"This is a sad part of our heritage. . . . We're deeply apologetic. ... It was a terrible thing. . . . There's no one sitting in the United States in the year 2005, hopefully, who would ever, in a million years, defend the practice," said Joe Polizzotto, general counsel of Lehman Brothers.

Polizzotto initially claimed that company research had, so far, produced no concrete information that founding brothers Mayer, Henry and Emanuel Lehman had profited from slavery. But, under questioning from aldermen, he said, "It is virtually inconceivable, given the fact that they owned slaves that were in the business that the company didn't profit in some way, shape or form, from the institution of slavery. We appreciate that fact. We know that," the general counsel said.

The 1927 disaster displaced, at least temporarily, nearly 1 percent of the nation's people, many of them sharecroppers. One effect was a spike in the Great Migration of rural black Southerners to Pittsburgh and other Northern industrial cities, which involved resettlement over decades of at least 5 million individuals.

Other calamities have uprooted Americans on a massive scale, most notably the 350,000 Okies who ventured west in the 1930s when their farmland turned barren in the Depression Dustbowl. Disasters such as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake or the Chicago fire of 1871 destroyed tens of thousands of homes, although residents of those cities didn't necessarily leave town.

The Army commemorated the day with a private Mass Sunday morning honouring the soldiers killed in the coup that overthrew Socialist President Salvador Allende and brought Pinochet to power. However the elderly former dictator, who is suffering from a variety of health problems and is facing trial for several human rights cases and acts of corruption, was not present.

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In the basement of the Civil District Courthouse on Poydras Street, three blocks from the Superdome, water has lapped over 20% of the 60,000 leather-bound books of the New Orleans Notarial Archives. The books contain the records of all property transfers in the city that have occurred in the modern era.

"We don't have deeds in New Orleans," said Stephen P. Bruno, custodian of the archives. "Whatever our records say, that's who owns the property."

Farther down Poydras Street, at the Amoco Building, the Notarial Archives maintains an equally large collection of older documents, some dating to the 1700s.

Many are handwritten, such as a power of attorney signed by the pirate Jean Lafitte giving his brother Pierre authority to demand reparations from Washington for damages suffered in the War of 1812.

"It's the single most perfect collection of these documents in North America," said historian Thomas Ingersoll of Ohio State University, who used them to prepare his thesis on 19th century slavery.

The city is preparing for a massive exodus of paper, trucking out valuable documents so they can be freeze-dried and cleaned by hand.

But for most of the paper blown through broken windows in the hurricane or flushed out into the city by the flood, there is little hope.

See also:"Iraq War Costs Now Exceed Vietnam's." Excerpt: The 84-page report,"The Iraq Quagmire: The Mounting Costs of the Iraq War and the Case for Bringing the Troops Home," says that the total bill for the war in Iraq has come to some $204 billion, or an average of $727 per U.S. citizen, not counting an additional $45 billion which is currently pending before Congress.

The report, which comes as Congress braces itself for the multi-billion costs of cleaning up after the unprecedented devastation inflicted this week on New Orleans and the broader Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina, also does not include at least another $25 billion request that the Pentagon is believed to be preparing to sustain operations in Iraq and Afghanistan into next year.

Released by two think tanks, the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the International Relations Center, that have strongly opposed the Iraq war, the new study is their third since mid-2004 to attempt a comprehensive accounting of the human, social, and international – as well as financial – costs of the war on the U.S. and Iraq.

The new report also includes a plan by IPS Fellow Phyllis Bennis for an"immediate and complete withdrawal of troops, military contractors and U.S. corporations backing the U.S. occupation."

The plan calls for U.S. troops to cease all offensive actions, withdraw from population centers, and redeploy to Iraq's borders to help Iraqi forces secure them, and for Washington to reduce the size of its embassy in Baghdad, and announce that it has no intention of maintaining either permanent bases in Iraq or control of its oil.

Similar steps have recently also been advocated by conservative critics of the war, such as the former director of the National Security Agency, ret. Gen. William Odom.

Bennis also called for Washington to negotiate with Iraqi insurgents over the mechanisms of withdrawal and endorse talks between them and U.S.-backed Iraqi leaders.

The Pentagon, according to the report, is currently spending $5.6 billion per month on operations in Iraq, an amount that exceeds the average cost of $5.1 billion per month (in real 2004 dollars) for U.S. operations in Vietnam between 1964 and 1972.

"While fewer troops are in Iraq, the weapons they use are more expensive and they are paid more than their counterparts who served in Vietnam," according to the report, which noted that at current rates, Washington could spend more than $700 billion over 10 years – $100 billion more than the total cost of the Vietnam War.

Almost all our old houses have gone. This isn't just a question of financial loss, this is our history that has disappeared," said Helen Sirmon, an elementary school teacher who took her classes on tours of Biloxi's historic buildings.

"We will try to keep our past alive by talking about it, but it isn't the same as being able to see it. This is going to impoverish our children," she said.

The Green Oaks, billed as the oldest remaining beachfront residence in Mississippi, is just a pile of rubble. Beauvoir, the final home of Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, is demolished.

The Davis home, built in 1854, was consumed by the storm surge. The Old Brick House, a historical museum, is gutted. Tullis-Toledano Manor, built in 1856 and lovingly restored after the killer 1969 Hurricane Camille, is a splintered jumble.

In the basement of the Civil District Courthouse on Poydras Street, three blocks from the Superdome, water has lapped over 20% of the 60,000 leather-bound books of the New Orleans Notarial Archives. The books contain the records of all property transfers in the city that have occurred in the modern era.

"We don't have deeds in New Orleans," said Stephen P. Bruno, custodian of the archives. "Whatever our records say, that's who owns the property."

Farther down Poydras Street, at the Amoco Building, the Notarial Archives maintains an equally large collection of older documents, some dating to the 1700s.

Many are handwritten, such as a power of attorney signed by the pirate Jean Lafitte giving his brother Pierre authority to demand reparations from Washington for damages suffered in the War of 1812.

"It's the single most perfect collection of these documents in North America," said historian Thomas Ingersoll of Ohio State University, who used them to prepare his thesis on 19th century slavery.
...
It took a week and a half for workers to begin the long process of salvaging the Notarial Archives. The basement room had filled with about 6 inches of water and smelled like a sewer.
...
On Canal Street, the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park is facing a similar problem. It escaped the flood, but the humidity is threatening old sheet music, early manuscripts and other artifacts, center spokesman Bill Line said.

Bruno and his colleagues have hired Chicago-based Munters Corp. to save the Notarial Archives. Beginning today, all the books will be removed from the basement to a climate-controlled storage facility to prevent mildew damage. The sodden books from the lowest shelf will be trucked out of the city and flown to Chicago for safekeeping and repair work.

Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian who is also Thompson's official biographer, writes that a Feb. 16 note may be Thompson's final written words, The Associated Press reports.

It reads:

"No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun - for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax - This won't hurt."
...
Brinkley writes in the magazine, on newsstands today, "February was always the cruelest month for Hunter S. Thompson. An avid NFL fan, Hunter traditionally embraced the Super Bowl in January as the high-water mark of his year. February, by contrast, was doldrums time."

The Denver Postreported Wednesday that a faculty review committee had examined and rejected charges that Churchill made inaccurate statements in the preface to a book by Leah Kelly, his ex-wife. Colorado officials are not commenting on or releasing any committee findings. But the Post article reported that the chair of the faculty panel wrote to Churchill last week, as follows: “I have concluded that these allegations, even if true, do not represent research misconduct. It is not the function of the committee to address any inaccuracies that may exist in a faculty member’s writings.”

The faculty committee could recommend that Churchill lose his tenure. But last week’s determination was the second in which Churchill has been cleared of charges. Last month, the panel rejected accusations that Churchill fabricated his ethnicity (he says that he is Native American, but many dispute that or say that his Indian ties are minimal).

The anniversary of the "Monkey Trial" provides an occasion to remember that it didn't really settle what we assume it settled. Popular memory of the trial, reinforced by the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind, made it seem that evolution was triumphant and fundamentalism vanquished, but in fact the result was much more ambiguous. Anti-Darwinism didn't die in Dayton, Tenn., in July 1925—it just retreated temporarily from the national scene, to which it has now returned.

Like the 1960s, the 1920s witnessed a series of culture wars. After decades in which liberalism and science had gained popular acceptance, a backlash arrived in the '20s. A revived Ku Klux Klan swelled to 5 million members. Feminism, having secured women's suffrage, stalled. The 18th Amendment, passed in 1919, prohibited the sale of alcohol. Congress restricted the immigration of peoples deemed undesirable.

Evolution marked another front in these fights. Although Darwin's theories had met fierce resistance when first proposed in 1859, in time they secured general approval. Even many Christian leaders, once hostile to evolution, endorsed the theory—one of several trends that split many Protestant denominations into modern (or liberal) and fundamentalist camps. "By the time of World War I," wrote the historian William Leuchtenberg, "an attack on Darwin seemed as unlikely as an attack on Copernicus."

But attack the fundamentalists did. Advocating a literal reading of the book of Genesis, they attained political power in many states, particularly in the rural South and Great Plains. In Tennessee, Oklahoma, and Mississippi, they passed laws forbidding the teaching of evolution.

Arinc stated that national parliaments were not the places where decisions on historical events can be taken, and added that parliaments should in fact exert efforts to create and improve atmosphere of friendship and cooperation among countries and peoples.

The hurricane and subsequent flooding damaged historical landmarks and wiped away at least some of the precious remnants of Louisiana’s time under French rule. But officials say many of the buildings that make up one of the most culturally influential cities in America appear to have survived intact, leaving them hopeful that restoration would be possible.

“There has not been a concerted effort or assessment of the damage to historic and cultural sites that I know of,” says John Hildreth, chief of the southern region for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. “I have seen some reports but it is scattered sketchy information on particular institutions. It’s all just kind of sketchy right now. The human element is just the priority right now.”

The American Association of Museums, for instance, has compiled a detailed rundown for New Orleans and the nearby Gulf region on their website, listing individual cultural institutions and providing the best sourcing and information they can muster on the fate of their collections, staff and structures.

In making the announcement, Dr. Thibodeau said, "As we move forward to making the Electronic Records Archives a reality, it is more important than ever that we reach out to obtain advice from a broad spectrum of experts. The Advisory Committee will provide an ongoing structure for bringing together experts in computer science and information technology, archival science and records management, information science, the law, history, genealogy, and education."

The ERA system will be a comprehensive, systematic, and dynamic means for storing, preserving, and accessing virtually any kind of electronic record, free from dependence on any specific hardware or software. ERA, when operational, will make it easy for NARA customers to find the records they want and easy for the National Archives to deliver those records in formats suited to customers' needs.

Willa Cather won the Pulitzer Prize and appeared on the cover of Time magazine when that meant something. She gained critical and eventual commercial success for books like "O Pioneers!" and "My Antonia" and wrote one of the great books of the 20th century, "Death Comes for the Archbishop." Her work is secure in the American literary canon.


And yet she is a faint name on academic reading lists today. High school and college students usually make her passing acquaintance and then move briskly to Zadie Smith. To many, she is dated and quaint, tied indelibly to the heroic idealism of the immigrant pioneer experience on the American Plains. What she is not in this postmodern world, aside from feminist dinner parties, is in play.


Tonight, PBS's "American Masters" reintroduces her to us in a 90-minute documentary, a solid, earnest effort written and co-produced by Christine Lesiak. Marcia Gay Harden is the voice of Cather and David Strathairn narrates each to good effect. The inevitable reenactment scenes from her novels are bearable. This show will be best appreciated by those already familiar with Cather because there is a fair amount of inside baseball about her writing that may flummox newcomers.

TELEVISION REVIEW WILLA CATHER: THE ROAD IS ALL ON: WGBH, CH. 2, AS PART OF"AMERICAN MASTERS" TIME: TONIGHT, 9-10:30

The discovery was made by an international team of researchers including the University of Pennsylvania Museum’s archaeochemist Dr. Patrick McGovern of MASCA (Museum Applied Science Centre for Archaeology). The discovery is the first direct chemical evidence for early fermented beverages in ancient Chinese culture, broadening our understanding of the key technological and cultural roles that fermented beverages played in China.

The letter, dated July 23, 1942, is to Robert Patterson, undersecretary of war, and is found in Patterson's papers. At the bottom of a memo about food supplies is a handwritten note:

These people are not 'internees' — they are under no suspicion for the most part and were moved largely because we felt we could not control our own white citizens in California.

In the first part of that statement, Robinson says, McCloy is admitting "that military necessity was not the primary reason for mass evacuation of Japanese Americans." Robinson discounts the second part because there is little evidence that Japanese Americans needed to be put in camps in order to be protected.


Robinson discusses the subject here and here .

This means it can be applied to documents without fear of washing away soluble scribbles, causing books to swell or ruining leather bindings.

The researchers, who have applied for a patent, say the bath could help to protect kilometres of ancient documents and manuscripts throughout the world's libraries for many years to come. They think it should be ready for commercial use in a few years' time.

Conservators have long known that there is something corrosive about inks from the Middle Ages. Many documents, from sketches by famous artists to political treaties, have fallen apart over time, with holes appearing where the ink used to be.

To tackle this problem, Jana Kolar, head of the InkCor project based at the National and University Library of Slovenia in Ljubljana, and her colleagues sought to uncover the exact constituents of the inks.

Early analyses had indicated that medieval inks are often full of iron. Free atoms of this metal in the ink react with the air to create oxygen radicals, reactive atoms that break down cellulose, yellowing paper and making it brittle. To the horror of scholars, after hundreds of years this can cause the paper to fall apart.