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: LiveScience
5-29-12
The mysterious fall of the largest of the world's earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say.Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the largest was the Indus or Harappan civilization. This culture once extended over more than 386,000 square miles (1 million square kilometers) across the plains of the Indus River from the Arabian Sea to the Ganges, and at its peak may have accounted for 10 percent of the world population. The civilization developed about 5,200 years ago, and slowly disintegrated between 3,900 and 3,000 years ago — populations largely abandoned cities, migrating toward the east.
Source: NYT
5-26-12
The custom of strewing flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers has innumerable founders, going back perhaps beyond the horizon of recorded history, perhaps as far as war itself. But there is the ancient practice and there is Memorial Day, the specific holiday, arising from an order for the annual decoration of graves that was delivered in 1868 by Maj. Gen. John A. Logan, the commander in chief of the Grand Army of the Republic, a group made up of Union veterans of the Civil War.
According to the United States Department of Veterans Affairs, roughly two dozen places claim to be the primary source of the holiday, an assertion found on plaques, on Web sites and in the dogged avowals of local historians across the country.
Yet each town seems to have different criteria: whether its ceremony was in fact the earliest to honor Civil War dead, or the first one that General Logan heard about, or the first one that conceived of a national, recurring day.
Source: Chronicle of Higher Ed
5-25-12
The University of Missouri will soon be without a university press. The university announced last week that it would phase out its press, beginning in July. The news was made public in a larger statement about the university's shifting strategic priorities.Such announcements about other university presses have often spurred protests and attempts to save them, but so far at least, the news about the Missouri press has been greeted quietly.One close observer of scholarly publishing, Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive, noted in a blog post for Publishers Weekly that "the impact of such closures is mediated by how the academic community handles the larger transformations in publishing." He wrote that while closing university presses might lead to "a diminution of the number of outlets for scholarly work, it could just as easily be a more positive bellwether for a healthy shift in emphasis from one model of scholarly publishing to another."...
Source: Russia Today
5-24-12
A World War II-era Soviet submarine has been found on the bottom of the Tallinn Bay by an Estonian hydrographical ship.“The object was marked on the sea maps as an unidentified obstacle,” said the press service of the Water Transport Department. “The expedition discovered it was actually a submarine.”The scientists took beautiful photos of the sub that helped identify it as a Soviet Malyutka type submarine, said Estonian underwater archaeologist Vello Mäss....
Source: WaPo
5-20-12
CARROLLTON, Ark. — On the wildflower-studded slopes of the Ozarks, where memories run long and family ties run thick, a little-known and long-ago chapter of history still simmers.On Sept. 11, 1857, a wagon train from this part of Arkansas met with a gruesome fate in Utah, where most of the travelers were slaughtered by a Mormon militia in an episode known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Hundreds of the victims’ descendants still populate these hills and commemorate the killings, which they have come to call “the first 9/11.”Many of the locals grew up hearing denunciations of Mormonism from the pulpit on Sundays, and tales of the massacre from older relatives who considered Mormons “evil.”...There aren’t many places in America more likely to be suspicious of Mormonism — and potentially more problematic for Mitt Romney, who is seeking to become the country’s first Mormon president. Not only do many here retain a personal antipathy toward the religion and its followers, but they also tend to be Christian evangelicals, many of whom view Mormonism as a cult....
Source: NYT
5-22-12
FLORENCE -- The decision to suspend Greece from the common currency became inevitable when it emerged that Athens had fiddled with the accounts yet again amid chronic economic weakness, forfeiting what credibility in the international arena it still had left.That was in 1908.After diluting the gold content in its coins, Greece left the Latin Monetary Union, whose founding members included France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland. More than a century later, history may repeat itself, albeit in vastly different circumstances.From the dual currency economy of 14th-century Florence to the monetary union of Austria-Hungary and Argentina's abandoned dollar peg, the past is littered with examples of countries' weighing the costs and benefits of different monetary regimes....
Source: PBS Newshour
5-23-12
Source: Boston Globe
5-24-12
NATICK — Frank Rines Jr. sat in a studio at the Morse Institute Library. Lights glared and the camera rolled. Questions flowed, and soon Rines, better known by his buddies as Bud, was in a time machine, transported across oceans and decades.Wearing a sweater and jacket, Rines, 92, a chief radio officer in the US Merchant Marine during World War II, looked quite comfortable, considering the task.He was being asked, as one of the recent contributors to the Natick Veterans Oral History Project, to recall the details of his service over some 22 voyages, including about 15 “lucky crossings’’ of the Atlantic Ocean when it was infested with German U-boats....
Source: allAfrica
5-23-12
Robert Mugabe has reportedly blamed Zimbabwe's current problems on historical influences, in a meeting Wednesday with the visiting United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay.The UN Human Rights chief met with Mugabe at his state house offices and told reporters the ZANU PF leader had admitted the country currently faces problems. But he blamed historical influences for the ongoing political and economic crisis .Pillay was invited by government for a week-long mission to assess the human rights situation in the country. She had already met with civil society groups and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvngirai on Tuesday....
Source: History.com
5-23-12
Politician, printer, inventor, diplomat, author, scientist—Benjamin Franklin will forever be remembered as a man of many talents. But not everyone knows the founding father was also a volunteer firefighter who at age 30 established Philadelphia’s first fire department. Tom Lingenfelter, president of the Heritage Collectors’ Society in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, recently announced his discovery of a relic from this fascinating phase of Franklin’s career: a document listing his name and those of the Union Fire Company’s other members, thought to date to 1736.
Born in Boston in 1706, Franklin left home and moved to Philadelphia at age 17. His adoptive hometown still bears numerous traces of his extraordinary legacy, from the University of Pennsylvania to America’s first lending library, the Library Company of Philadelphia. One of the city’s most central and successful public figures from a very young age, Franklin cofounded the Union Fire Company, an all-volunteer brigade, in 1736....
Source: New Haven Register
5-23-12
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Harvard University’s alumni association says it regrets including the Unabomber’s references to his convictions in a directory for his 50th class reunion this week.Ted Kaczynski graduated in 1962 and is in prison for killing three people and injuring 23 others during a nationwide bombing spree between 1978 and 1995. He lists his occupation as “prisoner” and his awards as “eight life sentences.”...
Source: WaPo
5-23-12
More than 65 years after it was suppressed by the Army, a powerful and controversial John Huston documentary about soldiers suffering from the psychological wounds of war has been restored by the National Archives and debuts Thursday on the Web. “Let There Be Light” portrays GIs just back from the battlefields of Europe and the Pacific — trembling, stuttering, hollow-eyed and crying. Using a noir style, Huston filmed dozens of soldiers in unscripted scenes from their arrival at an Army psychiatric hospital on Long Island through weeks of often successful treatment, culminating in their release to go home.The restoration “reveals the film’s full force,” said Scott Simmon, a film historian and English department chairman at the University of California, Davis....
Source: Fox News
5-24-12
The final resting places for many of the men and women who fought America’s wars have fallen into shocking disrepair, with neglect, theft and vandalism prompting veterans groups to question the nation's commitment to honoring its dead soldiers.Advocates say smaller federal, state, county and private cemeteries that contain the graves of service members are often poorly kept, marked by crumbling headstones, overgrown with weeds and littered with debris. Perhaps even worse, many veterans' gravesites have been targets of vandalism and theft.“It’s a pattern that you’re seeing across the country right now," said Tim Tetz, national legislative director for the American Legion. "You have cemeteries being expanded or added to with less or the same number of people caring for the grounds.”...
Source: CBS News
5-23-12
Every year, the Library of Congress designates 25 sound recordings "cultural and historic treasures" and it preserves the best available copy for future generations. This year's choices, announced Wednesday, include an 1888 hand-cranked recording of "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star"; Prince's "Purple rain," "A Charlie Brown Christmas"; and one that caught our ears….Edward R. Murrow was the narrator for "I Can Hear It Now," a Columbia Records recording that was selected by the Library of Congress as a cultural and historical treasure, announced May 23, 2012.
Source: NYT
5-18-12
Two delegations of Japanese officials visited Palisades Park, N.J., this month with a request that took local administrators by surprise: The Japanese wanted a small monument removed from a public park.The monument, a brass plaque on a block of stone, was dedicated in 2010 to the memory of so-called comfort women, tens of thousands of women and girls, many Korean, who were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during World War II.But the Japanese lobbying to remove the monument seems to have backfired — and deepened animosity between Japan and South Korea over the issue of comfort women, a longstanding irritant in their relations....
Source: AP
5-22-12
LONDON (AP) — A Channel Islands auction house says it's selling a vial that allegedly contains blood residue from Ronald Reagan — a move denounced Tuesday by the late U.S. president's family and his foundation.The vial being auctioned online was used by the laboratory that tested Reagan's blood when he was hospitalized after a 1981 assassination attempt in Washington, the PFCAuctions house said.Reagan's son Michael condemned the auction but said he was confident it was not his father's blood....
Source: BBC News
5-22-12
A Worcestershire woman is campaigning for the restoration of eight memorials throughout the county.Amateur historian Sandra Taylor has spent the past 13 years researching more than 10,000 names on local war memorials, many of which are decaying.Ms Taylor is part of a group that is trying to fund restoration work in time for the centenary of the outbreak of World War I in two years time....
Source: WaPo
5-20-12
The smashed bullet that killed Lt. Henry H. Waite of the 6th Maine regiment is there. So is the one that claimed Pvt. James Bainham of the 125th New York. And the one that killed Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States.
Scores of deformed slugs pulled from the flesh of the Civil War’s victims sit like grimy jewels in these glass cases, not far from trays of splintered bones and punctured skulls damaged in the conflict.
There’s more than war in the Defense Department’s refreshed and relocated National Museum of Health and Medicine, which will celebrate its grand reopening in Silver Spring on Monday.
The arthritic skeleton of Peter Cluckey sits in its wooden chair, as it has for decades, a macabre but longtime feature of the 150-year-old museum of medical oddities and scientific history....
Related Links
Jeffrey S. Reznick: Remember the Army Medical Library and Discover the National Library of Medicine
Source: Discovery News
5-21-12
A powerful quake hit northern Italy on Sunday, killing seven people, injuring dozens, and leaving at least 5,000 homeless.The magnitude 6.0 quake to hit the country since 2009, when a tremor in the Abruzzo region killed nearly 300 people, the magnitude-6.0 earthquake was followed by more than 100 aftershocks in 24 hours.The quake struck at around 4 a.m. local time in the flatlands of the Emilia Romagna region, hitting an area between the historic cities of Bologna, Modena and Ferrara, a Unesco World Heritage site....
Source: Discovery News
5-21-12
On May 21, 1965, NASA released the Gemini 4 press kit. It opened with the standard mission description, in this case for a four-day orbital flight that would send commander Jim McDivitt and pilot Ed White around the Earth 62 times to evaluate "the effects of extended spaceflight on crew performance and physical condition."Then there was an intriguing page that hinted at something bigger: "No decision has been made whether in the Gemini 4 mission the crew will engage in extravehicular activity... A decision to undertake the extravehicular test can be made as late as the day before the launch." The possibility of an EVA on Gemini 4 came as a surprise not only the American people that day, but to many within NASA as well.EVAs, colloquially known as spacewalks, were one of the three main program goals for NASA's Gemini program designed to support the Apollo program. If NASA was going to send men all the way to the moon, there was no point in having them sit inside and look out the window. They were going outside....
