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: BBC News
February 15, 2012
History and broadcasting will come under the spotlight in a series of illustrated talks, conversations and preview screenings in Northern Ireland next week.The Festival of History and Broadcasting will be hosted by William Crawley and will take place from Tuesday, 21 February to Thursday, 23 February at BBC's Broadcasting House, Belfast.Tickets for festival events and more information can be obtained on www.bbc.co.uk/ticketsAlready confirmed to take part in the three-day festival are writer, historian and presenter, Dan Cruickshank (BBC's Britain's Best Buildings) and Mary Beard, historian, broadcaster and author.As an accompaniment to The Festival of History and Broadcasting, BBC Northern Ireland asked a cross-section of people from different academic disciplines and backgrounds to consider - Why History Matters.What follows is intended as a starting point for further discussion, and as a stimulus for the sharing of other views and opinions....
Source: NYT
February 14, 2012
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who serves on the Senate Judiciary Committee as well as the Senate Budget Committee, has requested to see complete travel documents for the Smithsonian Secretary G. Wayne Clough, after a report revealed that $112,000 of Mr. Clough’s travel costs have been financed by outside donors.According to the report by Junketsleuth.com, Mr. Clough spent 191 days traveling over a span of three years – from July 2008 to July 2011 – to destinations like France, Antarctica and New Zealand. His expenses included the use of charter flights, private car services, and upgrading to first-class or business-class airline tickets.In a letter released on Monday, Mr. Grassley expressed concerns that Mr. Clough was incurring many of the same type of travel expenses as his predecessor, Lawrence M. Small , who resigned in 2007 after it was discovered he was using federal funds to finance his travels....
Source: NBC-- Rock
February 15, 2012
The Martin family knows something about themselves that few if any families will ever learn about their past. They're able to trace their ancestry back hundreds of years to a little girl. Her name was Priscilla. She was 10 years old. Priscilla was kidnapped in Sierra Leone west Africa in 1756, and shipped to Charleston, South Carolina, where she lived her entire life as a slave.Priscilla's spirit is alive and well in her modern day relatives, the Martins, who live not far from where Priscilla toiled on a plantation. They are believed to be the only African Americans with such a detailed link to the past. And what's even more remarkable is that this centuries old family tree, spreading over at least 7 generations, is documented on paper. For most African American families there is no record of where their ancestors came from, and almost no chance of finding one.
Source: CBS News
February 15, 2012
This week marks the 50th anniversary of Jackie Kennedy's famous televised tour of the White House. The vintage video shows Mrs. Kennedy with CBS News correspondent Charles Collingwood. But we wanted to know the inside story of that historic broadcast. "Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley caught up with the CBS newsman who produced it.
Source: BBC News
February 15, 2012
Fifty years ago this week the idea of mutually assured nuclear destruction was outlined in a major speech. But how did this frightening concept of the Cold War fade from people's psyches?Today the notion of all-out nuclear war is rarely discussed. There are concerns about Iran and North Korea's nuclear programmes and fears that terrorists might get hold of the technology and detonate a "dirty" nuclear bomb.But the fear of a war in which the aim is to wipe out the entire population of an enemy has startlingly diminished.In 1962, the concept of mutually assured destruction started to play a major part in the defence policy of the US. President Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, set out in a speech to the American Bar Foundation a theory of flexible nuclear response.In essence it meant stockpiling a huge nuclear arsenal. In the event of a Soviet attack the US would have enough nuclear firepower to survive a first wave of nuclear strikes and strike back. The response would be so massive that the enemy would suffer "assured destruction".
Source: LiveScience
February 14, 2012
A wealth of new discoveries, from animal mummies linked to the jackal god and human remains to an enigmatic statue, are revealing the secrets of an ancient holy place in Egypt once known as the "Terrace of the Great God."The mysterious wooden statue may be a representation of Hatshepsut, a female pharaoh who ruled the land 3,500 years ago, the researchers say. She was typically portrayed as a man in statues, but this one, giving a nod to femininity, had a petite waist.The discoveries were made during one field season this past summer by a team led by Mary-Ann Pouls Wegner, director of the excavation and a professor at the University of Toronto. The findings offer insight into Abydos, a site that was considered a holy place, Pouls Wegner said at a recent meeting of the Society for the Study of Egyptian Antiquities in Toronto, Canada. [Photos of the Egypt mummy]...
Source: News24
February 14, 2012
Rome - Heavy snow has caused extensive damage to the mediaeval walled town of Urbino and further deteriorated the Colosseum in Rome, already badly in need of repair, Italian newspapers reported on Tuesday.Partial collapses have been reported at the convents of San Francesco and San Bernardino in Urbino and the roof of the Church of the Capuchins outside the town centre has completely caved in, La Repubblica reported.There is also water damage in the town's 12th-century Duomo cathedral....
Source: Telegraph (UK)
February 15, 2012
The Mormon Church has apologised after members of the religion performed posthumous baptisms into Mormonism of the dead Jewish parents of famed Nazi hunter and Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal.The baptisms “by proxy” were performed last month in Mormon temples in Utah, Arizona and Idaho, according to the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organisation named after the man who hunted down more than 1,000 Nazi war criminals in the years following the Holocaust.Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center told Reuters the baptisms were “unacceptable,” adding that people who lost everyone and everything and were murdered for being Jewish during the Holocaust should not have their souls hijacked by another religion.The Mormon Church, formally called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, permits dead people to be baptised into the religion, with the belief that the dead person “in the next life” can then choose to accept or decline the baptism. In these baptisms, a current Church member is baptised on behalf of a dead person....
Source: NYT
February 14, 2012
JERUSALEM — The students were spared nothing. There were sessions on Nazi disputes over how to murder the Jews; propaganda art in the Third Reich; encounters with survivors; a history of anti-Semitism; the dilemmas faced by leaders of the Jewish ghetto councils.It was just what one might expect from a 10-day seminar at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial and museum. The surprise was the students: 35 teachers and professors from Taiwan, none of them specialists in the area, most of whom had never before met a Jew. More surprising still were the lessons some were taking away.“Before I came, I felt worse about the Holocaust,” said Jen Hsiu-mei, a psychologist and an early childhood educator. “This week, I learned that inside the death camps people helped each other. It gives new meaning to human values. This is not something I expected to learn here — hope.”
Source: thegrio
December 14, 2012
This month, HBO premieres The Loving Story, a documentary film that chronicles the lives of Richard and Mildred Loving, the plaintiffs in a 1967 Supreme Court case that challenged Virginia's ban on interracial marriage.
Source: CNN.com
February 14, 2012
(CNN) -- Stalin was to the point. Napoleon went on and on. Hitler did it as if he were writing an employee's job review."Evil may walk among us, but that doesn't mean evil never wrote a love letter," said John Kirkland, an author who has plundered the depths of cheesy writing throughout history by revered, infamous and just plain awful people. His book "Love Letters of Great Men" is mostly filled with leaders acting honorably. But it also features several who had an affection for tyranny."I found that almost all powerful people are very passionate, and that naturally can make them over the top in their personal lives," Kirkland said."Another truth I learned," the author said, "is that it's never a good idea to hook up with a dictator."
Source: BBC News
February 13, 2012
It's 70 years this week since the first US air force officer was killed in Europe, following America's entry into World War II. By heading the list of 30,000 USAAF men to lose their lives in the European theatre, Lt Col Townsend Griffiss became a footnote in the history of the war. But who was he and how did he die?There is no memorial to Townsend Griffiss in the UK, but a corner of Bushy Park in west London offers the faintest of reminders.Here, half covered by grass, are a handful of tablets in the earth, marking the various blocks of Camp Griffiss, the British headquarters of the US Army Air Force, set up in the summer of 1942. It's a royal park, and the royal deer help prevent the plaques disappearing into the grass entirely....At the time of his death on 15 February 1942, he was 41 years old, a high-flying officer, returning from the Soviet Union, where he had been sent on a diplomatic mission by US Army Chief of Staff Gen George Marshall....
Source: BBC News
February 13, 2012
On his first visit to America in 1842, English novelist Charles Dickens was greeted like a modern rock star. But the trip soon turned sour, as Simon Watts reports.On Valentine's Day, 1842, New York hosted one of the grandest events the city had ever seen - a ball in honour of the English novelist Charles Dickens.Dickens was only 30, but works such as Oliver Twist and the Pickwick Papers had already made him the most famous writer in the world.The cream of New York society hired the grandest venue in the city - the Park Theatre - and decorated it with wreaths and paintings in honour of the illustrious visitor....But a visit which had started so well quickly turned into a bitter dispute, known as the "Quarrel with America"....
Source: NYT
February 13, 2012
MALE, Maldives — The broken glass from an attack by vandals on the National Museum here has been swept away, and the remnants of the Buddhist statues they destroyed — nearly 30 of them, some dating to the sixth century — have been locked away. But officials say the loss to this island nation’s archaeological legacy can never be recouped.In the midst of the political turmoil racking this tiny Indian Ocean nation of 1,200 islands, a half-dozen men stormed into the museum last Tuesday and ransacked a collection of coral and lime figures, including a six-faced coral statue and a 1 1/2-foot-wide representation of the Buddha’s head. Officials said the men attacked the figures because they believed they were idols and therefore illegal under Islamic and national laws.The vandalism was reminiscent of the Taliban’s demolition of the great carved Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan in early 2001, and it has raised fears here that extremists are gaining ground in the Maldives, a Sunni Muslim country that historians say converted from Buddhism to Islam in the 12th century. The country has incorporated elements of Islamic law into its jurisprudence for years. Idols cannot be brought into the country, for example, and alcohol and pork products are allowed only at resorts that cater to foreigners....
Source: Science Now
February 9, 2012
About 3000 years ago, Central Africa was a landscape in transition. Lush evergreen forests were gradually giving way to savannas and grasslands as regional climate change pushed the formerly humid weather patterns toward drier, slightly warmer conditions. But climate was not the only factor at play. According to a new study, an influx of humans into the region at this time may have helped drive some of the original rainforests into oblivion.The paper's results, published online today in Science, came as a surprise to the researchers. "To be honest, at the beginning we were not at all aware of this human issue," says lead author Germain Bayon, a geochemist at the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea in Plouzané.
Source: Guardian (UK)
February 12, 2013
A British excavation has struck archaeological gold with a discovery that may solve the mystery of where the Queen of Sheba of biblical legend derived her fabled treasures.Almost 3,000 years ago, the ruler of Sheba, which spanned modern-day Ethiopia and Yemen, arrived in Jerusalem with vast quantities of gold to give to King Solomon. Now an enormous ancient goldmine, together with the ruins of a temple and the site of a battlefield, have been discovered in her former territory.Louise Schofield, an archaeologist and former British Museum curator, who headed the excavation on the high Gheralta plateau in northern Ethiopia, said: "One of the things I've always loved about archaeology is the way it can tie up with legends and myths. The fact that we might have the Queen of Sheba's mines is extraordinary."...
Source: Discovery News
February 13, 2012
Forget roses, chocolate boxes, and candlelight dinners. On Valentine's Day, this is rather boring stuff - at least according to ancient Roman standards.Imagine half naked men running through the streets, whipping young women with bloodied thongs made from freshly cut goat skins. Although it might sound like some sort of perverted sado-masochist practice, this is what the Romans did until 496 A.D.Indeed, mid-February was Lupercalia (Wolf Festival) time. Celebrated on February 15 at the foot of the Palatine Hill beside the cave where according to tradition the she-wolf had suckled Romulus and Remus, the festival was essentially a purification and fertility rite.Directed by the Luperci, or "brothers of the wolf," the festival began with the sacrifice of two male goats and a dog, their blood smeared on the faces of Luperci initiates and then wiped off with wool dipped in milk.As thongs were cut from the sacrificed goats, the initiates would run around in the streets flagellating women to promote fertility....
Source: National Geographic
February 13, 2012
Where did Valentine's Day come from? (Think naked Romans, paganism, and whips.) What does it cost? And why do we fall for it, year after year?Valentine's Day History: Roman RootsMore than a Hallmark holiday, Valentine's Day, like Halloween, is rooted in pagan partying. (See "Halloween Facts: Costumes, History, Urban Legends, More.")The lovers' holiday traces its roots to raucous annual Roman festivals where men stripped naked, grabbed goat- or dog-skin whips, and spanked young maidens in hopes of increasing their fertility, said classics professor Noel Lenski of the University of Colorado at Boulder.The annual pagan celebration, called Lupercalia, was held every year on February 15 and remained wildly popular well into the fifth century A.D.—at least 150 years after Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire....
Source: The Root
February 13, 2012
In a blog entry at Atlantic magazine, Ta-Nehisi Coates condemns former Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder for apparently abandoning plans to open a highly touted slavery museum nearly two decades ago, leaving donors in the lurch.Famous first L. Douglas Wilder was supposed to be putting together a powerhouse slavery museum in Virginia. It looks like no such museum is in the offing:" 'Governor Wilder disappeared,' said Rev. Lawrence Davies, the former longtime mayor of Fredericksburg who was a member of the board. Davies stopped getting notices about board meetings, and when he tried to reach Wilder, he never heard back....
Source: AP
February 13, 2012
An Associated Press reported highlighted the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board reported that in 2011, gambling revenues in the Keystone State rose 22 percent to more than $3 billion. With numbers like that, it is hard to imagine a municipality or locality not wanting a gaming establish built to attract jobs and other ancillary business. But state Rep. Paul Clymer, R-Bucks, wants a 10-mile buffer zone around important historical locations, as reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.What sites in particular are trying to be protected?
