and novels on the war (yes, plural) is in the works.Below Mr. Coates answers questions on the battlefields he’s visited.Q. What was the first battlefield you visited?
Source: Salon
June 4, 2012
TRANG BANG, Vietnam (AP) — In the picture, the girl will always be 9 years old and wailing “Too hot! Too hot!” as she runs down the road away from her burning Vietnamese village.She will always be naked after blobs of sticky napalm melted through her clothes and layers of skin like jellied lava.She will always be a victim without a name.It only took a second for Associated Press photographer Huynh Cong “Nick” Ut to snap the iconic black-and-white image 40 years ago. It communicated the horrors of the Vietnam War in a way words could never describe, helping to end one of the most divisive wars in American history....
Source: AP
June 2, 2012
The U.S. Department of Justice says at least some materials sealed as part of the court case against seven men involved in the 1972 Watergate burglary should be released.
The agency responded Friday to a request by a Texas history professor who is seeking access to materials he believes could help answer lingering questions about the burglary that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.
Luke Nichter of Texas A&M University-Central Texas in Killeen, Texas, wrote the chief judge of the federal court in Washington to ask that potentially hundreds of pages of documents be unsealed. The judge said in a letter made public earlier this year that the professor had "raised a very legitimate question" about whether the material should remain sealed, and he ordered the Department of Justice to respond with any objections.
Source: NYT
June 2, 2012
The White House said Friday that President Obama had written a letter to the Polish president expressing “regret” for using the term “Polish death camp” this week while honoring a Polish World War II resistance hero rather than wording that would have made it clear that he meant a death camp operated by Nazi Germany on Polish soil....
Source: NYT
June 1, 2012
“Halt! Advance and give the countersign!”So began an 1895 article in The New York Times detailing how William Wilkins was prevented from visiting his ancestral graveyard in Fort Totten, then a Queens military base, by a sentry at the gates.The fort, Mr. Wilkins insisted to no avail, had once been his family’s rolling farmland and the cemetery on it was still his. It had been retained, he said, by a special provision set out when his father sold the property, which was eventually bought by the military before the Civil War.More than a century later, Tom Loggia, Mr. Wilkins’s great-grandnephew, is continuing the family quest to seek out and memorialize a cemetery that he steadfastly insists lies unmarked on the land....
Source: NYT
June 2, 2012
It seemed self-evident at the time: A museum devoted to documenting the events of Sept. 11, 2001, would have to include photographs of the hijackers who turned four passenger jets into missiles. Then two and a half years ago, plans to use the pictures were made public.New York City’s fire chief protested that such a display would “honor” the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. A New York Post editorial called the idea “appalling.” Groups representing rescuers, survivors and victims’ families asked how anyone could even think of showing the faces of the men who killed their relatives, colleagues and friends.The anger took some museum officials by surprise.“You don’t create a museum about the Holocaust and not say that it was the Nazis who did it,” said Joseph Daniels, chief executive of the memorial and museum foundation....
Source: NYT
June 1, 2012
THOUGH it is something the Red Queen might have said, it was actually uttered by Elizabeth II. “I have to be seen to be believed,” the queen of England remarked, according to her most recent biographer, Sally Bedell Smith. Far from being a goofball tautology, that declaration is a shrewd assessment of monarchy management in an era when image rules supreme.It was in the 1953 Order of Coronation that England’s newly crowned ruler was referred to as “Queen Elizabeth, Your Undoubted Queen.” Over the decades that followed — and that culminate this week in her Diamond Jubilee celebrations — that undoubted queen diligently fulfilled a role she considered fateful. She simultaneously forged the definitive image of a monarch at a time when most monarchies were reduced to ceremonial nothingness or else had gone kaput.
Source: Fox News
May 27, 2012
DRESDEN, Germany – A German 16-year-old has become the first person to solve a mathematical problem posed by Sir Isaac Newton more than 300 years ago.Shouryya Ray worked out how to calculate exactly the path of a projectile under gravity and subject to air resistance, The (London) Sunday Times reported.The Indian-born teen said he solved the problem that had stumped mathematicians for centuries while working on a school project....
Source: WaPo
May 31, 2012
It was reputed to be America’s loveliest Colonial-era plantation house, a jewel of Georgian architecture. Its interiors, with opulent walnut and yellow pine paneling, parquetry and grand staircase — the work of a master joiner summoned to Colonial Virginia from England — are lauded in its National Historic Landmark paperwork as the most beautiful in the South.For the better part of three centuries, Carter’s Grove rested serenely on the northern bank of the James River. It was built in 1750 by Carter Burwell, grandson of Robert “King” Carter, the English colony’s early land baron, to awe visitors with physical evidence of the bountiful riches that could be wrung from the New World wilderness.Before the house, the land was the site of Martin’s Hundred plantation and Wolstenholme Towne, an ill-fated English settlement founded in 1620, just a few years after the establishment of Jamestown five miles upriver. Wolstenholme was destroyed during a native Powhatan massacre of English settlers in 1622....
Source: WLFI
May 10, 2012
AUSTIN (KXAN) - Early next month, the Civil War Trust , an organization dedicated to the preservation of historic battlefields from the War between the States, will hand out its first ever award to a child.That child is Andrew Druart, 12, from South Austin.“They're giving me an award for junior preservation,” said Andrew. “I'm the first one to get this award for protecting battlefields at such a young age.”...
Source: Washington Examiner
May 30, 2012
Policing the History Channel now appears to be a pet project for Congress — with bipartisan support. After months of Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, tweeting his fury with the cable channel over its “lack of history,” Rep. Gerry Connolly, D-Va., has taken up the mantle.Connolly tells Yeas & Nays that he has been “bitterly disappointed” in the History Channel’s programming. “I only got cable television a few years ago,” he said. “One of the great draws was that I could watch this channel called the History Channel.” A self-described history buff who says he reads a history book a week, Connolly has watched in dismay as the channel moved into reality TV territory....
Source: HLNTV
May 31, 2012
Investigators from the Los Angeles Police Department will now be able to examine some audio tapes that they say could link Charles Manson followers to other murders.A bankruptcy judge has released hours of recorded conversations Manson’s right-hand man Tex Watson had with his attorney in 1969."The LAPD has information that Mr. Watson discussed additional unsolved murders committed by followers of Charles Manson," said a letter signed by Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck and Lt. Yana Horvatich, acting commanding officer of the robbery-homicide division....
Source: Jezebel
May 21, 2012
On the season finale of NBC's Who Do You Think You Are, Paula Deen discovered that her great great great great-grandfather, John Batts, was a slave owner. Deen, who was born, raised and still lives in Georgia, found that Batts, a politician and plantation owner, was very wealthy — and a hefty portion of his assets were slaves.Dr. Bob Wilson, a professor of history at Georgia College, showed Deen a document showing that Batts was part of a movement trying to get Georgia to support Democratic candidate John Breckenridge for president. Breckenridge was running on a pro-slavery platform; whereas Abraham Lincoln, the Republican candidate, was against the expansion of slavery. Dr. Wilson showed Deen 1860 census records, showing that Batts was incredibly rich for his time. Deen also perused a Slave Inhabitants document, which detailed how many slaves John Batts owned: Thirty-five, some of them 8 and 11-year-old children....
Source: The Grio
May 30, 2012
Emory University has secured one of the largest photo libraries of black history ever assembled. The collection holds over 10,000 photographs of intimate moments of African-American life dating back to the late 19th century. The anthology contains photos of several notable black Americans, such as William Monroe Trotter, Marcus Garvey, and sculptor Selma Burke, but the uniqueness of this collection lies in the photos that capture rare moments in the lives of everyday black Americans.A number of photographs in the collection were taken by African-American photographers themselves and range in subject matter from shots of cabaret life to pictures chronicling the civil rights movement. Emory University Provost Earl Lewis, who is also a professor of history and African-American studies, is very proud to have a collection of this magnitude at Emory....
Source: Newsbusters
May 30, 2012
Comparing conservatives to Hitler is old-and-busted. The new hotness, if you ask Martin Bashir, is comparing them to Stalin.A few months ago, you may recall, Bashir compared Rick Santorum to the long-dead Soviet dictator. Now it's the state of Florida, more specifically, the conservative Republican Rick Scott, who is getting the honors. "Why is the Sunshine State in the midst of a purge that even Josef Stalin would admire?" Bashir rhetorically asked on the way out to an ad break on today's program. The "purge," by the way, is one admitted by a Democratic official in Broward County, Florida, to be "very, very microscopic" in nature....
