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: Time
April 5, 2012
From the educational to the experiential to the downright bizarre, ways to commemorate the April centennial of the Titanic disaster won’t be in short supply. Whether through eerily specific replica cruises or the more foreseeable 3-D release of James Cameron’s 1997 film, history buffs and Leonardo DiCaprio fans alike can pay homage to one of the world’s deadliest peacetime sea tragedies 100 years after it happened.
Source: Discovery News
April 5, 2012
About 55 million years ago, an intense heat wave hit the planet. Earth's surface temperature surged by 9 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius). Then, after a relatively short time, the heat subsided, only to be followed by at least two similar, but smaller heat waves.Based on chemical clues preserved in rocks, scientists believe a surge of carbon dioxide warmed the planet. But where did all of this greenhouse gas come from?A team of scientists is proposing that it came from the melting of permafrost, frozen soil packed with organic matter, after cycles in the Earth's orbit warmed up the areas near the poles. The melting released a massive amount of carbon into the atmosphere, keeping reflected sunlight from escaping and causing the heat wave....
Source: NYT
April 3, 2012
For 110 years, the numbers stood as gospel: 618,222 men died in the Civil War, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South — by far the greatest toll of any war in American history.
But new research shows that the numbers were far too low.
By combing through newly digitized census data from the 19th century, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has recalculated the death toll and increased it by more than 20 percent — to 750,000.
The new figure is already winning acceptance from scholars. Civil War History, the journal that published Dr. Hacker’s paper, called it “among the most consequential pieces ever to appear” in its pages. And a pre-eminent authority on the era, Eric Foner, a historian at Columbia University, said:
Source: Finance and Commerce (MN)
April 2, 2012
When it comes to proposed state bonding projects, the Charles A. Lindbergh Historic Site in Little Falls hardly registers a blip on the radar screen.The Minnesota Historical Society wants $650,000 to preserve and maintain the 106-year-old boyhood home of the famous aviator — far less than the tens of millions requested by other agencies for other projects.But in the eyes of Lindbergh historians like Charlie Pautler, site manager for the Charles A. Lindbergh Historic Site, the relatively modest request doesn’t mean the project lacks significance....
Source: LiveScience
April 3, 2012
Researchers using high-tech photography have reconstructed a signature that may belong to William Shakespeare — or perhaps a clever forger.It's not yet known who scrawled "Wm Shakespeare" across the title page of the legal treatise "Archaionomia," a collection of Saxon laws published during the reign of Elizabeth I of England. It may never be clear, said Gregory Heyworth, a professor of English at the University of Mississippi.
Source: LiveScience
April 3, 2012
James Cameron's epic 1997 movie "Titanic" is about to be re-released and re-packaged in a 3D presentation to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the ocean liner on April 15, 1912. Although few changes have been made to the movie itself, there is one tweak that will impress astronomers.Spurred on by a "snarky" message from astrophysicist and outspoken science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cameron has addressed Tyson's criticism that the incorrect star field was used during one of the film's most famous scenes...."[W]ith my reputation as a perfectionist," [Cameron said,] "I should have known that and I should have put the right star field in. So I said 'All right, send me the right stars for that exact time and I'll put it in the movie.'"...
Source: Science Daily
April 2, 2012
ScienceDaily (Apr. 2, 2012) — Scientists studying 1,600-year-old cotton from the banks of the Nile have found what they believe is the first evidence that punctuated evolution has occurred in a major crop group within the relatively short history of plant domestication.The findings offer an insight into the dynamics of agriculture in the ancient world and could also help today's domestic crops face challenges such as climate change and water scarcity.The researchers, led by Dr Robin Allaby from the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick, examined the remains of ancient cotton at Qasr Ibrim in Egypt's Upper Nile using high throughput sequencing technologies....
Source: Science Daily
April 2, 2012
ScienceDaily (Apr. 2, 2012) — Once again, science and anthropology have teamed up to solve questions concerning the fascinating, brilliantly hued pigment known as Maya Blue. Impervious to the effects of chemical or physical weathering, the pigment was applied to pottery, sculpture, and murals in Mesoamerica largely during the Classic and Postclassic periods (AD 250-1520), playing a central role in ancient Maya religious practice. This unusual blue paint was used to coat the victims of human sacrifice and the altars on which they were dispatched.For some time, scientists have known that Maya Blue is formed through the chemical combination of indigo and the clay mineral palygorskite. Only now, however, have researchers established a link between contemporary indigenous knowledge and ancient sources of the mineral.In a paper published online in the Journal of Archaeological Science on March 16, 2012, researchers from Wheaton College, The Field Museum of Natural History, the United States Geological Survey, California State University of Long Beach, and the Smithsonian Institution, demonstrated that the palygorskite component in some of the Maya Blue samples came from mines in two locations in Mexico's northern Yucatan Peninsula....
Source: Wired
April 28, 2012
April 12th of this year marked 150 years since the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, starting the long conflict known as the American Civil War. This spring there have been special museum exhibits, battle reenactments, and plenty of news stories. Ken Burns’s Civil War series was rebroadcast. But these things were all pretty much expected.
Source: NYT
April 2, 2012
Rarely does reality intersect with role playing the way it did two Sundays ago in Bob Woodward’s living room....Commissioned by the Discovery Channel, the project, “All the President’s Men Revisited,” will be a two-hour television documentary about the scandal that doomed Richard M. Nixon’s presidency and will explore its effects on politics and the media in the 40 years since. It will have its premiere in 2013 but will be announced by Discovery this week at its annual presentation for advertisers.“To be able to pull the fabricated and the real together, for the first time, is kind of a juicy opportunity for us,” Eileen O’Neill, the president of Discovery, said in an interview....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
April 4, 2012
Summer was the most dangerous time for Tudors with nearly three quarters of all deaths happening over the season, University of Oxford research has shown.A study of coroners’ court records found fatal accidents were much more likely to occur in June than any other month, as agricultural work and travel reached a peak.The figures, discovered during an investigation into 16th century inquests, reveal deaths from drowning, working accidents and misadventure.Common causes of death included being crushed by a cart, falling from a horse, becoming entangled in agricultural machinery or even falling out of trees....
Source: Spiegel Online
April 2, 2012
Germany's national railway, Deutsche Bahn, has hired a law firm and PR agency in the United States to prepare for legislation being considered by Congress that would allow Holocaust survivors to sue European railway companies for damages in American courts. Deutsche Bahn fears victims could sue for millions if the legislation passes.Officials at Germany's Deutsche Bahn national railway appear to be concerned about the possibility of lawsuits demanding millions in damages from Holocaust survivors in United States courts. SPIEGEL has learned that the national railway hired a New York law firm and a public relations agency at the end of 2011 to observe legislation being considered in Congress that would provide the basis for possible lawsuits.The PR agency, which specializes in crisis management, is also supposed to promote Deutsche Bahn's viewpoint by lobbying in Washington. When contacted by SPIEGEL, a Deutsche Bahn spokesperson confirmed that a company's services had been retained but would not comment on further details. On Sunday, the firm also confirmed it had hired the services of the New York law firm to observe and analyze the legislation.
Source: Salon
April 2, 2012
Attention, “Game of Thrones” fans: The most enjoyably sensational aspects of medieval politics — double-crosses, ambushes, bizarre personal obsessions, lunacy and naked self-interest — are in abundant evidence in Nancy Goldstone’s “The Maid and the Queen: The Secret History of Joan of Arc.” Goldstone’s premise, innovative but not outlandishly so, is that Joan’s rise from poor, illiterate farmer’s daughter to mystical champion of French nationalism during the Hundred Years’ War was largely orchestrated by Yolande of Aragon. Yolande, who was the Duchess of Anjou and Countess of Maine as well as the Queen of Aragon (among other titles), was also the mother-in-law of the dauphin, Charles, whose military triumph over the occupying English and coronation in Reims were the two great causes espoused by the saintly, if warlike, Joan. As Goldstone sees it, Yolande’s political genius goes under-recognized.
Source: Haaretz
March 12, 2012
Here's a question for you: what do actor Charlton Heston, DreamWorks animation studios and Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin all have in common? Well, they've all, at one time or another, perpetuated the myth that the Jews built the pyramids. And it is a myth, make no mistake. Even if we take the earliest possible date for Jewish slavery that the Bible suggests, the Jews were enslaved in Egypt a good three hundred years after the 1750 B.C. completion date of the pyramids. That is, of course, if they were ever slaves in Egypt at all.We are so quick to point out the obvious lies about Jews and Israel that come out in Egypt – the Sinai Governors claims that the Mossad released a shark into the Red Sea to kill Egyptians, or, as I once read in a newspaper whilst on holiday in Cairo, the tale of the magnetic belt buckles that Jews were selling cheap in Egypt that would sterilize men on contact – yet we so rarely examine our own misconceptions about the nature of our history with the Egyptian nation....
Source: Today Online
April 3, 2012
LONDON - Human ancestors first gathered around campfires a million years ago, 300,000 years earlier than previously thought, scientists have discovered. Traces of wood ash uncovered next to fragments of animal bones and stone tools in South African caves are the earliest known evidence of human ancestors using fire. The findings suggest the art of making fire may have begun among species as primitive as Homo erectus, the first early humans to become hunter-gatherers....
Source: Huffington Post
April 3, 2012
While the Daily Show brilliantly reminded millions of viewers last night of the disgraceful racist elements behind the attack on Tucson's acclaimed and now outlawed Mexican American Studies program, educators across the nation recalled a teaching moment.Over a half century ago, facing a similar segregationist campaign to shut down the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, famous for its pioneering desegregation and civil rights efforts, folk school co-founder Myles Horton informed his rabid foes: "A school is an idea, and you can't padlock an idea."Invoking Horton's towering legacy today, the Zinn Education Project bestowed its national Myles Horton Education Award on embattled Mexican American Studies director Sean Arce for his leadership role in "one of the most significant and successful public school initiatives on the teaching of history in the U.S."...
Source: National Post
March 28, 2012
Waterloo University is set to repatriate a box of 18th-century bone fragments to a New York community that did not even know the bones were missing.The bones came from Fort William Henry, a former British fort that was the scene of a brutal massacre of British troops by Huron warriors during the Seven Years’ War, an events depicted in the film The Last of the Mohicans.Following a 1950s archaeological dig, the dug-up skeletons of the dead British soldiers were put on display as part of a full-scale reconstruction of the fort, which is located in Lake George, New York....
Source: NYT
April 3, 2012
AUGUSTA, Ga. — For decades, the black caddies at Augusta National Golf Club — required by the club’s rules and treasured for their nuanced knowledge of the course’s topography — stood as a striking symbol of the sport’s segregated state.“As long as I’m alive,” said Clifford Roberts, one of the club’s founders in 1933 and a longtime Masters chairman, “all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black.”In 1997, 20 years after Roberts’s death, Tiger Woods, with a white caddie, won the first of his four Masters championships, shattering the mirror that Roberts’s vision reflected. Woods, who has won 14 majors, changed the face of golf in more ways than one. Not only is the best golfer of this era not white, Woods’s success has helped push the black caddie to the brink of extinction....
Source: NBC Nightly News (with video)
April 2, 2012
Finally tonight, for those of us who are interested in who we are or how far our nation has come and how much we have changed in a very short time, the federal government today released a gold mine . they released the 1940 census, including what people told the census takers in their interviews about their lives, they pay, they living arrangements, and it shows we have changed so much in this relatively short period of time. in 1940 , we had survived a depregdz and fought a world war . and we had no way of knowing quite yet it would someday we called the first world war . in 1940 , it was still possible to see civil war veteran marching in your local memorial day parade, and that year, americans were told the census was mandatory.
Source: OutHistory.org
April 1, 2012
On the 100th anniversary of the death on the Titanic of painter Frank Millet, OutHistory.org has published transcriptions of all Millet’s letters to writer Charles Warren Stoddard. The letters indicate that the two had a loving, sexual affair in Venice in 1875. The intimacy of Millet and Stoddard is also described in a chapter republished on OutHistory from Jonathan Ned Katz’s bookLove Stories: Sex Between Men Before Homosexuality. Photos of Millet accompany Katz’s history. “A fascinating aspect of Millet’s devotion to Stoddard,” says Katz, “is that just eight months after he realizes that Stoddard will never settle down with him in a domestic relationship, Millet is writing friends about his love for and impending marriage to Lily Merrill.” Katz adds: “In this era, no homosexual-heterosexual divide told people they had to be either gay or straight, and Millet is a good example of that era’s erotic fluidity.” This first transcription of all Millet’s letters to Stoddard was the work of OutHistory volunteer Claude M. Gruener, a gay artist and writer in Albany. Archie Butt by James Gifford
