July 04, 2007
For amber waves of grain,
For purple mountain majesties
Above the fruited plain.
America! America! God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea.
O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern impassion'd stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness.
America! America! God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.
O beautiful for heroes prov'd
In liberating strife,
Who more than self their country loved,
And mercy more than life.
America! America! May God thy gold refine
Till all success be nobleness,
And ev'ry gain divine.
O Beautiful for patriot dream
that sees beyond the years.
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears.
America! America! God shed his grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood,
From sea to shining sea.
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June 27, 2007
Now, though, this ignored mummy has been identified as Queen Hatshepsut -- whose successor tried to erase all trace of her 15 year reign over the Valley of the Nile.
The British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered Hatshepsut's tomb while excavating at the Valley of the Kings in 1902. When he properly explored the tomb in 1920, two years before his famous discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb, Mr Carter found two sarcophagi, one for Hatshepsut and the second for her father, but both were empty.Speculation about the riddle has, for years, focused on a separate tomb now known as KV60, which Mr Carter found and opened in the spring of 1903.
Inside he found coffins of mummified geese, which he removed, and the partially disturbed and decaying coffins of two women lying side by side. One bore the inscription of Sitre-In, Hatshepsut's wet nurse, the other was anonymous.
As the tomb was not royal it received little attention until the Egyptologist Donald Ryan reopened it in 1989. The sarcophagus marked with the name of the wet nurse was taken to Cairo museum, and the second unnamed sarcophagus remained behind.
Mr Hawass decided to re-investigate the mystery surrounding Hatshepsut for a television special to be aired by the Discovery network and his team removed the second sarcophagus to Cairo for a CT scan.
"That is the only mummy I have removed from the Valley of the Kings," he said.
The scan revealed that this mummy was an obese woman between the ages of 45 and 60 who had bad teeth. She also suffered from cancer, evidence of which can be seen in the pelvic region and the spine.
In search of more clues, Mr Hawass suggested a CT scanner be used to examine artefacts associated with the queen. One of those was a small wooden box that bore the cartouche, or royal seal, of Hatshepsut and contained a liver.
Embalmers typically eviscerated the dead before embalming them but preserved the organs in jars and boxes.
The CT scan also revealed a tooth in the box. Mr Hawass called in a dentist, Galal El-Beheri from Cairo University, who studied the scans of the tooth and of several female mummies.
"Not only was the fat lady from KV-60 missing a tooth but the hole left behind and the type of tooth that was missing were an exact match for the loose one in the box," Mr Hawass said.
The exact dimensions of teeth are unique to each mouth. The molar tooth in the box fits within a fraction of a millimetre with the space of the missing molar in the mouth of the mummy. The minuscule difference could be due to erosion of the gums after the tooth was extracted.
This is utterly incredible -- and shows how there is still so much to be learned about ancient civilizations through the work of archaeologists. This will be one to share with my students this fall.
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June 25, 2007
Charles W. Lindberg, one of the U.S. Marines who raised the first American flag over Iwo Jima during World War II, has died. He was 86.Lindberg died Sunday at Fairview Southdale hospital in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina, said John Pose, director of the Morris Nilsen Funeral Home in Richfield, which is handling Lindberg's funeral.
Lindberg spent decades explaining that it was his patrol, not the one captured in the famous Associated Press photograph by Joe Rosenthal, that raised the first flag as U.S. forces fought to take the Japanese island.
In the late morning of Feb. 23, 1945, Lindberg fired his flame-thrower into enemy pillboxes at the base of Mount Suribachi and then joined five other Marines fighting their way to the top. He was awarded the Silver Star for bravery.
"Two of our men found this big, long pipe there," he said in an interview with The Associated Press in 2003. "We tied the flag to it, took it to the highest spot we could find and we raised it.
"Down below, the troops started to cheer, the ship's whistles went off, it was just something that you would never forget," he said. "It didn't last too long, because the enemy started coming out of the caves."
Lindberg is the last of the survivors of that flag-raising. May he rest in peace, and may his service to this country never be forgotten.
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June 16, 2007
But the related story is fascinating.
Salvagers discovered thousands of pearls Friday in a small, lead box they said they found while searching for the wreckage of the 17th-century Spanish galleon Santa Margarita.Divers from Blue Water Ventures of Key West said they found the sealed box, measuring 3.5 inches by 5.5 inches, along with a gold bar, eight gold chains and hundreds of other artifacts earlier this week.
They were apparently buried beneath the ocean floor in approximately 18 feet of water about 40 miles west of Key West.
``There are several thousand pearls starting from an eighth of an inch to three-quarters of an inch,'' said Duncan Mathewson, marine archaeologist and partner in Blue Water Ventures.
James Sinclair, archaeologist and conservator consulting with Mel Fisher's Treasures, Blue Water's joint-venture partners, said the pearls are very rare because of their antiquity and condition.
Sinclair said pearls don't normally survive the ocean water once they are out of the oyster that makes them.
``In this instance, we had a lead box and the silt that had sifted into the box from the site of the Margarita, which preserved the pearls in a fairly pristine state,'' he said.
Four century old pearls preserved on the sea bed. That is amazing. And to find them loose, not in a setting, is even more amazing.
And to think they were found in a box smaller than a Kleenex box -- that is just stunning.
I wonder how much they will go for on the open market when the company starts selling to collectors?
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Read the newly published The Reagan Diaries if you want a true insight into the mind of the nation's 40th president.The diaries — written daily from 1981 until President Ronald Reagan left office in 1989 — reveal him to be much more involved in the nitty gritty of national and world affairs than many White House reporters thought. He had often been portrayed as a detached "chairman of the board" kind of president.
The diaries show that Reagan had something to say about everything and everybody; his thoughts were often summarized in one handwritten sentence. His notations mixed the profound with the trivial.
Historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited the publication of the diaries, had to toss out chunks to boil the entries down to a 696-page memoir. But no one is short-changed.
Reagan comes across as deeper, funnier, more religious and more humble than he seemed when he was striding across the world stage. He is true to his public persona — foe of communism, tax increases and organized labor — and often the news media.
Now that shocks Thomas, who never took Reagan particularly seriously during his time in the White House. She, like much of the White House press corps, seem to have thought that Reagan was either simple-minded or playing to his audience, not necessarily someone who believed in what he was doing (or, at least, not someone who had given much thought to what he was doing). These diaries dispel that point of view. That leads Thomas to make this obesrvation.
As a reporter having covered him for eight years in the White House, I am sure the press could have done a better job if we had known the real Ronald Reagan.
But that is precisely the problem -- Reagan was right there for the press to see, his public persona very much an expression of the real man. They just didn't want to see, much less know, the real man. That is enough to make one question their coverage of the current president -- and any other leader, especially those of a conservative bent.
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June 09, 2007
You can't really blame Al Gore for not using footnotes in his new book, "The Assault on Reason." It's a sprawling, untidy blast of indignation, and annotating it with footnotes would be like trying to slip rubber bands around a puddle of quicksilver. Still, I'd love to know where he found the scary quote from Abraham Lincoln that he uses on page 88.In a chapter entitled "The Politics of Wealth," Gore argues that the ancient threat to democracy posed by rich people run amok has finally been realized under the man who beat him in the 2000 presidential race. Even Lincoln, Gore says, saw the age of Bush coming in 1864: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
* * * Writing in 1999 in the Abraham Lincoln Association's newsletter, the great Lincoln historian Thomas F. Schwartz traced the bogus passage to the 1880s, about 20 years after Lincoln's death. One theory is that it first appeared in a pamphlet advertising patent medicines. Opponents of Gilded Age capitalism -- Gore's forerunners -- found the quote so useful that Lincoln's former White House secretaries felt compelled to launch a campaign "denouncing the forgery," Schwartz said. Robert Todd Lincoln, who was the president's only surviving son and himself a wealthy railroad lawyer, called it "an impudent invention" that ascribed to his father views that the former president would never have held.
"I discovered what I think is the true and only source of this supposed quotation," Robert wrote in an unpublished letter, probably tongue-in-cheek. "It originated, I think, at what is called a Spiritualist Séance in a country town in Iowa, a number of years ago, as being a communication by President Lincoln through what is called a Medium." Even bloggers might think twice about trusting such a source.
Well, maybe not left-wing bloggers.
And frankly, I'm shocked that the guy who invented created the Internet (happy now, Dan?) couldn't use it to do a better job fact-checking his book. Makes you wonder how much of the rest of his book is based upon pseudo-sources and lousy research.
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, 
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, 
, 
, June 08, 2007
"Now, if Gen. Meade can complete his work so gloriously prosecuted thus far, by the litteral or substantial destruction of Lee's army, the rebellion will be over."
Meade, of course, failed in this task and the Army of Northern Virginia escaped -- leading to nearly two years of additonal warfare.
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June 06, 2007
Thank God for those who fought and died that day (including one member of my wife's family). Thank God for those who fought and lived. And thank God for a loyal media that was not dead-set on undermining the war effort and morale of the American people.
H/T Stop the ACLU, Church & State, The Combat Report
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Forty years after Israel's stunning victory over three Arab armies, the defeat still lingers in the Arab world — so much so, some blame it for everything from a lack of democracy in the region to the rise of religious extremism.On June 5, 1967, Israeli warplanes destroyed 400 aircraft belonging to Egypt,
Syria, Jordan and Iraq — most of them sitting on airport tarmacs. Egypt lost the Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, Syria gave up the Golan Heights, and Jordan relinquished the West Bank and east Jerusalem.Trying to minimize the defeat, Arabs have long called the Six Day War the "naksa," or "setback," but its impact remains a deep wound.
Egyptian columnist Wael Abdel Fattah wrote in the independent weekly Al-Fagr newspaper that Arabs blame the defeat for "everything" — from "price hikes, dictatorship, religious extremism, sectarian strife, even sexual impotence."
The thing is, though, that every single one of the problems that is listed long pre-dated the 1967 war -- lousy economies, totalitarian regimes, the teachings of Islam, the divisions between Sunni and Shiite, and (presumably) lack of sexual prowess among Arab men. It is simply one more example of Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism to blame the Jews for these problems, when they are part and parcel of the failure of Arab/Muslim culture and "civilization" (if you can even call it that over the last several centuries).
Until the Arabs take responsibility for their own destiny, admit that their societies are fundamentally flawed and dominated by a barbaric and backwards theological system that holds them back in the modern world, there is little that can be done to help them -- and strife will continue in the Middle East.
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June 04, 2007
A picture that paints a million words.
More At Malkin, Liberty News, Bill's Bites, Old War Dogs, Gateway Pundit
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May 16, 2007
In a collision of 21st-century science and decades-old conspiracy theories, a research team that includes a former top FBI scientist is challenging the bullet analysis used by the government to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot the two bullets that struck and killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.The "evidence used to rule out a second assassin is fundamentally flawed," concludes a new article in the Annals of Applied Statistics written by former FBI lab metallurgist William A. Tobin and Texas A&M University researchers Cliff Spiegelman and William D. James.
The researchers' re-analysis involved new statistical calculations and a modern chemical analysis of bullets from the same batch Oswald is purported to have used. They reached no conclusion about whether more than one gunman was involved, but urged that authorities conduct a new and complete forensic re-analysis of the five bullet fragments left from the assassination in Dallas.
The only problem is that the accoustic evidence does rule out more than one shooter -- and computer modeling shows that the Warren Report got its conclusions fundamentally right. I'm waiting to see how this particular piece of research is shown to be flawed, as all the other scientific evidence is against it.
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May 08, 2007
Much that is new and exciting in the story of Jamestown is the result of discoveries made in the past 13 years by a white-haired 66-year-old archeologist named William M. Kelso, who found something here no other archaeologist had been able to find in a century of looking:The long-lost site of Jamestown's fort.
Kelso's findings, unfolding quietly over more than a decade, take Jamestown's story back to its beginning, experts say, and rank among the greatest in North American archeology in the past 50 years.
"It's a big deal," said Carter L. Hudgins, chairman of the department of history and American studies at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. "It's something you thought you'd never be able to look at. . . . We can now begin with the letter A. We don't have to begin with the letter D."
Kelso himself seems astonished. Last week he hosted the queen of England and Vice President Cheney. This week, the president. He chuckles: "This is the whole ball of wax, man."
The rest of the story is fascinating -- as are the discoveries that have been made in the last 13 years, bringing to light the lost history of the founding colonists.
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May 07, 2007
An Israeli archaeologist has found the tomb of King Herod, the legendary builder of ancient Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Hebrew University said late Monday.The tomb is at a site called Herodium, a flattened hilltop in the Judean Desert, clearly visible from southern Jerusalem. Herod built a palace on the hill, and researchers discovered his burial site there, the university said.
The university had hoped to keep the find a secret until Tuesday, when it planned a news conference to disclose the find in detail, but the Haaretz newspaper found out about the discovery and published an article on its Web site.
Now this is an important discovery in terms of further confirming the historical claim of the Jews to Israel, as well as documenting the well-attested history of the Roman era.
I would, however, like to note the glaring historical error in the article.
Herod became the ruler of the Holy Land under the Romans around 74 B.C.
Looks to me like someone just went to Wikipedia and read the first, awkwardly phrased sentence, presuming that the year of his birth was the year he became king. Herod becomes governor of Judea in 47 BC, and king in 37 BC.
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May 02, 2007
On this day in 1963, police in Birmingham, Alabama -- under the command of the Democrat sheriff, Eugene "Bull" Connor -- attacked several thousand African-American schoolchildren who were demonstrating peacefully for their civil rights. Connor's men used high-pressure hoses, clubs and police dogs in their assault, and then jailed nearly a thousand children.At the time, it should be noted, Connor was the Democratic National Committeeman for Alabama. A member of the Ku Klux Klan, Connor had been a Democrat state legislator and a delegate to the 1948 Democratic National Convention. A year after attacking the African-American children, Connor was elected, as a Democrat, president of the state Public Service Commission.
I wonder -- did Robert Byrd wear his dress sheets to the Senate today to celebrate the heritage of his party?
Thanks to Michael Zak for highlighting this important day in American history, and giving Democratic Party barbarism the attention it deserves.
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Scientists believe they have for the first time identified an ancient graveyard for gladiators.Analysis of their bones and injuries has given new insight into how they lived, fought and died.
The remains were found at Ephesus in Turkey, a major city of the Roman world, BBC Timewatch reports.
Gladiators were the sporting heroes of the ancient world. Archaeological records show them celebrated in everything from mosaics to graffiti.
Motifs of gladiators are found on nearly a third of all oil lamps from Roman archaeological digs throughout the Empire.
But how much did they risk every time they stepped into the arena? Did they have much chance of getting out alive?
The discovery of what is claimed to be the first scientifically authenticated gladiator graveyard has given researchers the opportunity to find out.
The information gleaned so far shows that most gladiators died of injuries sustained in the arena, usually by the time they were in their thirties. Wounds were consistent with those that would be expected from the weapons depicted in Roman artwork, but there was also evidence of gladiators receiving medical care, as indicated by healed injuries.
There is a BBC documentary on this, and I can’t wait for it to be shown in the US. Anyone now when it will be picked up by one of the cable channels.
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Scientists believe they have for the first time identified an ancient graveyard for gladiators.Analysis of their bones and injuries has given new insight into how they lived, fought and died.
The remains were found at Ephesus in Turkey, a major city of the Roman world, BBC Timewatch reports.
Gladiators were the sporting heroes of the ancient world. Archaeological records show them celebrated in everything from mosaics to graffiti.
Motifs of gladiators are found on nearly a third of all oil lamps from Roman archaeological digs throughout the Empire.
But how much did they risk every time they stepped into the arena? Did they have much chance of getting out alive?
The discovery of what is claimed to be the first scientifically authenticated gladiator graveyard has given researchers the opportunity to find out.
The information gleaned so far shows that most gladiators died of injuries sustained in the arena, usually by the time they were in their thirties. Wounds were consistent with those that would be expected from the weapons depicted in Roman artwork, but there was also evidence of gladiators receiving medical care, as indicated by healed injuries.
There is a BBC documentary on this, and I canÂ’t wait for it to be shown in the US. Anyone now when it will be picked up by one of the cable channels.
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May 01, 2007
Ronald Reagan thought Alexander Haig was "utterly paranoid," considered former senator Lowell Weicker "a pompous, no good fathead" and was "surprised at how shy" Michael Jackson was.Reagan also refused to talk to his son after Ron Reagan hung up on him, felt that daughter Patti had "a kind of yo yo family relationship" and was invariably "lonesome" when his wife, Nancy, was out of town.
A self-portrait of the 40th president -- determined, funny, wistful, at times clinging to his beliefs despite countervailing facts -- emerges from diaries that he faithfully kept from 1981 to 1989, his eight years in the White House. Historian Douglas Brinkley had exclusive access to the five hardback books bound in maroon leather, each page filled to the bottom with Reagan's neat handwriting. Vanity Fair magazine, in its June issue, is publishing excerpts of the book "The Reagan Diaries," edited by Brinkley and due out this month from publisher HarperCollins.
A fantastic resource for historians -- and anyone who loves America.
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April 29, 2007
Researchers have long debated what happened when the indigenous Neanderthals of Europe met "modern humans" arriving from Africa starting some 40,000 years ago. The end result was the disappearance of the Neanderthals, but what happened during the roughly 10,000 years that the two human species shared a land?A new review of the fossil record from that period has come up with a provocative conclusion: The two groups saw each other as kindred spirits and, when conditions were right, they mated.
How often this happened will never be known, but paleoanthropologist Erik Trinkaus says it probably occurred more often than is generally imagined.
In his latest work, published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Trinkaus, of Washington University in St. Louis, analyzed prehistoric fossil remains from various parts of Europe. He concluded that a significant number have attributes associated with both Neanderthals and the modern humans who replaced them.
"Given the data we now have, it would be highly improbable to argue there is no Neanderthal contribution to the early European population that came out of Africa," Trinkaus said. "I believe there was continuous breeding between the two for some period of time.
"Both groups would seem to us dirty and smelly but, cleaned up, we would understand both to be human. There's good reason to think that they did as well."
The conclusion, one of the strongest to date in this debate, remains controversial, and it has potentially broad implications. It suggests, for instance, that humans today should still have some Neanderthal genes. It also means that the unanswered question of why the Neanderthals died out is even more puzzling -- because under this scenario they were quite capable of living successfully alongside the more modern newcomers.
Don't like this conclusion? Don't worry -- in the next few years there will be a new study claiming exactly the opposite, as has been the case for decades whenever a groundbreaking study of this question is published.
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April 28, 2007
One hundred fifty years ago, a glorious September morning in the Utah mountains morphed into Mormonism's darkest hour when a militia opened fire on a wagon train, leaving more than 120 men, women and children dead in a flowery field.Now the "Mountain Meadows Massacre" is becoming more than a subject of somber reflection within tight-knit Mormon circles. Two new films and a forthcoming book aim to tell the nation what happened, why and -- perhaps most important -- whether the revered Mormon prophet Brigham Young ordered the killing.
At stake are not just the details of a tragic moment in pioneer history. For the 5.8 million Americans who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon church is officially known, the integrity of one of their most important heroes hangs in the balance. For others, the depictions stand to forge new impressions of a controversial religious minority that has known both violent persecution and substantial influence across its tumultuous 180-year history.
"As a society, we are definitely at a crossroads" in terms of rethinking Mormonism, says Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. "This is a huge moment, because it's a very important religion."
There are three projects in the works. One, a movie, depicts the events sensationally and stakes out the position that this was an act inspired by, if not ordered by, Brigham Young. The second, a PBS documentary, tries to contextualize what happened and does not, in so far as I can tell, really take a clear position on Young's involvement. And an upcoming book by three Mormon historians takes the official Mormon position that Young had nothing to do with the events of that morning at all -- and that he tried to stop it.
What is the answer? In the end, I suspect the PBS documentary may do a great service by contextualizing the events, coming as they did as a part of the "Mormon War" in Utah. And personally, I doubt that Young actually ordered these murders -- but I do suspect that his words, like those of Henry II in the case of Thomas a Becket, could legitimately have been taken by some of his more loyal followers as an implicit call for these events. As such, one might fairly impute an indirect moral responsibility to the Mormon leader, though perhaps not the sort that those who claim he directed the massacre would insist upon. But regardless, the events of September 11, 1857 remain a blot upon the history of the LDS Church -- and will likely continue to be a source of controversy.
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April 26, 2007
The letter from George Washington is pasted between poetry and party invitations, stuffed into a dusty scrapbook amid jokes and cutouts of handsome men, and all the highlights of a lucky little girlÂ’s life.It was written in May 1787 and addressed to Jacob Morris, grandfather of Julia Kean, the precocious 10-year-old who started the brown leather scrapbook in 1826 and put the letter under a portrait of the nationÂ’s first president.
The letter is just 111 words long, a scant two paragraphs, but it mentions a rival of Washington, Horatio Gates, and includes enough hints of intrigue to whet the appetite of scholars. They learned of the letterÂ’s discovery only recently, after it was found among the private papers of one of New JerseyÂ’s most prominent families.
What a neat treasure to find -- and the words of the letter are significant, written during the Constitutional Convention over which George Washington presided.
“The happiness of this Country depend much upon the deliberations of the federal Convention which is now sitting,” reads the second paragraph of the quill-and-ink letter. “It, however, can only lay the foundation — the community at large must raise the edifice.”
Indeed -- the Constitution is mere paper unless We, the People, build and maintain the structure it designs. Have we lived up to that responsibility in the 220 years since that great man wrote those words?
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April 21, 2007
The attack on Mexican troops at the Battle of San Jacinto came at just the right time and place 171 years ago today, leading to a Texian victory that secured independence from Mexico.
* * * Texian troops were defeated by Mexican troops at the Alamo on March 6, 1836.
Another major blow came on March 27, when more than 350 Texian soldiers at Goliad who had surrendered were massacred.
Then came the Battle of San Jacinto.
* * * "The battle only took 18 minutes so you can literally take an 18-minute walk and feel the battle," he said. "The Alamo takes a lot of attention, but this is where we won it."
And the world -- in particular the destiny of the United States and Mexico -- was forever changed in those 18 minutes.
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April 15, 2007
SNOWS are melting in central Afghanistan and roads to the town of Bamiyan have reopened after unseasonal rain - meaning work on restoring the giant Buddha statues destroyed by the Taleban can resume.Piles of rubble lie below two gaping niches in the red-brown cliff facing the town where the statues had stood since the sixth century until the Taleban brought them down in 2001, branding them unIslamic.
The larger, identified chunks of stone from the standing Buddhas have been stored or covered, but thousands of fragments and rubble lie in the open. "It's impossible to work here for at least six months of the year," said Habiba Sarabi, the governor of Bamiyan. "We hope work will resume by June."
She said reconstruction of at least one statue - the larger one, which stood 174ft tall - would begin after a request from the federal government to UNESCO.
Reconstructed bits of statue will be mixed with clay in a process called anastylosis, pieced together and bonded back on to the cliff face. It is an immense task and experts are divided on whether reconstruction is feasible or even necessary.
A team has been clearing the site of mines, but its work is not complete. Hundreds of poor people live in caves on the cliffside, and preventing encroachment into the World Heritage Site is a key issue.
Preliminary estimates of the cost of rebuilding the larger statue are £25 million, and it is debatable whether that might be better used elsewhere in the war-ravaged and impoverished nation.
Whenever work starts, it will take years - perhaps a decade - to complete. "There are at least 3,000 pieces of the larger Buddha and 1,500 from the smaller one," said Ms Sarabi.
These statues are a part of the heritage of all humanity -- their reconstruction needs to be a priority. Especially if we are to send a clear signal to the Islamists that WE WILL NOT SUBMIT!
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) April 12, 2007
The Vatican and Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial got into a public spat Thursday over the wartime conduct of Pope Pius XII during the Nazi genocide, threatening to upset fragile relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish state.Separately, church officials announced new developments Thursday in the Vatican's case to make Pius a saint. A massive dossier on Pius' virtues _ some six volumes of 3,000 pages _ was handed over to a panel of bishops and cardinals earlier this month to study, they said.
At issue in the Yad Vashem-Vatican dispute is a photograph of Pius in Yad Vashem's museum in Jerusalem with the caption: "Even when reports about the murder of Jews reached the Vatican, the pope did not protest," refusing to sign a 1942 Allied condemnation of the massacre of Jews during World War II.
Pius "maintained his neutral position" with two exceptions, the caption reads, criticizing "his silence and absence of guidelines." The exceptions were appeals to the rulers of Hungary and Slovakia toward the end of the war, the caption says.
The Vatican's ambassador to Israel, Monsignor Antonio Franco, confirmed Thursday that he would not attend Yad Vashem's annual memorial service for Holocaust victims next week because of the Pius photograph.
"I don't intend to go to Yad Vashem if things remain the way they do," he said.
The memorial service is traditionally attended by all foreign ambassadors to Israel or their representatives. Yad Vashem said this would mark the first case in which a foreign emissary deliberately skipped the ceremony.
Yad Vashem is "shocked and disappointed" by Franco's decision, said spokeswoman Iris Rosenberg.
I'm shocked and disappointed by Israel's decision to include a blood-libel against a man universally recognized as a friend of the Jews during the holocaust -- by both the Jews and the Nazis. I wish more ambassadors had the integrity to stay away from the memorial service in recognition that the exhibit defames a good and decent man who did more than any other world leader to safeguard those targeted for death by the Nazi genocide machine.
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April 11, 2007
Locks of 3,200-year-old hair from the pharaoh Ramses II have been unveiled at the Egyptian Museum, returned to Egypt after being stolen 30 years ago in France and put up for sale on the Internet.The small tufts of brown hair were displayed alongside pieces of linen bandages and 11 pieces of resin used in the mummification of Ramses and his son Merneptah in a glass display case. Photographers mobbed the case as Egypt's culture minister and antiquities chief showed off the returned items. The hair will eventually be displayed next to Ramses' mummy at the museum.
The theft was discovered when the pieces of hair were put up for sale on a Web site last November by a French postman, Jean-Michel Diebolt, who gave the hair a price tag of $2,600.
Diebolt is the son of a French researcher who examined the 3,200-year-old mummy when it was brought to France in 1976 for treatment to stop the spread of a rare fungus. Diebolt is being investigated in France for allegedly possessing stolen goods.
Egyptian antiquities official Ahmed Saleh traveled to Paris last week to retrieve the stolen items.
"It was wonderful mission. I felt very great when I had the lock of hair of Ramses II in my hand," said Saleh.
Ramses II, who ruled from 1270 to 1213 B.C., is one of ancient Egypt's most famous pharaohs, known for building some of its grandest monuments. Some believe him to be the pharaoh at the time of Moses.
This is clearly stolen property, by any definition. I therefore think it is proper to return the lock of hair to the Egyptians.
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April 02, 2007
On the eve of Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the story of Moses leading the Israelites through this wilderness out of slavery, Egypt’s chief archaeologist took a bus full of journalists into the North Sinai to showcase his agency’s latest discovery.It didn’t look like much — some ancient buried walls of a military fort and a few pieces of volcanic lava. The archaeologist, Dr. Zahi Hawass, often promotes mummies and tombs and pharaonic antiquities that command international attention and high ticket prices. But this bleak landscape, broken only by electric pylons, excited him because it provided physical evidence of stories told in hieroglyphics. It was proof of accounts from antiquity.
That prompted a reporter to ask about the Exodus, and if the new evidence was linked in any way to the story of Passover. The archaeological discoveries roughly coincided with the timing of the IsraelitesÂ’ biblical flight from Egypt and the 40 years of wandering the desert in search of the Promised Land.
“Really, it’s a myth,” Dr. Hawass said of the story of the Exodus, as he stood at the foot of a wall built during what is called the New Kingdom.
Later on, they get in a dig about the lack of evidence of Jesus being in Egypt as a child (though why an obscure Jewish family would have been noted at the time is pretty obvious).
Personally, I have some qquestions about the Exodus story as handed down to us -- but don't doubt it is historically based on some smaller scale -- sort of the "George Washington and the cherry tree" effect. And since i am not a biblical literalist, that does not trouble me at all.
But I do have a question -- will there the NY Times be running articles debunking the Koran or raising questions about Muhammad during Ramadan this year? Or do they know that the response from Jews and Christians to such articles is more sedate than those of Muslims to attempts to call their faith into question?
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March 29, 2007
Now there is more evidence to confirm that.
Pius XII, the wartime pontiff often condemned as "Hitler's Pope", was actually considered an enemy by the Third Reich, according to newly discovered documents.Several letters and memos unearthed at a depot used by the Stasi, the East-German secret police, show that Nazi spies within the Vatican were concerned at Pius's efforts to help displaced Poles and Jews.
In one, the head of Berlin's police force tells Joachim von Ribbentropp, the Third Reich's foreign minister, that the Catholic Church was providing assistance to Jews "both in terms of people and financially".
A report from a spy at work in the Vatican states: "Our source was told to his face by Father Robert Leibner [one of Pius's secretaries] that the greatest hope of the Church is that the Nazi system would be obliterated by the war."
La Repubblica, the newspaper that discovered the papers, said they were sent to the heads of the Stasi, after the Second World War.
The revelations they contain will help to clear the name of Pius XII, Eugenio Pacelli, who has long been criticised for turning a blind eye to the Holocaust. During the war, the British Foreign Office even described him as the "greatest moral coward of our age".
Those who have promoted the blood libel against the Pope are those who hate the Catholic Church, and wish to present it as always on the wrong side of history. They are not even above lying to do it. Will the documentary evidence that contradicts their claims stop the slander of a great and saintly pontiff?
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March 28, 2007
When Charles E. McGee slid his P-51 fighter, "Kitten," onto the tail of the fleeing German FW-190 in the skies over Austria in 1944, he fired his six big machine guns and struck a blow for civil rights back home.Walter L. McCreary did the same a few months later, when his P-51 was hit by flak on a strafing run over Hungary and the cockpit floor began to slosh with what he thought was leaking gasoline.
And so did Woodrow W. Crockett's ground crews a few months after that, when they stopped a supply train and commandeered special gas tanks so their pilots could fly without running out of fuel.
Today, members of the famed black World War II aviation cadre now called the Tuskegee Airmen will be honored in the Capitol Rotunda for their history-making feats.
In a ceremony at 1 p.m., the airmen, including McGee, McCreary and Crockett, will receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest honor that Congress can give to civilians. President Bush is scheduled to speak, along with Colin L. Powell, former secretary of state, who received the medal in 1991.
The achievement of men such as McGee, McCreary and Crockett was simple: They were bold in battle and capable in command -- at a time when many in the military thought blacks could be neither.
"What we accomplished hasn't always been recognized for, really, what it meant to the country," McGee said this week. "There was meaning there, you might say, in a civil rights area that preceded what we know as the civil rights movement."
Not only did they pre-date the civil rights movement, I'd argue that their accomplishments and story made it possible, given the respect they earned from bomber pilots they protected. Any honor they receive is deserved -- and I applaud this one, which is long overdue.
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While I applaud the efforts of Texas State Sen. Rodney Ellis and State Rep. Senfronia Thompson to pass a resolution of formal apology for slavery, their proposal does not go far enough. It may be a necessary first step, but Texas and Virginia, and the other slaveholding states, have much more to apologize for than just the institution of slavery, hideous though it was.Particularly during the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow periods, African-Americans in the South were treated with extraordinary brutality and cruelty, from the second-class citizenship status formalized in segregation to the epidemic of lynching that swept across the South and up into the Midwest as far north as Duluth, Minn., between about 1880 and 1930. Almost 500 documented lynchings took place in Texas alone, a greater number than in any other state except Georgia and Mississippi.
These lynchings included some of the most atrocious of the so-called "spectacle lynchings," a species of mass entertainment that probably began on Feb. 1, 1893, in Paris, Texas, with the prolonged torture/murder with hot irons and a bonfire of Henry Smith, a retarded black man, before a cheering mob of 10,000 spectators. In addition to the violence directed at individuals, there were also periodic "race riots," which usually meant pogroms directed at blacks. In 1886, all blacks were completely driven out of Comanche County by vigilantes. My father, who grew up in Comanche County in the 1920s, remembers stories of signs posted on the edge of town that read, "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you here."
Those who committed these evils are, by and large, long dead. So are their victims and those with living memory of them. And while we must not forget them, we must not apologize for these events either, for such apologies constitute an admission of our moral culpability for them -- something this generation does not have.
And in a state like Texas, where Republicans today dominate, such an apology is inappropriate -- for slavery and Jim Crow were institutions supported by the Democrats, while the GOP actively opposed them. Let the Democratic party apologize for its role in institutionalizing and supporting these practices, both by its policies and its active support of the Klan.
And if any apology, acknowldgement, or condemnation does come from state government, make sure that the role of that malignant political entity is acknowledged prominently in the text, along with Republican efforts to stop and oppose them. After all, that is history as well -- a history that some would rather hide.
And personally, I think this approach -- dealing with today's issues -- is much more important. Human trafficking goes on today, and must be stopped with the full resources of every level of government.
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While recovering from surgery recently, I had the good fortune to read a fine new book about political dissent in the North during the Civil War. The book, Copperheads: The Rise an Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North, by journalist-turned-academic-historian Jennifer Weber, shines the spotlight on the “Peace Democrats,†who did everything they could to obstruct the Union war effort during the Rebellion. In so doing, she corrects a number of claims that have become part of the conventional wisdom. The historical record aside, what struck me the most were the similarities between the rhetoric and actions of the Copperheads a century and a half ago and Democratic opponents of the Iraq war today.
I made a similar connection some time back – and am quite interested in learning more about the treason of the Democrat Party in the past, as we deal with its subversion in the present.
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While recovering from surgery recently, I had the good fortune to read a fine new book about political dissent in the North during the Civil War. The book, Copperheads: The Rise an Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North, by journalist-turned-academic-historian Jennifer Weber, shines the spotlight on the “Peace Democrats,” who did everything they could to obstruct the Union war effort during the Rebellion. In so doing, she corrects a number of claims that have become part of the conventional wisdom. The historical record aside, what struck me the most were the similarities between the rhetoric and actions of the Copperheads a century and a half ago and Democratic opponents of the Iraq war today.
I made a similar connection some time back – and am quite interested in learning more about the treason of the Democrat Party in the past, as we deal with its subversion in the present.
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March 21, 2007
A 16th century maritime map proves Portuguese adventurers, not British or Dutch, were the first Europeans to discover Australia, according to a new book.The book, Beyond Capricorn, says the map, which accurately marks geographical sites along Australia's east coast in Portuguese, proves Portuguese seafarer Christopher de Mendonca led a fleet of four ships into Botany Bay in 1522 - almost 250 years before Britain's Captain James Cook.
The map is in a Los Angeles library vault.
Australian author Peter Trickett said that when he enlarged the small map he could recognise all the headlands and bays in Botany Bay in Sydney - the site where Cook claimed Australia for Britain in 1770.
"It was even so accurate that I found I could draw in the modern airport runways, to scale in the right place, without any problem at all," Trickett told Reuters.
This theory presumes, of course, that the theory put forth by David Menzies in 1421 that the Chinese Admiral Zheng He's great fleet explored the East coast of Australia (as well as the coasts of Africa and the Americas) is not correct -- and that the chart in question is based upon a copy of a copy of the charts from that expedition.
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March 20, 2007
The songwriter, labor organizer and folk hero Joe Hill has been the subject of poems, songs, an opera, books and movies. His will, written in verse the night before a Utah firing squad executed him in 1915 and later put to music, became part of the labor movementÂ’s soundtrack. Now the original copy of that penciled will is among the unexpected historical gems unearthed from a vast collection of papers and photographs never before seen publicly that the Communist Party USA has donated to New York University.The cache contains decades of party history including founding documents, secret code words, stacks of personal letters, smuggled directives from Moscow, Lenin buttons, photographs and stern commands about how good party members should behave (no charity work, for instance, to distract them from their revolutionary duties).
By offering such an inside view, the archives have the potential to revise assumptions on both the left and the right about one of the most contentious subjects in American history, in addition to filling out the story of progressive politics, the labor movement and the civil rights struggles.
“It is one of the most exciting collecting opportunities that has ever presented itself here,” said Michael Nash, the director of New York University’s Tamiment Library, which will announce the donation on Friday.
It should provide some great insights into the enemy within -- and may just expose which current pols are fellow-travelers with the CPUSA.
One day, no doubt, we will get a look at the archives of the party of America's domestic enemies -- the DemocrtICK Party.
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March 04, 2007
Can a nonbinding congressional resolution really matter? Most are ignored by everyone except the special interests they are usually directed at. Even the House's recent resolution on Iraq was dismissed by both President Bush and Democratic antiwar leader John Murtha. Yet a vote expected next month on a nonbinding House resolution describing a "genocide" in the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1915 has the potential to explode U.S. relations with Turkey, sway the outcome of upcoming Turkish elections and spill over into several other strategic American interests, including Iraq and Iran.So, yes: The Armenian Genocide Resolution sponsored by Rep. Adam Schiff does matter, logically or not. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul spent several days in Washington last month lobbying against it, though the Turkish-American agenda is chockablock with seemingly more important issues. Friends of Turkey in Washington, from American Jewish organizations to foreign policy satraps, are working the Hill; so is the Bush team. On the other side is the well-organized and affluent Armenian American community, 1.4 million strong, and some powerful friends -- including the new House speaker, Nancy Pelosi.
Here is a debate that could occur only in Washington -- a bizarre mix of frivolity and moral seriousness, of constituent pandering, far-flung history and front-line foreign policy. And that's just on the American side; in Turkey there is the painful struggle of a deeply nationalist society to come to terms with its past, and in the process become more of the Western democracy it wants to be.
I'm sorry, but this is a resolution that should not be. Not because the Armenian genocide did not happen, for it undeniably did. Not because it was not serious or because we might offend an ally, because the first is false and the second is irrelevant. Rather, it is not the place of political bodies to be setting historical judgments in stone. That is what has happened in Turkey, where one can be punished for conceding that the horrors done to the Armenians by Turks ever happened -- and in France, where denying they happened is punishable by law. The problem is that by taking the matter out of the hands of historians establishes an orthodoxy that is hard to overcome as new evidence come to light -- and, indeed can make advocating against the orthodoxy a crime, silencing professionals in the field.
That the Turkish genocide committed against the Armenians happened is clearly established historical fact. That it remains a blot on the history of the Turkish people and the world cannot be denied by any honest observer. But the proper place for judging this long-ago crime is not Congress, for the events have long since passed from current events that can be remedied into the mists of history.
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March 03, 2007
Pirates!
Pirates!
Sorry about that, folks, but we are talking about Blackbeard's own pirate vessel, Queen Anne's Revenge! This is cool -- a three-hundred year old pirate ship.
A shipwreck off the North Carolina coast believed to be that of notorious pirate Blackbeard could be fully excavated in three years, officials working on the project said."That's really our target," Steve Claggett, the state archaeologist, said Friday while discussing 10 years of research that has been conducted since the shipwreck was found just off Atlantic Beach.
The ship ran aground in 1718, and some researchers believe it was a French slave ship Blackbeard captured in 1717 and renamed Queen Anne's Revenge.
Several officials said historical data and coral-covered artifacts recovered from the site — including 25 cannons, which experts said was an uncommonly large number to find on a ship in the region in the early 18th century — remove any doubt the wreckage belonged to Blackbeard.
Three university professors, including two from East Carolina University, have challenged the findings. But officials working on the excavation said Friday that the more they find, the stronger their case becomes.
"Historians have really looked at it thoroughly and don't feel that there's any possibility anything else is in there that was not recorded," said Mark Wilde-Ramsing, director of the Queen Anne's Revenge Project. "And the artifacts continue to support it."
I cannot wait to see if the artifacts recovered continue to provide support for this being the famous pirate vessel sailed by the best-known pirate of the eighteenth century.
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February 28, 2007
Schlesinger, who was also an active liberal who worked in the Kennedy Administration, has died.
n his 89 years, Arthur M. Schlesinger was a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a Kennedy insider, and an influential thinker who helped define mainstream liberalism during the Cold War."(He had) enormous stamina and a kind of energy and drive which most people don't have, and it kept him going, all the way through his final hours," Schlesinger's son Stephen said early Thursday morning, hours after his father's death. "He never stopped writing, he never stopped participating in public affairs, he never stopped having his views about politics and his love of this nation."
Schlesinger was dining with family members in Manhattan on Wednesday when he suffered a heart attack, Stephen Schlesinger said. He later died at New York Downtown Hospital.
Schlesinger was among the most famous historians of his time, and was widely respected as learned and readable, with a panoramic vision of American culture and politics. He received a National Book Award for "Robert Kennedy and His Times" and both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer for "A Thousand Days," his memoir/chronicle of President Kennedy's administration. He also won a Pulitzer, in 1946, for "The Age of Jackson," his landmark chronicle of Andrew Jackson's administration.
Indeed, it is the work on the Jackson administration that first introduced me to Schlesinger, some 35 years after it was published. It remains a classic in the field of American history.
Quite frankly, I don't have the words to express the sense of loss I feel upon the passing of this intellectual giant.
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February 25, 2007
Meeting on the grounds of the former Confederate Capitol, the Virginia General Assembly voted unanimously Saturday to express "profound regret" for the state's role in slavery.Sponsors of the resolution say they know of no other state that has apologized for slavery, although Missouri lawmakers are considering such a measure. The resolution does not carry the weight of law but sends an important symbolic message, supporters said.
"This session will be remembered for a lot of things, but 20 years hence I suspect one of those things will be the fact that we came together and passed this resolution," said Delegate A. Donald McEachin, a Democrat who sponsored it in the House of Delegates.
The resolution passed the House 96-0 and cleared the 40-member Senate on a unanimous voice vote. It does not require Gov. Timothy M. Kaine's approval.
The measure also expressed regret for "the exploitation of Native Americans."
The resolution was introduced as Virginia begins its celebration of the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, where the first Africans arrived in 1619. Richmond, home to a popular boulevard lined with statues of Confederate heroes, later became another point of arrival for Africans and a slave-trade hub.
The resolution says government-sanctioned slavery "ranks as the most horrendous of all depredations of human rights and violations of our founding ideals in our nation's history, and the abolition of slavery was followed by systematic discrimination, enforced segregation, and other insidious institutions and practices toward Americans of African descent that were rooted in racism, racial bias, and racial misunderstanding."
In Virginia, black voter turnout was suppressed with a poll tax and literacy tests before those practices were struck down by federal courts, and state leaders responded to federally ordered school desegregation with a "Massive Resistance" movement in the 1950s and early '60s. Some communities created exclusive whites-only schools.
Personally, I would have abstained from any vote.
I owned no slaves.
My ancestors owned no slaves.
My political party actively opposed slavery and segregation.
On the other hand, I would have encouraged every Democrat to vote for the resolution -- but only if they had the integrity to include a condemnation of the DemocratICK Party and its paramilitary terrorist wing, the KKK, in the resolution. After all, their membership in that party indelibly tars them with its sins.
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February 22, 2007
Joseph Loconte has this to say about the abolition movement and the message it should hold for those who express hostility to the involvement of people of faith in the political process.
A convert to evangelical Christianity, Wilberforce is greatly admired in religious circles today, if not always imitated. Early in his parliamentary career, he made a vow to avoid the corruptions of political influence — and kept it. He was known for his intellectual seriousness and personal charm. French author Madame de Stael confessed her surprise after dining with him: "I have always heard that he was the most religious, but I now find that he is the wittiest man in England."Wilberforce sought to change hearts and minds, not just laws. So he organized boycotts and petitions, staged demonstrations and commissioned artwork to mobilize public opinion on a national scale. Wilberforce suffered many setbacks — his abolition bills were repeatedly killed in committee or defeated in the House of Commons — but he kept on.
Most important, he was unafraid to invoke the Gospel to challenge the consciences of slavers and their supporters in Parliament. In his "Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade," published in January 1807, Wilberforce placed the brutish facts of human trafficking against the backdrop of Christian compassion and divine justice.
"We must believe," he warned, "that a continued course of wickedness, oppression and cruelty, obstinately maintained in spite of the fullest knowledge and the loudest warnings, must infallibly bring down upon us the heaviest judgments of the Almighty." A month later, on Feb. 23, the House of Commons voted 283 to 16 to abolish the slave trade.
In our post-Sept. 11 era, there's suspicion and antagonism toward religious belief, especially when it mixes with politics. Secularists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris describe the beliefs of the faithful as a "delusion" and akin to "insanity." Wilberforce endured similar scorn. He was lampooned for his "damnable doctrine" and dismissed as a "treacherous fanatic."
Modern skeptics should remember that the great campaign against the international slave trade was not led by atheists. It was fought by people with deep Christian convictions about the dignity and freedom of every person made in the image of God.
In my lifetime, we have seen a civil rights movement that centered around the churches of America, black and white, for support, and a host of other efforts by people of Christian faith to be salt and light in the world. And yet all too often those efforts have clashed with the secular ideology of opinion elites, who have then attempted to delegitimize the efforts of those who, like Wilberforce, seek to denounce the moral evils of the day and bring about solutions to them.
We ignore and marginalize such voices at our peril.
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February 18, 2007
It was a speech so moving the crowd wept. It was a speech so personally important George Washington's hand shook as he read it until he had to hold the paper still with both hands. After the ceremony, he handed the thing to a friend and sped out the door of the State House in Annapolis, riding off by horse.For centuries, his words have resonated in American democracy even as the speech itself -- the small piece of paper that shook in his hands that day -- was quietly put away, out of the public eye and largely forgotten.
Today, however, amid festivities celebrating his birthday, Maryland officials plan to unveil the original document -- worth $1.5 million -- after acquiring it in a private sale from a family in Maryland who had kept it all these years. It took two years to negotiate the deal and raise money for the speech, which experts consider the most significant Washington document to change hands in the past 50 years.
The speech, scholars say, was a turning point in U.S. history. As the Revolutionary War was winding down, some wanted to make Washington king. Some whispered conspiracy, trying to seduce him with the trappings of power. But Washington renounced them all.
By resigning his commission as commander in chief to the Continental Congress -- then housed at the Annapolis capitol -- Washington laid the cornerstone for an American principle that persists today: Civilians, not generals, are ultimately in charge of military power.
It would have been very easy for Washington, as head of the Continental Army, to have become the de facto ruler of the newly formed United States. Instead he placed the needs of the country first and retired, however temporarily, from public life. In doing so he earned the respect even of his erstwhile enemy, King George III, whose comment upon his impending resignation to the painter Benjamin West upon hearing the news was "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."
And indeed, we were fortunate that t this critical juncture of American history, Washington was clearly one of a number of American patriots who could qualify for that title.
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February 17, 2007
Natural rights [are] the objects for the protection of which society is formed and municipal laws established.
-- Thomas Jefferson (Letter to James Monroe, 1791)
Seems to me to be a good one for folks to discuss here -- do you agree or disagree?
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February 12, 2007
Napoleon Bonaparte died a more prosaic death than some people would like to think, succumbing to stomach cancer rather than arsenic poisoning, according to new research into what killed the French emperor.Theories that Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic have abounded since 1961, when an analysis of his hair showed elevated levels of the toxic element.
But the latest review of the 1821 autopsy report just after he died concludes the official cause of death -- stomach cancer -- is correct.
The autopsy describes a tumor in his stomach that was 4 inches long. Comparing that description to modern cases, main author Dr. Robert M. Genta of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas and an international team of researchers surmised that a growth so extensive could not have been a benign stomach ulcer.
"I have never seen an ulcer of that size that is not cancer," said Genta, a professor of pathology and internal medicine.
Further analysis suggested that his stomach cancer had reached a stage that is virtually incurable even with modern medical technology. People with similar cancers today usually die within a year.
The autopsy and other historical sources indicate that the rotund French leader had lost about 20 pounds in the last few months of his life, another sign of stomach cancer. His stomach also contained a dark material similar to coffee grounds, a telltale sign of extensive bleeding in the digestive tract. The massive bleeding was likely the immediate cause of death, Genta and his colleagues concluded.
I wish I'd seen this article when it came out, right in the midst of my unit on the French Revolution and Napoleon. It would have made a real interesting tidbit to hare with my students.
Posted by: Greg at
10:55 AM
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