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RUSSIA SPIED ON BLAIR FOR SADDAM... // Top secret documents obtained by the Sunday Telegraph in Baghdad show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders... MORE...

<p>PHILADELPHIA -- In his years as the trusted war horse of Gen. George Meade, Old Baldy fought for the Union in bloody battles from Antietam to Gettysburg. More than a century later, he's in the middle of a court battle waged by a pair of small Philadelphia-based Civil War museums, both of which claim that the head of the hero horse is theirs.</p>

Hard pressed to find four free hours to spend in a movie theater, I have not seen Ron Maxwell's new Civil War film Gods and Generals. So I have no idea which of the disparate reviews – which range from glowingly positive to implacably negative – accurately reflects whether it is worth seeing. Stephen Lang and Robert Duvall in Gods and Generals But I have had occasion to witness the ideological debate that has surrounded much of the commentary about the film. Maxwell has won praise from those who believe that the South has been maligned in most retellings of...

PORTLAND, Oregon, 3 March 2003 — Suppose Islam lost a great war. What would the consequences be? Some believe it will cause terrorism to erupt, disrupt the globe’s largest reserves of oil — the life-blood of the modern age — and plunge the Arab world into an age of fanaticism and darkness. But as we verge on a controversial war with Iraq, there is a fascinating — and surprising — lesson to be learned from another great battle in history. On May 28, 1453, two of the greatest armies in the world ended an epic 52-day battle on the border...

Throughout American history, historians have accredited James Madison with many subtitles. Some are accurate, some not. He is commonly referred to as the Father of the Constitution. However, his record at the Constitutional Convention makes that point arguable at best. Atheists commonly cite Madison as being in favor of total removal of religious belief and guidance in government. That this fact is disputable is a gross understatement. However, that James Madison was the leading American constitutionalist among the founding fathers is beyond dispute. As with the study of any political thinker, the task of fully grasping Madison’s ideas must come...

Students, teachers re-create slaves' Middle Passage Friday, February 28, 2003 By NICOLA M. WHITE SPECIAL TO THE RECORD It is said that if the Atlantic Ocean were drained, its floor would be littered with the bones of those who died in the Middle Passage, the notorious journey millions of African slaves endured on the way to America. On Thursday morning, Lincoln Middle School students and teachers brought this history to life with the school's annual Black History Month performance. An amalgamation of song, dance, and poetry, the program was titled "In the Belly," an apt name for a dark, often...

It is sometimes said, including by me, that Americans don’t know as much history as they ought to. But there is one era that many Americans have studied carefully—and that is our own Civil War epoch. Indeed, national interest in the Civil War borders on obsession: over 60,000 have been produced—more than one a day since Lee called it quits at Appomattox Court House. An amazing 7,000 volumes have been written about Lincoln alone, making him the most heavily investigated figure in American history. And our fascination with the Civil War is rising, not falling. Your editors added up registered...

<p>When the New Jersey Education Association posted a brochure, "Getting Involved in Your Child's School," on its Web site about a year ago, it offered three versions, named "A parent's resource," a "Spanish version" and the "African-American version."</p> <p>The NJEA, the state's largest teachers union, has removed that last heading, apologizing for an embarrassing lapse in judgment after questions were raised about the purpose of offering one version for African-Americans, another for other English speakers.</p>

FELLOW CITIZENS Of the SENATE, and HOUSE of REPRESENTATIVES, I EMBRACE with great satisfaction the opportunity, which now presents itself, of congratulating you on the present favourable prospects of our public affairs. The recent accession of the important state of Northcarolina to the Constitution of the United States (of which official information has been received)--- the ruling credit and respectability of our country--- the general and increasing good will towards the government of the union, and the concord, peace and plenty, with which we are blessed, are circumstances auspicious, in an excellent degree, to our national prosperity. In reforming your...

Papers have been flapping with new headlines about the latest in a long line of alleged dinosaur ancestors of birds. This one is claimed to be a sensational dinosaur with feathers on its hind legs, thus four ‘wings’.1 This was named Microraptor gui—the name is derived from words meaning ‘little plunderer of Gu’ after the paleontologist Gu Zhiwei. Like so many of the alleged feathered dinosaurs, it comes from Liaoning province of northeastern China. It was about 3 feet (1 meter) long from its head to the tip of its long tail, but its body was only about the size...

The death train had songs to the gas camp After her speech, a lady by the name of Penny Lea had a very old man make his way to her weeping. She relates his early boyhood eyewitness account, "Each Sunday morning we would hear the whistle of a death train from the distance and then the clickety clack of the wheels moving over the track. "We became disturbed one Sunday," he tearfully blurted, "when we noticed cries coming from the train as it passed by. We grimly realized that the train was carrying Jews to a gas camp. They were...

AS MANY ABORTIONS AS POSSIBLE Mike W. Perry Everything they saw that day, from the vast fields of ripening grain to the many children, spoke of fertility. It seemed nothing could change the vitality of these people. As Martin and Karl drove from village to village their faces grew increasingly grave. In the evening they returned. Martin talked about all the children he had seen and warned that, "someday they may give us a lot of trouble" because they were "brought up in a much more rugged way than our people." Alarm spread through the group until its leader spoke....

One of the greatest fighting generals in the Confederacy, and known best by his nickname of "Stonewall," Jackson was born in Clarksburg, Virginia on January 21, 1824. Raised of Scottish-Irish ancestry, his parents died in poverty, and Thomas was raised by his uncle. Although Jackson never had the opportunity to be formally enlightened for higher education, he did have the privilege of entering West Point in July 1842. Although his grades were not great the first year, he applied himself and they improved with each year, whereby he graduated seventeenth in his class of fifty-nine in 1846. During the Mexican...

America's failing government schools, the educational establishment, and the teachers' unions are running scared, and they should be. On Tuesday, November 26, the federal Department of Education issued final rules for the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. These rules give school districts 12 years to bring all students up to proficiency levels in reading, math, and science. In addition, students must show "adequate yearly progress" on national standardized tests. If they do not, schools can be designated as "failing". For the first time in decades, government schools will be forced to be accountable to the...

By Margarita Assenova (Rigor, the fourth R: Curricula in Europeon classrooms, such as this one in Aschaffenburg, Germany, have a far bigger dose of academic subject matter than those in the United States.) Because of their heavy curriculum requirements, European students regularly surpass their American counterparts on international tests. hen English is your second or third language, it's certainly not easy to take the college-admission Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT)--let alone do well on it. Yet many European students score at the highest levels in competition with their American peers for admission to Ivy League schools in the United States. Western...

Saving Black BabiesAbortion has cost 13 million African American lives.By Sheryl Blunt in Washington | posted 01/10/2003 Growing up in inner city Detroit, Janine Simpson and her girlfriends didn't think twice about having abortions. In her all-black neighborhood, teen abortions were the norm, she says, and the local abortion clinic was a fixture. "My friends and I, we all had abortions," Simpson says. "We didn't even think about it. To us it was just getting rid of a blob of tissue. We'd say, 'Oh, you pregnant? Okay, let's go take care of it.' " But after Simpson's own abortion her...

Back to Main News Summaries Daily News Quiz Word of the Day Test Prep Question of the Day Web Explorer Science Q & A Letters to the Editor Ask a Reporter Web Navigator Daily Lesson Plan Lesson Plan Archive News Snapshot Issues in Depth On This Day in History Crossword Puzzle Campus Weblines Education News Newspaper in Education (NIE) Teacher Resources Classroom Subscriptions Conversation Starters Family Movie Guide Vacation Donation Plan Discussion Topics Site Guide Feedback Job Opportunities This event took place on December 29, 1940, and was reported in the The New York Times the following day. Read...

A Tommy gun stolen by John Dillinger after a brazen 1934 jail escape in Indiana could soon be molten steel. Newly elected Lake County, Ind., Sheriff Roy Dominguez--no fan of Dillinger because he killed a cop--is thinking about throwing the infamous Colt Thompson submachine gun into a furnace at one of the county's steel mills. History experts say the gun could be worth $1 million. "I see no sense in glorifying him or that gun...[the Tommy gun] was used in the commission of a felony," Dominguez said. "I would consider melting it down or find another way to properly dispose...

The battles of TRENTON and PRINCETON are connected, and part of a campaign against the British forces in NJ, during the American Revolution during the 1776-1777 winter. Here is a general account of that campaign. In the fall of 1776, Washington was in desperate straits, having been defeated in Long Island, and having to retreat from New York City, which being surrounded by water, was found to be indefensible from the British with their naval mobility and larger force. Fort Washington on Manhattan Island was captured by the Hessians (mercenary troops from Germany employed by the British), and Fort Lee,...

There's an odd, poetic justice in Trent Lott's downfall over his incautiously fond reminiscences about Strom Thurmond's 1948 Dixiecrat revolt against Harry Truman's Democratic re-election campaign. Thurmond had an opponent in that race whom almost no one has mentioned, because he and his followers were swept immediately into history's dustbin after that election. Now is the time for that untold half of the story. Everyone knows by now that Thurmond's States' Rights Party meant to thwart Truman's unprecedentedly strong commitment to civil rights. The segregationist apostates didn't expect Thurmond to win the election (he carried only four Southern states); they...