By the time the Beatles landed in Pittsburgh in September 1964, the Fab Four had already charted an amazing 15 hits that year, starting in January with "I Want to Hold Your Hand."

It's no wonder you couldn't hear them singing over the screams of young girls at the sold-out Civic Arena.

The Rolling Stones' first local appearance was a different story altogether. In fact, we could have fought off this British Invasion with a couple of guys from the Elks Club. And, if you were recording a live album on June 17, 1964, at West View Park's Danceland, you could have done it without mixing down the audience.

"The applause was very little," recalls Dave Goodrich, a local music historian.

That was a fairly typical reaction to the Stones on the band's nine-city, 15-day tour of the States that summer. Although they had just sparked a minor riot at the "Ready Steady Go! Mod Ball" back in England, over here they had only...

Governments and the media were as complicit today in whipping up widespread public fears as they were in 18th-century England when so-called moral panics surfaced, according to an academic running a conference on the phenomenon.

University of Newcastle historian David Lemmings, one of three organisers of the two-day symposium Moral Panics: The Media and the Law, which opens today, said governments legitimated their authority with measures that set up anxiety about threats to moral and personal security.

Fear of terrorism, raised security consciousness and a premiers' meeting in Canberra yesterday to discuss anti-terrorism laws provided the elements of a modern-day moral panic, associate professor Lemmings said.

"Increasing surveillance laws and keeping people in jail for a period of time without charge; yes, of course I think that they're ratcheting up public anxiety to constitute their legitimate authority," he said.

In 18th-...

'PEOPLE don't know, they just don't know," says Laurence Rees, writer and producer of Auschwitz: The Nazis and the Final Solution. "And if they do know about the Holocaust, the folk memory is wrong, surrounded by caricatures."

Rees speaks as a biographer of the most evil place in the world. His acclaimed six-part documentary, first screened on the BBC earlier this year, comes to the ABC this week.

In the spring of 1940, Auschwitz was no more than a neat row upon row of abandoned huts, a dilapidated former Polish army barracks set around a huge horse-breaking yard.

At first, Poles were imprisoned and died in the camp, political prisoners seen as a threat to the German occupation. By the beginning of 1942, it was an industrial killing machine at the service of the modern German state, the site for the greatest mass murder in history.

"People think there was one carpet-biting loony who ordered a load of robots to work...

I am queuing outside a portable toilet behind a Viking and a Roman legionary. The air is thick with the fatty smell of spit-roasts from a nearby Norman encampment. Over the sound system, an excited narrator gives a real-time, blow-by-blow account of the action unfolding on a grassy arena, where a division of British light infantry is facing a French line at the battle of Salamanca - originally fought in 1812. Acrid gunpowder smoke wafts over a crowd of wet onlookers. A woman in a heavy velvet dress stumbles out of the toilet, soaked hem held aloft, grumbling that Portaloos were clearly not designed for 15th-century ladies.

Such inevitable anachronisms are the bread and butter of historical re-enactors - and nowhere are they more conspicuous than at the Festival of History, Britain's annual jamboree. This year's event, held over a soggy mid-August weekend on the grounds of a Northamptonshire stately home, gathered almost 1,000 re-enactors and attracted 17,000 visitors,...

Are Italy's artistic and architectural treasures too precious to remain outside in streets and piazzas, at the mercy of vandals? It may sound extreme to suggest that cities such as Florence and Rome could be stripped bare in the future, their historic statues and monuments moved indoors and copies put in their place, but calls are growing for a debate on whether many of the most vulnerable works of art should be removed from public locations for their own safety.

Concern is mounting after a recent spate of attacks on some of Italy's finest monuments. A man snapped off the hand of the giant, 16th-century statue of Neptune by baroque sculptor Bartolomeo Ammanati in Florence's Piazza della Signoria while trying to climb it to have his photograph taken.

In Rome a stone bee was lopped off a fountain sculpted by Pietro Bernini in 1644. Also in the capital, a crucial piece of the Navicella fountain produced by Andrea Sansovino in 1518 was broken into bits. City...

Sixty years after the battleship Yamato was sunk in the East China Sea during World War II, the popularity of a new museum dedicated to the vessel has far exceeded expectations, attracting nearly 700,000 visitors since its opening in April.

A magnificent 26.3-meter-long model of the Yamato holds pride of place in the Yamato Museum in Kure, although there is much more to see. Among the 120,000 items in the museum are a Zero fighter, a submarine, a Kaiten suicide torpedo and various types of ordnance.

Another attraction is the novel approach the museum has taken in focusing on the high technology and craftsmanship required to build the 65,000-ton battleship, which was launched at Kure naval dockyards in 1940.

The Yamato was attacked and sunk on April 7, 1945 en route to Okinawa in what was in reality a suicide mission, taking the lives of about 3,000 crew members. Of the 260 crew members who survived, only about 30 are alive today. The ship now lies...

Full preservation of the last walled village in an urban area is out of the question because it is too dilapidated, the Urban Renewal Authority says.

A spokesman said this after eight of the remaining 13 owners of the 600-year -old Nga Tsin Wai village in Wong Tai Sin submitted a petition urging the government to press ahead with redevelopment.

"The village is derelict, with appalling hygiene conditions ... Apart from the Tin Hau temple and the entrance archway, there isn't anything else worth preserving," said the letter, presented to representatives of the authority, government and Wong Tai Sin District Council.
...
The Urban Renewal Authority said it was not a practical possibility. "This is no longer a conceptual argument. The reality is, we are unable to rebuild the whole village, it's too dilapidated," a spokesman said, but the authority had not yet reached a plan with Cheung Kong.

Valuable monuments such as the...

In the autumn of 1978, I arrived at Leeds University, already over- qualified in Dylanology. Another Bobsessive, I soon discovered, was living close by in our Headingley student ghetto, and he supplemented his grant by dealing Dylan bootlegs. One night he sold me a copy of an album that, according to the crudely stamped label, was a recording of Bob Dylan and The Hawks (later The Band) at the Royal Albert Hall on their notorious UK tour in May 1966. It was on these dates that Bob first appeared in Britain with an electric band. (His tour the previous spring, immortalised in the film Don't Look Back, was still solo Dylan, in protest mode, with just an acoustic guitar.)

The 1966 bootleg was not only of first-rate sound quality; it was also the most dramatic, confrontational concert I'd ever heard " and I was a regular at Clash gigs at the time. It remains, for me, the most exciting live album of all. Dylan, on that tour, split his audiences straight down the middle....

There is no more sensitive issue in Turkey's 20thcentury history. The country's most celebrated writer faces jail for mentioning it. But this weekend Bosphorus University plans to go ahead with a conference, on the fate of Turkish Armenians at the end of the Ottoman empire, that has been delayed for months after a government minister accused the university of treason.

The meeting will be the first to discuss the issue outside official control and will be closely watched for any hint that Turkey's democratic credentials fail to meet the standards expected of a candidate for European Union membership.

As it prepares to begin the long process of joining the EU, Ankara seems ready to address many contentious issues, such as Cyprus or the plight of the country's ethnic Kurds. But it appears paralysed on the question of the Armenians.

Armenia claims that 1.5m Armenians died as a result of genocide by Ottoman troops beginning in 1915, before the republic...