Samantha Levine, in a Special Issue of US News devoted to the history of exploration (Feb. 23, 2004):

There's the Magellan spacecraft, the first to thoroughly map Venus. There's a Magellan mutual fund, a Magellan healthcare insurance company, and dozens of other businesses and products all named in honor of the Portuguese explorer known as the first man to circumnavigate the globe. But that admiration may be misdirected. It seems that Ferdinand Magellan's slave, Enrique, was actually the first man to complete the circuit.

Enrique did not make the journey by choice, of course. Most likely born on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, Enrique was sold to Magellan in nearby Malacca in 1512, during one of the navigator's earlier voyages. When Magellan set off on his quest to find a passage through the Americas to the East Indies, Enrique was part of the crew, ending up back in Malacca nearly 10 years later. Having started far to the east, he thus completed his circumnavigation before anyone else aboard--let alone Magellan, who was killed in the Philippines and never made it home.

Worldview. Still, Magellan's tenacity--even fanaticism--vastly enlarged the world that Europeans knew. Laurence Bergreen, author of a new book about Magellan, Over the Edge of the World, says the difference between Christopher Columbus's jaunts across the Atlantic and Magellan's trip across the vast breadth of the Pacific was like the "difference between going to the moon and going to Mars." Along the way, Magellan discovered and somehow navigated the 330-mile labyrinth of fjords and bays we now call the Strait of Magellan and was the first to note the Pacific's critical trade winds. "This was the first modern voyage that gave us our sense of what the world was actually like," says Bergreen.

Guy Gugliotta, in the Wash Post (Feb. 16, 2004):

When it surfaced in 1957, it was too good to be true: a purported 15th-century world map depicting an island to the far west labeled Vinilandia Insula -- the fabled Vinland -- proof positive, it seemed, that Norse explorers had reached North America long before Columbus.

Thanks -- but no thanks -- the British Museum told the intermediary who offered to sell it to them. It's a phony.

Later that year, however, New Haven, Conn., book dealer Lawrence Witten bought the map and an accompanying medieval manuscript for his wife, paying $3,500. Soon after, he visited Yale University Library to view a seemingly unrelated manuscript fragment purchased by Thomas E. Marston, the library's curator of medieval and renaissance literature. Witten asked to borrow it.

That night, Marston got an excited call from Witten. Marston's manuscript, Witten's manuscript and the map were all written in the same hand, Witten said. Furthermore, worm holes in all three works matched up. They apparently had been bound together, with Marston's manuscript as the meat in the sandwich. The map had to be real.

Thus began the affair of the"Vinland Map," a 13-by-19-inch sheet of parchment depicting not only Vinland, but also remarkably detailed renderings of Iceland and, especially, of Greenland, which -- if the map is real -- is portrayed as an island for the first time in history.

Forty-five years after the map's"discovery," its authenticity remains a subject of fierce debate. In the last two months, the journal Analytical Chemistry has published two articles by front-line combatants in the dispute.

One, by retired Smithsonian research chemist Jacqueline Olin, argued that the presence of anatase, or titanium oxide, in the ink did not mean the ink was modern, as had been alleged in earlier research. She suggested the ink may well have been medieval, made from a simple leaching process from the titanium-rich mineral ilmenite.

The other, by Kenneth Towe, also a retired Smithsonian analyst, reminded readers that the map's anatase had a crystalline structure identical to commercial anatase, a ubiquitous synthetic compound used to enhance colors in paint. Olin's analysis, Towe charged, was"a 'rehash' that is too often biased, misleading or inaccurate."

In May, Danish businessman Jorgen Siemonsen, a well-known debunker of Viking frauds who is agnostic on the map, will sponsor a debate between believers and skeptics as part of a conference on the"Dynamics of Northern Societies."

And coming a month later will be a book-length study titled"Maps, Myths and Men, the Story of the Vinland Map," which will make the case that it is a 1930s forgery by a German Jesuit priest intent on making the Nazis look like fools.

At this juncture, a preponderance of evidence points toward forgery, but the argument is not over, and the stakes are high. If it is authentic, the map is priceless, the oldest known depiction of North America. Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the map's current resting place, at one point reportedly insured it for $25 million. If it is not authentic, however, it is an amusing curiosity -- worth what Witten paid for it, perhaps, but not much more.

Bill McCleery, in the Indiannapolis Star (Feb. 16, 2004):

Twelve days after killing President Abraham Lincoln, assassin John Wilkes Booth was gunned down inside a Virginia barn.

Or was he?

Inspired by a coded message written in the late 1860s, a retired Indiana State University professor has spent decades searching for information about Lincoln's assassination. For Ray Neff, that odyssey culminated in the publication last year of his book,"Dark Union."

Neff's most sensational claim: that Booth escaped his pursuers and lived almost 20 more years after killing Lincoln. The dead man purported by authorities to be Booth was someone else, the book claims.

Booth, Neff maintains, fled overseas to India and assumed the identity of John Byron Wilkes, a man who lived in Terre Haute and whose personal information Booth supposedly purchased. Among the evidence cited by the book is a copy of Wilkes' will that names friends and relatives of Booth as beneficiaries.

"Dark Union," written with co-author Leonard Guttridge, suggests that conspirators -- who originally plotted to kidnap Lincoln -- extended beyond Confederates embittered by the Civil War. It also included northerners enriching themselves through a food-for-cotton trade scheme, the authors claim. And, they add, it included radicals from Lincoln's Republican Party opposed to the president's hints of a lenient reconstruction of the South.

"We don't have all the answers," said Neff, 80."But we do have a lot of answers to a lot of things."

Editorial in the NYT (Feb. 13, 2004):

The History Channel, an entertainment outlet with a serious name to live up to, has finally agreed to reconsider its"documentary" charging that Lyndon Johnson conspired to have President John Kennedy assassinated. It's about time.

The channel initially promoted the show and its ludicrous accusation by darkly announcing that"the roots of the crime lie buried deep in the heart of Texas and revolve around" President Johnson. The show featured the freewheeling imaginings of Barr McClellan, a retired Texas lawyer whose book demonizing Johnson is rooted in supposed confidences from sources who are now conveniently dead. The book is rich in patently unhistorical touches, insisting that Johnson was at a shadowy meeting on the eve of the assassination with Richard Nixon, J. Edgar Hoover and two Texas oilmen. This is the stuff not of history, but of the Texas conspiratorial satires of the late Richard Condon.

A demand to set the record straight was understandably pressed by the late president's outraged relatives and colleagues. This issue is about fairness and common sense, not the freedom to broadcast. After the initial controversy, the channel admitted it had failed to"make it apparent that the material presented in this program is a theory." The program was one of several taking up unproven but titillating conspiracy speculations, from the Mafia to Cuba; the channel insisted that some deserved"public debate" and that there had never been"one clear-cut finding." This stance seems to equate any and all bits of what-if fantasizing with the Warren Commission's lengthy inquiry and firm conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the murderer.

After public pressure, the channel is now pursuing an independent review by three respected historians. The History Channel's reputation, as much as Johnson's, is in urgent need of this corrective. The program has already generated a flood of truly misinformed complaints and accusations for the Johnson presidential library. In clinging to his harebrained narrative, Mr. McClellan admits that he dabbled in"faction": fictional projections. That's the last thing the History Channel needs to stand for.

From NPR's Day to Day (Feb. 11, 2004):

The journals of Lewis and Clark record that on this day in 1805, the Shoshone woman Sacagawea, who, with her French-Canadian husband, was helping guide the expedition--she gave birth. Officially, the only birth noted by the Corps of Discovery, though some Native Americans have claimed that some of the explorers, including the leaders, fathered other children with tribal women. Historians don't know. But with the Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebrations, people have all sorts of questions. From South Dakota Public Radio, Brian Bull reports.

Unidentified Voice: It is a beautiful evening.

BRIAN BULL reporting:

At the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center in Sioux City, Iowa, visitors watch robotic figures of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark mourn the loss of companion Sergeant Floyd.

Unidentified Voice: You spend months thinking of everything you can possibly need on an expedition, but somehow you're still unprepared for moments like this.

BULL: But Lewis and Clark were prepared for meeting and consorting with members of the opposite sex. One encounter was recorded by Clark in November, 1805, read here by an actor.

Unidentified Actor: An old woman and wife to a chief of the Chinooks came and made a camp near ours. She brought with her six young squaws, I believe, for the purpose of gratifying the passions of the men in our party. Those people appear to view sensuality as a necessary evil and do not appear to abhor it as a crime in the unmarried state.

Ms. MARCIA PULL (Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center): They were young men, they were full of passion. They had to be full of passion.

BULL: Marcia Pull, assistant director of the center, says while some tourists are shocked upon hearing about the explorers' sex lives, she says it makes for good history.

Ms. PULL: People are much more interesting with all of their, shall we say--I'm not sure--their imperfections, perhaps, is one way of put--but we're all human beings. And I think that tells us more about who these people were....

Professor BRAD TENNANT (Presentation College): If a person had intercourse with a woman, and then that woman would have intercourse with her husband, the power from one person to the next would be transferred to pass on that ability to be good hunters, be good providers. And here you have this new group of people who are seen as being very special, as having big medicine.

BULL: Indians were especially taken with Clark's slave York, whose dark skin and physique suggested very big medicine. One Arikara warrior had York spend a night with his wife and sat outside the lodge to keep the two from being interrupted.

But there were misunderstandings. In November 1804, Sergeant John Ordway's affair with an Indian woman nearly ended in tragedy.

Prof. TENNANT: If the women engaged in sexual relations unbeknownst to their husbands, they could be kicked out of the community, they might even be physically punished. In the case of John Ordway, when the husband returned and found Ordway with the woman, the woman was actually stabbed several times.

BULL: Clark ordered Ordway to give the husband some trinkets, then told the Indian couple to go home and make up. Later, while wintering with a Mandan in 1805, Clark described the buffalo dance used to transfer an elder's skill, say, to hunt, to a younger man through sex with his wife.

 

Jon Meacham, on MSNBC.com (Feb.

It is night, in a quiet, nearly deserted garden in Jerusalem. A figure is praying; his friends sleep a short distance away. We are in the last hours of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, in the spring of roughly the year 30, at the time of the Jewish feast of Passover. The country—first-century Judea, the early 21st's Israel—is part of the Roman Empire. The prefect, Pontius Pilate, is Caesar's ranking representative in the province, a place riven with fierce religious disputes. Jesus comes from Galilee, a kind of backwater; as a Jewish healer and teacher, he has attracted great notice in the years, months and days leading up to this hour.

His popularity seemed to be surging among at least some of the thousands of pilgrims gathered in the city for Passover. Crowds cheered him, proclaiming him the Messiah, which to first-century Jewish ears meant he was the"king of the Jews" who heralded the coming of the Kingdom of God, a time in which the yoke of Roman rule would be thrown off, ushering in an age of light for Israel. Hungry for liberation and deliverance, some of those in the teeming city were apparently flocking to Jesus, threatening to upset the delicate balance of power in Jerusalem.

The priests responsible for the Temple had an understanding with the Romans: the Jewish establishment would do what it could to keep the peace, or else Pilate would strike. And so the high priest, Caiaphas, dispatches a party to arrest Jesus. Guided by Judas, they find him in Gethsemane. In the language of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, there is this exchange:"Whom do you seek?" Jesus asks."Jesus of Nazareth." The answer comes quickly."I am he." ...

As moving as many moments in the film are, though, two NEWSWEEK screenings of a rough cut of the movie raise important historical issues about how Gibson chose to portray the Jewish people and the Romans. To take the film's account of the Passion literally will give most audiences a misleading picture of what probably happened in those epochal hours so long ago. The Jewish priests and their followers are the villains, demanding the death of Jesus again and again; Pilate is a malleable governor forced into handing down the death sentence.

In fact, in the age of Roman domination, only Rome crucified. The crime was sedition, not blasphemy--a civil crime, not a religious one. The two men who were killed along with Jesus are identified in some translations as "thieves," but the word can also mean "insurgents," supporting the idea that crucifixion was a political weapon used to send a message to those still living: beware of revolution or riot, or Rome will do this to you, too. The two earliest and most reliable extra-Biblical references to Jesus--those of the historians Josephus and Tacitus--say Jesus was executed by Pilate. The Roman prefect was Caiaphas' political superior and even controlled when the Jewish priests could wear their vestments and thus conduct Jewish rites in the Temple. Pilate was not the humane figure Gibson depicts. According to Philo of Alexandria, the prefect was of "inflexible, stubborn, and cruel disposition," and known to execute troublemakers without trial.

So why was the Gospel story--the story Gibson has drawn on--told in a way that makes "the Jews" look worse than the Romans? The Bible did not descend from heaven fully formed and edged in gilt. The writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John shaped their narratives several decades after Jesus' death to attract converts and make their young religion--understood by many Christians to be a faction of Judaism--attractive to as broad an audience as possible.

The historical problem of dealing with the various players in the Passion narratives is complicated by the exact meaning of the Greek words usually translated "the Jews." The phrase does not include the entire Jewish population of Jesus' day--to the writers, Jesus and his followers were certainly not included--and seems to refer mostly to the Temple elite. The Jewish people were divided into numerous sects and parties, each believing itself to be the true or authentic representative of the ancestral faith and each generally hostile to the others.

Given these rivalries, we can begin to understand the origins of the unflattering Gospel image of the Temple establishment: the elite looked down on Jesus' followers, so the New Testament authors portrayed the priests in a negative light. We can also see why the writers downplayed the role of the ruling Romans in Jesus' death. The advocates of Christianity--then a new, struggling faith--understandably chose to placate, not antagonize, the powers that were. Why remind the world that the earthly empire which still ran the Mediterranean had executed your hero as a revolutionary?

Sarah Ives, in National Geographic News (Feb. 5, 2004):

Two historians say African American slaves may have used a quilt code to navigate the Underground Railroad. Quilts with patterns named"wagon wheel,""tumbling blocks," and"bear's paw" appear to have contained secret messages that helped direct slaves to freedom, the pair claim.

Jacqueline Tobin and Raymond Dobard first posited the quilt code theory six years ago in their book Hidden in Plain View: A Secret Story of Quilts and the Underground Railroad, published in 1998. In the book, the authors chronicled the oral testimony of Ozella McDaniel, a descendant of slaves. McDaniel claims that her ancestors passed down the secret of the quilt code from one generation to the next.

The code"was a way to say something to a person in the presence of many others without the others knowing," said Dobard, a history professor at Howard University in Washington, D.C."It was a way of giving direction without saying, 'Go northwest.'"

In a series of discussions with Tobin and Dobard, McDaniel described the code: A plantation seamstress would sew a sampler quilt containing different quilt patterns. Slaves would use the sampler to memorize the code. The seamstress then sewed ten quilts, each composed of one of the code's patterns.

The seamstress would hang the quilts in full view one at a time, allowing the slaves to reinforce their memory of the pattern and its associated meaning. When slaves made their escape, they used their memory of the quilts as a mnemonic device to guide them safely along their journey, according to McDaniel.

The historians believe the first quilt the seamstress would display had a wrench pattern."It meant gather your tools and get physically and mentally prepared to escape the plantation," Dobard said. The seamstress would then hang a quilt with a wagon wheel pattern. This pattern told slaves to pack their belongings because they were about to go on a long journey.

Dobard said his favorite pattern was the bear's paw, a quilt he believes directed slaves to head north over the Appalachian Mountains."You were supposed to follow the literal footprints of the bear," Dobard said."Bears always go to water and berries and other natural food sources."

The last quilt had a tumbling blocks pattern, which Dobard described as looking like a collection of boxes."This quilt was only displayed when certain conditions were right. If, for example, there was an Underground Railroad agent in the area," Dobard said."It was an indication to pack up and go."

The quilt-code theory has met with controversy since its publication. Quilt historians and Underground Railroad experts have questioned the study's methodology and the accuracy of its findings.

Giles R. Wright, a New Jersey-based historian, points to a lack of corroborating evidence. Quilt codes are not mentioned in the 19th century slave narratives or 1930s oral testimonies of former slaves. Additionally, no original quilts remain.

"What I think they've done is they've taken a folklore and said it's historical fact," Wright said."They offer no evidence, no documentation, in support of that argument."

Elizabeth Olson, writing in the NYT (Feb. 7, 2004):

While on a trip to New York in 1895, Winston Churchill, then 21, wrote to his brother that the United States"is a very great country, my dear Jack," adding,"Not pretty or romantic but great and utilitarian."

His relationship with Americans, beginning with his Brooklyn-born mother, Jenny Jerome Churchill, was cultivated over visits spanning most of his life and made Churchill the best-known and most popular British leader on the American side of the Atlantic. That"mutual love affair," as his daughter Mary Soames, 81, called it, is being celebrated in a display being billed as the first comprehensive exhibition on Churchill in the United States. It opened on Thursday at the Library of Congress.

"Americans who admired him knew he liked them very much and set store by his relationship with America," Lady Soames said in an interview after viewing the exhibition on Wednesday, when President Bush also toured it.

More than 200 public and private letters, cartoons, photographs, maps, scripts and even a large globe used in plotting wartime strategy are in the exhibition, which focuses on Churchill's long and close ties with the United States.

Views of Churchill are more uniformly positive in the United States than in England, Lady Soames acknowledged. In 1954, Dwight Eisenhower said of Churchill:"He comes closest to fulfilling the requirement of greatness of any individual that I have met in my lifetime." A collection of video clips at the beginning of the exhibition features American politicians of nearly every stripe quoting Churchill — although not always precisely.

One reason for his grandfather's enduring popularity in the United States, said his grandson and namesake, Winston Churchill, also in Washington for the exhibition's opening, is that people still remember his stirring wartime broadcasts.

"It's partly a reflection that he put so much effort into crafting his speeches, and he did it himself," Mr. Churchill said."One of his private secretaries said he would invest up to one hour of preparation for every minute of delivery. That would mean a 30-minute speech took 30 hours of preparation."

For the exhibition, which runs through June 26, the Library of Congress scoured its collections and found 15 previously unknown Churchill letters.

In a newly unearthed letter from 1908, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that Churchill"is a rather cheap character" who, like his father, Randolph, displayed"levity, lack of sobriety, lack of permanent principle and an inordinate thirst for that cheap form of admiration which is given to notoriety."

In another letter being exhibited for the first time, from 1898, young Lieutenant Churchill wrote of being"thoroughly sickened of human blood" during the British Army's cavalry charge at Omdurman, Sudan. But he liked military life, not least because it gave him a chance to win fame and pave his way into politics. His service in the Boer War finally won him the celebrity he sought. After resigning his commission, he wrote dispatches for a London newspaper describing his daring escape from Boer captivity.

Dan Gardner, writing in the Ottawa Citizen (Feb. 2, 2004):

Torture is the most intimate of crimes. The torturer always gets close to his victim, physically and psychologically, sitting with him, like doctor and patient, sometimes drawing so near he can feel the heat of the victim's gasps. The torturer talks with his victim for hours and days. Even for weeks and months. He seeks to know the victim, to find his weaknesses and fears, to learn what will break this man. And he does all this while inflicting on the victim suffering so profound it can scar the soul.

How could anyone be capable of such a crime? They must be sick, we assume. Twisted. They must be empty of normal human feeling. They must be sadists. Hateful madmen. Monsters.

In reality, Arendt's dictum about the banality of evil applies particularly well to torturers. ...

It's hard to imagine a worse atrocity than that committed by German Reserve Police Battalion 101 during the Second World War: The shooting of 38,000 Jewish men, women and children. And yet when historian Christopher Browning studied the men who lined up their victims next to open pits and pulled the triggers, he found they were mostly middle-aged civilians. They had families. They had normal emotions. Hesitation and dissent were widespread, at first. When the battalion commander first told his men what they were to do, he expressed disgust; he had tears in his eyes.

These men were mass murderers, but they were also, as Mr. Browning put it in the title of his book, Ordinary Men.

John Steiner, a sociologist and Holocaust survivor, interviewed hundreds of Nazi concentration camp guards. He came to the same conclusion.

When Eichmann left his office and visited a concentration camp, he was sickened. So was SS chief Heinrich Himmler when he inspected a mass execution. In a private speech, Himmler implicitly acknowledged the ordinary human feelings of his officers and lauded them for pushing those feelings aside. "Most of you know what it means when 100 corpses are lying side by side, or 500, or 1,000. To have stuck it out and at the same time -- apart from exceptions caused by human weakness -- to have remained decent men, that has made us hard. This is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written."

Historian David Chandler studied the genocidal regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia and came to remarkably similar conclusions to those who studied Nazi atrocities. In particular, Mr. Chandler examined the operation of "S-21," a notorious Khmer Rouge torture facility, and found no evidence that those who ran the machinery of pain were in any sense abnormal.

In Greece, psychologist Mika Haritos-Fatouros studied a torture unit that operated under a military junta between 1967 and 1974. Again, she found nothing unusual about these men.

In Violence Workers, the three co-authors interviewed 14 Brazilian torturers and assassins. In summing up the results of this research, Philip Zimbardo echoes Mr. Browning's description of the Nazi death squad: "These are, essentially, ordinary men."

Mr. Conroy examined torture in Northern Ireland, Chicago and Israel and summed up his findings, and perhaps the whole subject, in the title of his book: Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People.