Not gossiping about the day at work, not bitching about conditions, not even engaging in great debates about educational philosophy and policy -- a blogger/podcaster who is actually about TEACHING with his online work!

Fourth period on a midwinter Thursday, Christmas vacation a fading memory by now, and Lars Brownworth took his accustomed place in front of an American history class at the Stony Brook School here. He had been guiding these seniors through the Gilded Age lately, and for this session he planned to personify the era in the form of the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller.

For 45 minutes, Mr. Brownworth deftly orchestrated lecture, discussion and archival photographs to evoke Rockefeller in both his rapacious capitalism and social conscience. When the bell rang, out shuffled the audience, a dozen teenagers who might or might not remember any of this material beyond the next exam. In its satisfactions and its limits, such was the life Mr. Brownworth, the son of teachers, had gladly chosen.

That night, though, Mr. Brownworth, 31, set to work in his own apartment, writing an essay about Alexius I Comnenus, the Byzantine emperor from 1081 to 1118. After revision and rehearsal, the text would become the script for the latest installment of Mr. BrownworthÂ’s podcast. And if form held, something like 140,000 listeners from Afghanistan to White Plains would hear it.

In barely 18 months, Mr. Brownworth’s podcast, “12 Byzantine Rulers” (at http://www.anders.com/lectures/lars_brownworth/12_byzantine_rulers/), has become one of the phenomena of the podcasting world. A survey of 1,200 years of rather abstruse history, starting with Diocletian in 284 and finishing with Constantine XI Palaeologus in 1453, “12 Byzantine Rulers” routinely ranks in the top five educational podcasts on iTunes, and in the top 50 of all podcasts.

Now I particularly like Brownworth's humble reaction to all the attention -- and to his fan base. He never imagined that anyone else would listen when he started this little project, which was much more for himself and his own edification than for attaining a wide-scale audience. I'm hoping that there is eventually a book in the works, and that it has the sort of wild success that his efforts deserve. But perhaps most importantly in my book, I hope his work sparks a few young people to actually consider history as an avocation, as a field of study, and as a passion in life. For as I've said more than once -- if I can turn on even one student a year to the glories of the past (or, n my government classes, to the beauty of the US Constitution), my teaching those students who just want a grade and a credit has been worth it.

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Over at Blogs for Bush, Mark Noonan offers this for our consideration.

For your consideration and debate:

US Civil War: first time there is a Republican President - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

Spanish/American War: Republican President - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

World War One: Democratic President - no anti-war movement.

World War Two: Democratic President - no anti-war movement.

Korean War: Democratic President - no anti-war movement.

Vietnam War: As soon as a Republican took over the botched war from the Democrats - very large, Democraitc anti-war movement.

Last Ten Years of the Cold War: Republican Preisdent - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

Gulf War: Republican President - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

Kosovo War: Democratic President - no anti-war movement.

War on Terrorism: Republican President - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

Discuss: what are we to make of this clear pattern of Democrats opposing any war they are not in charge of?

My personal thought on the matter -- Democrats consider the votes of their fellow citizens to be more dangerous than the bullets and bombs of enemies of America who seek to defeat and destroy our country. It is therefore more important that the elected representatives of the American people be defeated, rather than the enemy in the field.

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Is “Never Again” becoming “Never Happened” even in the West?

More than a quarter of young Britons do not know if the Holocaust happened, according to a poll on Friday that sparked alarm among Jewish leaders determined the world should not forget the Nazi genocide.

"This poll reinforces the necessity to observe the motto -- Never Again", said Winston Pickett, spokesman for the umbrella group, the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The poll, conducted by The Jewish Chronicle to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, showed that 28 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds in Britain do not know if the Holocaust happened.

But teachers were given some comfort by the poll -- just one percent of those surveyed by YouGov pollsters thought the Holocaust was a myth.

I wonder what percentage of the doubters is part of the “Asian” (read that “Muslim”) population that is a growing, radicalized segment of the British populace. After all, that community’s leaders refuse to participate in or mark any commemoration of the Holocaust.

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If you want to learn more about GOP history, or se some good commentary on current events involving the Grand Old party, Might I recommend this new site to you -- Grand Old Partisan.

It is run by Michael Zak, author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party, who also operates the site www.republicanbasics.com.

Drop by and take a look -- you'll like it.

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Ever wonder why the Jews could hold out against the Romans so long in 70 AD? After all, even after the destruction of the Temple, parts of the city held out or another month. A new excavation has shed light on how.

An immense bedrock cliff uncovered opposite Jerusalem's Temple Mount may help explain why it took the Romans so long to capture what is now known as the Jewish Quarter almost two millenia ago, an Israeli archeologist said Sunday.

The cliff, uncovered during a year-long excavation at the western edge of the Western Wall Plaza, was one of several important finds that include the remains of a colonnaded street called the Eastern Cardo, dating from the Roman-Byzantine period; a section of the Lower Aqueduct that conveyed water from Solomon's Pools to the Temple Mount; and a damaged rock-hewn and plastered Jewish mikve (ritual bath) that dates back to the Second Temple period, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced at a press conference.

The dig, which was conducted in an area that had not been excavated before due to plans for construction, also served to clarify the height of an immense bedrock cliff that separated the Upper City from the Temple Mount area. It in itself is "the most impressive" find, said Shlomit Wexler-Bedolah, the excavation director.

Wexler-Bedolah said the cliff's topography could help explain the slow Roman conquest, noting that it took the Roman army an entire month from the time they destroyed the Temple Mount on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av until they captured the ground of today's Jewish Quarter on the 10th day of the following month.

"This could have been a natural obstacle for the Roman army," she said.

Seems to me that the people of Jerusalem made great use of the geological features of the city in their hopeless attempt to hold off the force of the greatest empire in the history of the world to that point.

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For in the earliest days of humanity, our ancestors migrated out of Africa and into the rest of the world.

Anthropologists and other scientists are slowly learning more about that event.

From a new analysis of a human skull discovered in South Africa more than 50 years ago, scientists say they have obtained the first fossil evidence establishing the relatively recent time for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa.

The migrants appeared to have arrived at their new homes in Asia and Europe with the distinct and unmodified heads of Africans.

An international team of researchers reported yesterday that the age of the South African skull, which they dated at about 36,000 years old, coincided with the age of the skulls of humans then living in Europe and the far eastern parts of Asia, even Australia. The skull also closely resembled skulls of those humans.

The timing, the scientists and other experts said, introduced independent evidence supporting archaeological finds and recent genetic studies showing that modern humans left sub-Saharan Africa for Eurasia between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago; probably closer to 45,000 to 35,000 years ago for Europe.

As one who teaches world history, a field that stretches back all the way to the emergence of the earliest humans, I find this fascinating, and encourage you to read the whole article.

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Are the many buffalo roaming the Great Plains really buffalo? It turns out that not many are pure bison bison, but are instead hybrids.

“The majority of public herds have some level of hybridization with cattle,” said Kyran Kunkel, a World Wildlife Federation biologist who is doing the sampling. “You can’t see any difference visually. But we don’t know what the long-term ecological or biological impacts would be.”

American bison, which teetered on the edge of extinction more than a century ago, are one of the first and perhaps greatest conservation successes, but there is an asterisk next to their species: while bison were being nursed back to viable populations, ranchers who owned them crossed them with cattle.

By the late 19th century, tens of millions of American bison had been reduced to fewer than 1,000, with two dozen or so in Yellowstone National Park, and another 250 in Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada. The balance of the animals were owned by cattle ranchers who wanted to preserve them.

“They purposely crossed bison with domestic cattle to make a better beef animal,” which they called cattelo, said James Derr, a geneticist at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine. “Bison did better in harsh conditions and are more resistant to parasites and native viral diseases.” (Bison do not contract Texas fever, for example, which afflicts cattle.)

Over time, cattle genes have spread into many of the remaining herds of American bison. Since the late 1990s, Dr. Derr and his graduate students have traveled to public and private bison herds around the country, taking blood samples. They have concluded that the vast majority of the 300,000 or so bison in the United States are hybrids, though they look like pure bison. Fewer than 10,000 bison are genetically uncontaminated.

The research has led to the stark realization that the battle for the long-term preservation of wild bison is not over.

Though cattle genes in affected bison herds make up less than 1 percent of the bison genome, their presence could create serious consequences like weaker disease resistance. “Hybridization makes it hard to predict and hard to manage because their immune response can be all over the place,” Dr. Derr said.

As a result, scientists are working to preserve the pure strain and restore it to the wild in viable quantities. Indeed, only about 3% of currently extant buffalo are not hybrids (that translates to roughly 10,000), and so we are still a long way from preserving this great national treasure, once hunted nearly to extinction.

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The great moai (stone statues) on Easter Island are one of the most recognizable symbols in the world. Scientists have worked diligently to restore them and to study the culture that produced them, but today there is a conflict -- what should the balance be between those two tasks. Should every moai be restored, or should the overwhelming majority be left in situ and buried or toppled, or should each and every one of them be brought back to its original state?

For local people, though, they also present a problem: what should be done about the hundreds of other stone icons scattered around the island, many of them damaged or still embedded in the ground?

Commercial and political interests, as well as some archaeologists, would like nothing better than to restore more — or perhaps eventually all — of the moai, as the statues are known. But many residents of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian name for Easter Island that is favored here, regard that possibility with a mixture of suspicion and dread.

“We don’t want to become an archaeological theme park, a Disney World of moai,” Pedro Edmunds Paoa, the mayor of Hanga Roa, the island’s largest settlement, said in an interview. “If we are going to keep on restoring moai there has to be a good reason to do so.”

The repaired and re-erected moai on display to visitors at the most popular half-dozen or so sites around Easter Island amount to fewer than 50. But estimates of the total number unearthed on the island have now climbed to more than 900 and keep growing as excavations continue, with nearly half of that total found at the hillside quarry at Rano Raraku, where the islandÂ’s original inhabitants mined and carved the statues out of compressed volcanic ash.

“Having so many is both a blessing and a curse,” said Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an American archaeologist who has worked here since 1982 and is the director of the Easter Island Statue Project. “Some are already lost, of course, but because there are so many, decisions are going to have to be made about which ones to save.”

Many of the islandÂ’s 3,800 residents argue that the moai already restored are sufficient to ensure a constant flow of tourists, the islandÂ’s main source of income. Tourism here zoomed to more than 45,000 visitors in 2005 from 6,000 in 1990 as airline flights have increased, but the influx is viewed as a mixed blessing because it has resulted in strains on public services and natural resources.

To restore even more statues, local critics argue, would only divert scarce resources from other scientific work that could reveal more about the culture that existed here for 1,000 years before the Dutch landed on Easter Sunday of 1722.

Let's put it in context -- the island is three times the size of Manhattan, and has 20,000 archeological sites. Much of the island has been declared to be off-limits to development, meaning that 80% of the land is uselesss to the 3800 inhabitants of the island.

And there is the economic question -- the restoration and maintenance of all 900 moai would cost somewhere int eh neighborhood of half a billion dollars. And given that many of the restored maoi have deteriorated due to renewed exposure to the elements, the question exists on how to best preserve these great stone faces.

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The New York Times may have deteriorated as a source for news about current events, but still does a fine job of covering news about the ancient past and developments in the field of archeology. Thus we find this excellent article on plans to preserve the mortuary complex of the Second Dynasty's King Khasekhemwy, which dates to around 2780 BC.

Now, in an ambitious effort to preserve this ruin, archaeologists, engineers and teams of artisans and laborers are shoring up the walls and gates of Shunet el-Zebib, ravaged by time and the elements and in danger of imminent collapse.

Officials of the project said in recent interviews that the work over the last two years had been slow and careful, but was at least halfway completed. More than 250,000 mud bricks, made on the scene from an ancient recipe, have been laid to build up the high walls. It has cost $1 million, and an equal amount is being raised to finish the job.

“We are not trying to restore the original structure, producing a kind of Walt Disney thing,” said David O’Connor, an Egyptologist at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. “We are preserving and stabilizing it as it is in a way that reflects its nearly 5,000-year history.”

Dr. OÂ’Connor, director of the preservation work, has conducted excavations at Abydos that have exposed the ruins of eight such enclosures. He suspects there are one or two others yet to be discovered.

British archaeologists investigating the site more than a century ago described the enclosures as fortresses, but more recent excavations, particularly at the one dedicated to Khasekhemwy, revealed the association with royal mortuary practices. Even so, owing to a dearth of inscriptions, archaeologists remain largely in the dark as to just what went on inside these centers to memorialize the king in afterlife.

We still have more questions and answers about these mortuary complexes that date back nearly 5000 to the dawn of human civilization. And to offer you some context, these structures were already over 14 centuries old during the reign of Tutankhamen, and are about two centuries older than the Great Pyramid on the plain at Giza. While preservation of Khasekhemwy's temple will be expensive, the cost of allowing it to further deteriorate is incomprehensible in terms of the heritage of humanity.

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Just to show you that Nazi Jew-hatred and Jihadi Jew-hatred have a long connection, according to British documents from the 1930s. Indeed, Hitler sought to arm the Arabs to aid in his war effort.

Historical documents in BritainÂ’s National Archives in London show that Nazi Germany attempted to ship arms to Palestinian forces in the 1930s.

A British Foreign Office report from 1939 reports of “news of a consignment of arms from Germany, sent via Turkey and addressed to Ibn Saud (king of Saudi Arabia), but really intended for the Palestine insurgents.” Britain’s chief military officer in Mandatory Palestine also noted reports “regarding import of German arms at intervals for some years now.”

British documents from the same period, and German records photographed by an American spy and sent to the British government, said that a number of Nazi agents were sent to Mandatory Palestine, in order to forge alliances with Palestinian leaders, and urge them to reject a partition of the land between the Jewish and Arab populations.

One Nazi agent, Adam Vollhardt, arrived in Palestine in July 1938, and was reported to have gained strong influence with Arab leaders, meeting with Palestinian leaders throughout 1938. Vollhardt held several meetings with leading Arab politicians and told them “that the Palestine question would be settled to the satisfaction of the Arabs within a few weeks,” adding that “it would be fatal to their (Palestinians’) cause if at this juncture they showed any signs of weakness or exhaustion.”

“Germany was interested in the settlement of the (Palestine) question on the basis of the Arabs obtaining their full demands,” Vollhardt was reported to say to Palestinian leaders, according to a report by the British War Office. Vollhardt also assured Arab leaders that “the Germans could continue to support the Palestinian Arab cause by means of propaganda.”

German documents photographed and sent to Whitehall by an American spy revealed that in 1937, German officials had calculated that “Palestine under Arab rule would… become one of the few countries where we could count on a strong sympathy for the new Germany.”

And sadly, this affinity between Arab and Nazi resulted in the abandonment of Jewish refugees by the British.

German records show that the Nazis viewed the establishment of a Jewish state with great concern. A 1937 report from German General Consulate in Palestine said: “The formation of a Jewish state… is not in Germany’s interest because a (Jewish) Palestinian state would create additional national power bases for international Jewry such as for example the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Communists. Therefore, there is a German interest in strengthening the Arabs as a counter weight against such possible power growth of the Jews.”

The records also show that the news of increased Nazi-Arab cooperation panicked the British government, and caused it to cancel a plan in 1938 to bring to Palestine 20,000 German Jewish refugees, half of them children, facing danger from the Nazis.

Documents show that after deciding that the move would upset Arab opinion, Britain decided to abandon the Jewish refugees to their fate.

“His Majesty’s Government asked His Majesty’s Representatives in Cairo, Baghdad and Jeddah whether so far as they could judge, feelings in Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia against the admission of, say 5,000 Jewish children for adoption… would be so strong as to lead to a refusal to send representatives to the London discussions. All three replies were strongly against the proposal, which was not proceeded with,” a Foreign Office report said.

“If war were to break out, no trouble that the Jews could occasion us, in Palestine or elsewhere, could weigh for a moment against the importance of winning Muslim opinion to our side,” Britain’s Minister for Coordination of Defence, Lord Chatfield, told the British cabinet in 1939, shortly before Britain reversed its decision to partition its mandate, promising instead all of the land to the Palestinian Arabs.

Shameful -- and part of the reason why Israel even today must fight for its survival in the face of those who would destroy it while others stand by and do nothing to stop the completion of Hitler's Final Solution.

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