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: Fox News
3-20-12
JONESBORO, Ga. – Just months after children at a Georgia school were given a math homework assignment that referenced slavery, a similar incident has occurred at another school in the state.Christopher Jackson said his nine-year-old son's homework assignment from a class at James A. Jackson Elementary School in Jonesboro, Ga., 12 miles south of Atlanta, contained an extra-credit question that read, "A plantation owner had 100 slaves. If three-fifths of them are counted for representation, how many slaves will be counted?"In January, some parents became upset over a third-grade math assignment at Beaver Ridge Elementary School, in Norcross, Ga., just north of Atlanta, that contained multiple references to slavery. A teacher later resigned over the controversy and the story received nationwide attention....
Source: Fox News
3-20-12
A body found naked in 1974 at a California condominium complex is a U.S. Marine from Iowa who had been listed as a deserter from Camp Pendleton, authorities said yesterday.The man known for more than 37 years as 'John Doe No. 155' is Oral Stuart Jr of Des Moines, Iowa, Long Beach police said in a statement.His cause of death, previously listed as undetermined, has been reclassified as a homicide.The body of Stuart, who was 18 when he disappeared, was found on November 10, 1974, in the carport area of an apartment complex near Interstate 605, police said....
Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
3-21-12
WASHINGTON — Famed architect Frank Gehry said he is open to changes to a planned Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington to address objections from the 34th president's family that the design doesn't put enough emphasis on his achievements as president and World War II military leader.Eisenhower family members shared their concerns at a House subcommittee hearing Tuesday, where a letter from Gehry was also introduced as testimony.Gehry's design calls for a memorial park framed by large metal tapestries depicting Eisenhower's boyhood home in Kansas. Two large carved stones would depict Ike as president and as military hero, and a statue of a young Eisenhower would appear to marvel at what his life would become. The memorial would be built just off the National Mall, near the National Air and Space Museum....
Source: NYT
3-20-12
It was a van Gogh, then it wasn’t a van Gogh and now it’s a van Gogh again, maybe this time for good.New research has shown that a still life painting of a vase brimming with flowers, bought in 1974 by the Kröller-Müller Museum in the central Netherlands, was executed directly over a painting of two wrestlers that matches a description of an image that a young van Gogh once mentioned in a letter to his brother, Theo, as a work in progress....
Source: The Republic
3-17-12
AUSTIN, Texas — The memorials around the Texas Capitol grounds have long honored heroes and moments of Texas' storied past, from the Alamo to the Confederacy to fallen soldiers in foreign wars.Joining them this month is a tribute to Texas' earliest pioneers, Tejano settlers who trail-blazed what would become the Lone Star State. On March 29, a massive granite and bronze memorial to those early Spanish and Mexican explorers, settlers and their descendants will be formally dedicated on the South lawn of the state Capitol, the culmination of a decade-long effort to honor their history."We've been here for 500 years. For 500 years, we've ignored that chapter of Texas history," said Renato Ramirez, CEO of International Bank of Commerce in the border city of Zapata and one of the leaders of the nearly $2 million project. Ramirez' family gave $125,000 to the effort....
Source: Daily Mail (UK)
3-19-12
Nine thousand Nazi war criminals fled to South America after the Second World War, it has been revealed for the first time.After receiving tip-offs, German prosecutors were recently granted access to secret files in Brazil and Chile that confirmed the true number of Third Reich immigrants.According to the documents, an estimated 9,000 war criminals escaped to South America, including Croatians, Ukrainians, Russians and other western Europeans who aided the Nazi murder machine.Most, perhaps as many as 5,000, went to Argentina; between 1,500 and 2,000 are thought to have made it to Brazil; around 500 to 1,000 to Chile; and the rest to Paraguay and Uruguay....
Source: Huffington Post
3-19-12
Forget the Hollywood sign and the walk of fame -- the next time you're in Los Angeles, Calif., go off the beaten path and head to an abandoned Nazi compound.There you'll catch a glimpse of an alternate reality in which the Nazis won World War II and set up their headquarters in sunny Los Angeles. That was the hope of landowners Winona and Norman Stephens, who built the the 50-acre "Murphy Ranch" in 1933 to be a self-sustaining Nazi community ruled by Adolf Hitler. Under the thrall of a mystical "Herr Schmidt," who may have been a German spy, the couple and a band of Nazi-sympathizers known as the "Silver Shirts" worked in the compound, doing military exercises and preparing for war....
Source: NYT
3-20-12
If the Obama administration persuades the Supreme Court to uphold its health care overhaul law, it will be in large part thanks to a 70-year-old precedent involving an Ohio farmer named Roscoe C. Filburn. Mr. Filburn sued to overturn a 1938 federal law that told him how much wheat he could grow on his family farm and made him pay a penalty for every extra bushel. The 1942 decision against him, Wickard v. Filburn, is the basis for the Supreme Court’s modern understanding of the scope of federal power. It is the contested ground on which the health care case has been fought in the lower courts and in the parties’ briefs. And it is likely to be crucial to the votes of Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Antonin Scalia, who are widely seen as open to persuasion by either side.
Source: AP
3-20-12
WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is wading into one of the 20th century's most enduring mysteries: the fate of American aviator Amelia Earhart, who went missing without a trace over the South Pacific 75 years ago.Clinton will meet Tuesday with historians and scientists from The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, which is launching a new search in June for the wreckage of Earhart's Lockheed Electra plane off the remote island of Nikumaroro, in what is now the Pacific nation of Kiribati. Earhart and her navigator Fred Noonan disappeared July 2, 1937, while flying from New Guinea to Howland Island. Searches at the time uncovered nothing.The group believes Earhart and Noonan may have managed to land on the island, then known as Gardner Island, and survived for a short time. Other historians believe they crashed into the ocean. But conspiracy theories, including claims that they were U.S. government agents captured by the Japanese before the Second World War, abound despite having been largely debunked....
Source: NYT
3-19-12
In 1952, a young Supreme Court clerk wrote a memorandum that would come to haunt him. The court was considering Brown v. Board of Education, the great school desegregation case. The question for the justices was whether to overrulePlessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that said “separate but equal” facilities were constitutional.The memo, prepared for Justice Robert H. Jackson, was written in the first person and bore the clerk’s initials — “WHR,” forWilliam H. Rehnquist. “I realize it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by ‘liberal’ colleagues,” Mr. Rehnquist wrote, “but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”The memo was disclosed by Newsweek in 1971, on the eve of the Senate floor debate on Mr. Rehnquist’s nomination to the Supreme Court. It caused a firestorm, one that was rekindled when President Ronald Reagan nominated Justice Rehnquist to be chief justice in 1986.Opposition to the Brown decision is a good way to doom a Supreme Court nomination. But Mr. Rehnquist had an explanation, which he sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee in a letter in 1971 and repeated under oath in 1986.
Source: NYT
3-19-12
...“I realize it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by ‘liberal’ colleagues,” Mr. [William] Rehnquist wrote [in a 1952 memo], “but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.”...In a new article in The Boston College Law Review, two scholars reconstruct and analyze another letter by Mr. Rehnquist, this one to Justice Felix Frankfurter in 1955, and they draw some stinging conclusions....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
3-19-12
The British military planned to secretly arm Vichy France during the Second World War behind Churchill’s back, despite the fact they were fighting for enemy forces, new documents have revealed.Confidential papers, unseen until now, show senior members of the Allied forces held a clandestine meeting with representatives of Vichy France - even as their opposing forces were fighting in Madagascar.Not only were Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle unaware of the meeting, they were specifically banned from being told under orders of the British Chief of Staff, who feared their reaction.The file, labelled “Most Secret”, decreed “knowledge of this plan should be greatly restricted” and added: “It would be unnecessary to inform the Prime Minister or Foreign Office until discussions were about to start.”...
Source: Lee White for the National Coalition for History
3-8-12
The Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State has announced the release of its Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series in a new e-book format that is readable on popular electronic devices such as the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad.The e-book edition combines many of the benefits of print and web publications in a new form that is portable and extremely convenient. During the pilot phase of the FRUS e-book initiative, five selected FRUS volumes will be offered on the Office of the Historian’s e-book homepage: http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/ebooks.The public is invited to download the new e-books and provide feedback to help improve the FRUS e-book edition. At the conclusion of the pilot phase later this year, the Office will work to offer e-book versions of many more FRUS volumes both through the Office website and on a wide array of e-bookstores. The Office will continue to expand and enhance its e-book offerings, as part of the ongoing FRUS digitization effort.For questions about the FRUS e-book initiative or feedback about the “beta” FRUS e-books released today, please contact history_ebooks@state.gov.
Source: Catholic.org
3-14-12
LOS ANGELES, CA (Catholic Online) - The "Battle of Anghiari" was a wall mural painted by Da Vinci in Florence's storied Palazzo Vecchio. It was long thought to have been hidden behind another fresco.Elusive and tantalizing, the hunt for the mural took on fresh impetus in the last years with the employment of state-of-art scientific tools.Da Vinci's mural was begun in 1505 to commemorate the 15th-century victory by Florence over Milan at the medieval Tuscan town of Anghiari. Researchers now think it may be hidden behind a newer wall, which was frescoed over decades later by Giorgio Vasari. "Battle of Anghiari" was unfinished when the artist left Florence in 1506....
Source: AP
3-18-12
NEW YORK – It was decades ago when tens of millions of people in the U.S. experienced mass unemployment and social upheaval as the nation clawed its way out of the Great Depression and rumblings of global war were heard from abroad.Now, intimate details of 132 million people who lived through the 1930s will be disclosed as the U.S. government releases the 1940 census on April 2 to the public for the first time after 72 years of privacy protection lapses.Access to the records will be free and open to anyone on the Internet — but they will not be immediately name searchable....
Source: NY Post
3-18-12
A survivor’s account of the sinking of the Titanic has been rediscovered after having been lost for decades and will be published next month ahead of the 100th anniversary of the disaster.John B. “Jack” Thayer, who boarded the ship at age 17 with his parents, printed his recollections of the catastrophe as a family record in 1940 and made just 500 copies.The tome was recently unearthed by Lorin Stein, editor of the Paris Review, who recalled a family tie he had to the Titanic after Luke Pontifell, who runs handmade-book publisher Thornwillow Press, said he wished he could track down documents from the ship.“Suddenly, I half-remembered that a distant cousin of mine had written an eyewitness account and had given my great-grandfather a copy,” Stein said. “My mother found the book in my grandfather’s library when he died.”...
Source: Medievalists.net
3-17-12
The classic account of St Patrick’s life tells us that he was abducted from Western Britain in his teens and forced into slavery in Ireland for six years before escaping, during which time his faith develohttp://hnn.us/node/add/hnnped.However, a new article looking at Patrick’s own writings in their historical context argues that the saint may have in fact fled to Ireland deliberately to avoid becoming a ‘Decurion’ – a Roman official responsible for tax collection.“In the troubled era in which Patrick lived, which saw the demise and eventual collapse of Roman government in Britain in 410, discharging the obligations of a Decurion, especially tax-collecting, would not only have been difficult but also very risky,” says Dr Roy Flechner of the University of Cambridge.Flechner’s article, “Patrick’s Reasons for Leaving Britain”, appears in Tome: Studies in Medieval Celtic History and Law in Honour of Thomas Charles-Edwards, edited by Fiona Edmonds and Paul Russell (Boydell, 2011)...
Source: NYT
3-17-12
The stranger settled in Cleveland after World War II with his wife and little girl. He became an autoworker and changed his first name from Ivan to John. He had two more children, became a naturalized American, lived quietly and retired. His war and the terrors of concentration camps were all but forgotten.
Decades later, the past came back to haunt John Demjanjuk. And for the rest of his life it hovered over a tortuous odyssey of denunciations byNazi hunters and Holocaust survivors, of questions over his identity, citizenship revocations, deportation orders and eventually trials in Israel and Germany for war crimes. He was convicted and reprieved in Israel, and was appealing a guilty verdict in Germany at the time of his death. He steadfastly denied the accusations.
Even at the end of his life — he died on Saturday at a nursing home in southern Germany, his son, John Demjanjuk Jr., said — questions remained in a case that had always been riddled with mysteries. Mr. Demjanjuk was 91
Source: OpenMarket.org
3-16-12
Even the liberal Talking Points Memo criticized a recent speech in which President Obama revealed his ignorance of U.S. and world history and disparaged a past U.S. President while denouncing the alleged ignorance of others. In a recent green energy speech, Obama mocked Republicans, “comparing their skepticism of alternative energy to the ‘Flat Earth Society’ in Christopher Columbus’ day and President Rutherford B. Hayes’ apparent dismissal of the telephone. But while Obama thinks the GOP is in need of a science lesson, he may need to bone up on history himself,” TPM notes, since President Hayes was a supporter of new technologies who had “the first telephone in the White House,” “the first typewriter in the White House,” hosted Thomas Edison, and pioneered the use of photography at White House events. Moreover, people in Columbus’s day new perfectly well that the Earth was round, as Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould has noted.
Source: Star Tribune
3-14-12
Nike has introduced its new Black and Tan shoe for St. Patrick's Day. Unfortunately, its name mirrors the reviled moniker that the Irish gave to oppressive British forces in the 1920s.Black and Tan. That's the name used for a new Nike sneaker arriving just in time for St. Patrick's Day; it's also a nod to the popular beer mash-up. Just one problem: Black and Tan is also a term reviled in Ireland, a sneering reference to the British forces accused of mistreating Irish citizens in the 1920s.In other words, it would be akin, in some circles, to naming a sneaker the Taliban or the Nazi.Cue today's "sorry" from the athletic shoe giant: "We apologize," Nike said in a statement to Fox News. "No offense was intended."...
