The National Archives and Records Administration is working to streamline the process of declassifying documents and has allowed few new withdrawals of documents from open shelves since a scandal over reclassified records hit the agency last spring, the United States archivist said on Wednesday.

The archives drew fire last April, when an audit report revealed that it had struck agreements with other federal agencies, such as the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, to remove and reclassify documents, leaving no record that they had once been freely available to researchers.

At the time, the archivist, Allen Weinstein, promised to stop making secret agreements on document withdrawals (The Chronicle, April 19). Mr. Weinstein, a former professor who had only recently become the archivist, also pledged to work with federal agencies on improving declassification practices. As part of that work, the archives started the National Declassification Initiative.

In a progress report released on Wednesday, Mr. Weinstein said that only seven documents had been withdrawn from open shelves since April 26, and the withdrawals are all noted in open files. One of those documents was later declassified and put back on the shelf for public access, according to a news release.

Watered down and designed to offend no one, critics say, high school textbooks' treatment of Sept. 11, 2001, show all too well the difficulties of depicting an event teetering between history and the news.

The rule of thumb among educators is that most editions of history textbooks last five to 10 years before a school system replaces them. By that formula, it's reasonable to assume that plenty of students are studying from books that deal with the events of 9/11 and its five-year aftermath. The significance of this is that an event's treatment in the news changes daily, but a textbook's handling of it can become the interpretation of record for a generation.

ut how to write about something that hasn't reached its conclusion? Or about something so politically and culturally charged that any interpretation is bound to meet objections?

"To be honest, I would say that writing about 9/11 isn't all that different from other emotionally and politically charged events, such as the Civil War, Pearl Harbor, the Vietnam War and so forth," Lizabeth Cohen says in an e-mail.

One of the authors of the high school-level "The Brief American Pageant," Cohen acknowledges that it is challenging to write about something everyone still remembers vividly. But even events from the distant past still stir strong opinions, she says. ...

James W. Loewen, author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your High School History Textbook Got Wrong," says the history books' treatment of 9/11 is in step with everything else wrong with textbooks: It's boring.

"One of the reasons that American history textbooks are so boring is that they don't really have a storyline," he says.

It's all facts and no analysis. "The books don't treat the question `Why?'" he says. "For example, why did the terrorists attack the U.S. - why not Sweden? That's a reasonable question."...

"The President is the sole organ of the nation in its external relations, and its sole representative with foreign nations," according to a statement made in 1800 by John Marshall.

This so-called"sole organ" doctrine has frequently been invoked by the executive branch"to define presidential power broadly in foreign relations and national security, including assertions of an inherent executive power that is not subject to legislative or judicial constraints," writes constitutional scholar Louis Fisher in a new Law Library of Congress study.

"When read in context, however, Marshall's speech does not support an independent, extra-constitutional or exclusive power of the President in foreign relations."

"The concept of an Executive having sole power over foreign relations borrows from other sources, including the British model of a royal prerogative," Fisher concludes.

Fisher's analysis of the sole organ doctrine is the first in a series of new studies of inherent presidential power prepared at the request of Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV). A copy was obtained by Secrecy News.

See"The 'Sole Organ' Doctrine" by Louis Fisher, Law Library of Congress, Studies on Presidential Power in Foreign Relations, Study No. 1, August 2006.

The South Korean government said Thursday it has to figure out China's official position on Korea's ancient kingdoms, especially Koguryo and Balhae, before deciding on any diplomatic countermeasures to Beijing's alledged move to incorporate them into its own history.

A state-funded Chinese research center, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) has argued that Koguryo (37 B.C.-A.D.668) and its successor Balhae were vassal states of China's ancient central government.

South Korean media and scholars say the Chinese government has hired history experts to systemically distort the history of the Korean kingdoms in case territorial disputes flare up after the possible collapse of North Korea, or if the communist country is merged with South Korea.


"It is too early to conclude that the distorted view of history held by the CASS reflects the Chinese government's official stance," a Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity. "The (South Korean) government will make a formal response when it becomes China's official position."

He added that Beijing is believed to be abiding by its 2004 agreement with Seoul not to take any government-level action on the Koguryo issue.

At that time, the Chinese Foreign Ministry's Web site described the Koguryo Kingdom as part of China's history, and relations with South Korea deteriorated to their lowest ebb since the establishment of diplomatic ties in 1992.

China's state media also trumpeted the significance of the addition of Koguryo relics in the country to the list of World Heritage sites.

After weeks of tension, the two sides managed to reach a provisional agreement to handle the issue through academic research.

Seoul's wait-and-see attitude on the sensitive history issue, however, drew harsh bipartisan criticism at home.

The ruling and opposition parties labeled China's move as a "grave concern" that undermined the identity of the Korean people.

"The government is taking a lukewarm response to China's history distortions, which are tantamount to an act of invasion," Rep. Kim Yong-kap of the main opposition Grand National Party, said.

Rep. Choi Sung of the ruling Uri Party said that, "We are paying heed to the fact that China is distorting the root of our history."

Vice President Dick Cheney is finally getting the book-length biography treatment-and he's playing along. We hear that the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes is hot on the case and plans to publish a bio titled, naturally enough, Cheney as early as next spring. "I'm not a historian," Hayes fesses up. "I approached it like a long magazine article." A very long article, considering Cheney's been in the public eye for some five decades. "It's a pretty unique perspective of American history over the last 50 years," Hayes says of Cheney, who worked in three administrations before being tagged by George W. Bush as veep. As is Bush with biographer Robert Draper, we hear Cheney, his staff, and friends are cooperating. So what's surprised Hayes so far? Cheney isn't just a hawk but a strong advocate for the "softer side of the Bush doctrine, advocacy of democracy." Also: "He's much more a normal person than his public persona." And maybe one reason that Cheney floundered at Yale: Pals told Hayes that he "pined" for his girlfriend Lynne, now Mrs. Cheney.

Mention the name Bangalore, and sprawling high-tech campuses of a saffron-scented Silicon Valley come to mind. In short, "New India." By year's end, however, Bangalore could go the way of Bombay, changing its name from an international totem to a Jeopardy question. What is the city formerly known as Bangalore: Bengaluru. Or perhaps Bengalooru.

The trend that began vexing cartographers a decade ago when Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, and Calcutta became Kolkata has only gained speed. Last month, the "French Riviera of the East" decided it wasn't so French after all, dropping its Francophile name, Pondicherry, for Puducherry.

In part, India is merely sweeping clean the last corners of colonialism - offending few beyond upper-class English-speaking Indians and outsiders who have wrapped India's identity in its anglicized names. In part, its politicians are using words as a tool - sometimes more to divide than to unite.

But underneath all is a new and unprecedented Indian self-assurance. More than half a century after the British left, India is making a statement that can be seen from politics to its economics: We are now a power in our own right, and the world must come to accept us on our own terms - whether that is nuclear weapons or a high-tech hub that might sound like baby talk to the foreign ear.

"This is a particular conjunction that is happening," says sociologist T.K. Oommen, citing changes in the Indian culture, polity, and economy. "We are gaining in confidence."

The changes sometimes take the guise of reclaiming historic names hopelessly mangled by colonial conquerors. Pondicherry was the best that the Gallic lips could do with Puducherry, and the British simply hit the eject button with Thiruvananthapuram, instead opting for the less tongue-twisting Trivandrum.

Advocates for Bengaluru say this is the case with Bangalore, where the cost of changing names would not be huge, the state chief minister has said. In fact, the local-language press had difficulty even reporting the proposed change: Bangalore is Bengaluru in the local tongue, so the papers duly pronounced that Bengaluru was changing its name to Bengaluru.

In some respects, the revisions are hardly surprising. From Myanmar (still widely known as Burma) to Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon), newly independent nations frequently find colonial names as ill-fitting as breeches and pointy admiral's hats. What is curious in India's case is that it took 50 years for the purge to start in earnest.

It is a measure of the admiration for Britain that many of India's early leaders shared, says Mr. Oommen - as well as a sign of how much the atmosphere has begun to shift to a new sense of self-worth.

What has emerged is also the logical culmination of a decision by India's first prime minister. In 1956, Jawaharlal Nehru decided that the country's states should be organized along linguistic lines, essentially creating more than a dozen nationlets within India - each with its own distinct language, culture, and recipe for curry.

For example, Bangalore is the capital of Karnataka, where the local language is Kannada - part of India's mix of 23 official languages, 800 unofficial languages, and an estimated 2,000 dialects. "If in a state that was made to preserve a certain language you can't even call the capital by the name in Kannada," there is something amiss, says Ramachandra Guha, a historian who lives in Bangalore.

Yet some of the other changes take a different tenor. India has slowly found firmer footing as a nation after the tumult of partition with Pakistan and the uncertainty caused by former leader Indira Gandhi's authoritarian rule in the 1970s and '80s. In this collective exhale, new and not always inclusive forms of national and regional politics have found space to expand.

Foremost among them has been more extremist strains of Hindutva: the doctrine that India - with an 80 percent Hindu majority - is a Hindu nation and should start acting like it. Some nationalists argue it's time to strip India's place names down to the studs. "The culture of India is not 200 years old," says Santosh Gangwar, a member of India's lower house of parliament, the Lok Sabha. "Our culture and heritage is more than 5,000 years old."

By this measure, he says, Delhi is Indraprasth - harking back its name in the Hindu epic, the Mahabharata. Even "India" is not beyond revision. After all, India's namesake - the Indus River - has been in Pakistan since partition. Mr. Gangwar suggests Hindustan. Others favor Bharat.

The past is not all that stirs would-be name-changers, though. The faceless forces of a more globalized future, turning India into nothing but a long succession of McDonald's and KFCs, also give pause. The switch to Mumbai in 1995 was largely the work of Shiv Sena, an ultraconservative party founded on the idea that within the state of Maharashtra (where Mumbai is the capital), Maharashtrians should have more rights than others.

"In some cases, [the changes] reflect local paranoia that they will be swept away by outsiders," says Mr. Guha.

There are shades of this discontent in Bangalore, even though the change to Bengaluru has been promoted not by right-wing politicians, but by an award-winning local writer. Forgotten amid the tumult of the New India is a different Bangalore, author U.R. Ananthamurthy laments. By some estimates, less than 30 percent of the population speaks Kannada.

"There are actually two towns here: Bangalore and Bengaluru," says Professor Ananthamurthy, noting the split between the Kannada-speaking locals and outsiders drawn by start-ups and call centers.

"The elite classes have to realize that there is also a Bengaluru," he adds, suggesting that the correct spelling should actually be Bengalooru. "The [name change] is a step towards making visitors come to terms with the place."

Occasionally, however, Indians themselves can't agree on which name and whose version of history to use. In 2000, the people of the hill country northeast of Delhi celebrated the creation of their new state - only to discover that the federal government had chosen to name it Uttaranchal.

The women and students who had lined the streets calling for a new state had united under the banner of Uttarakhand. Even the holy texts of the Hindu faith, perhaps written as early as 2,500 B.C., speak of the area as Uttarakhand.

But in a country where every state is a potential breakaway republic, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) worried that the name Uttarakhand might only encourage the state's sense of itself as separate and unique. So it settled on a new creation with no history outside the modern Indian nation, and Uttaranchal was born.

To Sanjay Kothiyal, it was nothing less than domestic colonialism. "It hurt the people as a whole that they changed the name for which people were fighting," he says.

With a different party in power, the name is returning to its ancestral antecedent. Says Mr. Kothiyal: "This is a question of pride."

Scientists think they can now write a reasonably comprehensive history of the occupation of the British Isles.

It stretches from 700,000 years ago and the first known settlers at Pakefield in Suffolk, through to the most recent incomers just 12,000 years or so ago.

The evidence comes from the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project.

This five-year undertaking by some of the UK's leading palaeo-experts has reassessed a mass of scientific data and filled in big knowledge gaps with new discoveries.

The project's director, Professor Chris Stringer from London's Natural History Museum, came to the British Association Science Festival to outline some of the key findings.

What has been uncovered has been a tale of struggle: "In human terms, Britain was the edge of the Universe," he said.

The project has established that a see-sawing climate and the presence of intermittent land access between Britain and what is now continental Europe allowed only stuttering waves of immigration.

And it has extended the timing of what was regarded to be the earliest influx by 200,000 years.

More than 30 flint tools unearthed in a fossil-rich seam at Pakefield, Lowestoft, on the east coast, represent the oldest, unequivocal evidence of humans in northern Europe.

But the story from then on is largely one of failed colonisation, as retreating and advancing ice sheets at first exposed the land and then covered it up.

"Britain has suffered some of the most extreme climate changes of any area in the world during the Pleistocene," said Professor Stringer.

"So places in say South Wales would have gone from something that looked like North Africa with hippos, elephants, rhinos and hyenas, to the other extreme: to an extraordinary cold environment like northern Scandinavia."

German spies hid messages in drawings of models wearing the latest fashions in an attempt to outwit Allied censors during World War II, according to British security service files.

Nazi agents relayed sensitive military information using the dots and dashes of Morse code incorporated in the drawings. But British secret service officials were aware of the ruse and issued censors with a code-breaking guide to intercept them.

The book -- part of a batch of British secret service files made public for the first time -- included an example of a code hidden in a drawing of three young models. "Heavy reinforcements for the enemy expected hourly," reads a message disguised as a pattern in the stitching of their gowns, hats and blouses.

The files reveal other ingenious ways spies tried to send coded notes through the post. Invisible ink, pinpricks and indentations on letters were all used to convey details of troop movements, bombing raids and ship-building.

Spies hid codes in sheet music, descriptions of chess moves and symbols disguised as handwriting. Postcards were spliced, stuffed with wafer-thin notes and resealed.

Agents also used secret alphabets and messages that could only be read by taking the first letter of certain words. The capture of German agents in 1942 uncovered two such codes that British intelligence had failed to crack, the files reveal.

Britain's wartime spy chief David Petrie described the failure as "somewhat disturbing." The code was used in a letter from "Hubert" to "Aunt Janet" to conceal the message: "14 Boeing Fortresses arrived yesterday in Hendon (London). Pilots expect to raid Kiel (Germany)."

Telltale signs of a spy's handiwork included rambling letters with no apparent point, often sent to neutral countries with too many stamps.

They were known as the "20 and odd," the first African slaves to set foot in North America at the English colony settled in 1607. For nearly 400 years, historians believed they were transported to Virginia from the West Indies on a Dutch warship. Little else was known of the Africans, who left no trace.

Now, new scholarship and transatlantic detective work have solved the puzzle of who they were and where their forced journey across the Atlantic Ocean began.

The slaves were herded onto a Portuguese slave ship in Angola, in Southwest Africa. The ship was seized by British pirates on the high seas -- not brought to Virginia after a period of time in the Caribbean. The slaves represented one ethnic group, not many, as historians first believed.

The discovery has tapped a rich vein of history that will go on public view next month at the Jamestown Settlement. The museum and living history program will commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's founding by revamping the exhibits and artifacts -- as well as the story of the settlement itself.

Although historians have thoroughly documented the direct slave trade from Africa starting in the 1700s, far less was known of the first blacks who arrived in Virginia and other colonies a century earlier. A story of memory and cultural connections between Africa and the early New World is being unearthed in a state whose plantation economy set the course for the Civil War.

"We went entirely back to the drawing board," said Tom Davidson, senior curator of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. "The problem has always been that all of the things that make for a human story [of the Africans] were missing. . . . Now we can talk about the Africans with the same richness we talk about the English and the Powhatans."

Behind him, an Angolan man was depicted stripping bark from a baobab tree in a re-created village featured in the museum's new 30,000-square-foot gallery, which will open Oct. 16. It's double the space of the previous one, to cover a long span of the 17th century and the African story, which was barely featured before.

How the story of the charter generation of Africans in Virginia has come to life in a new $25 million museum wing is a tale of two scholars who helped connect two coasts of the Atlantic Ocean.

Linda Farnsworth picked her way across a field of loose rocks, down a steep slope under the overhang of sandstone cliffs. The archaeologist stopped at the remains of a low stone retaining wall and searched briefly until she found the series of backfilled holes — where looters had rooted around a remote kiva site for highly prized black and white Anasazi pots, tools and other prehistoric objects.

Although Farnsworth and other officials of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which oversees the monument, suspect that the looters scored a valuable haul from the site, they can't back up their hunch.

"I have no idea," said Farnsworth, the BLM's sole archaeologist at Canyons of the Ancients in Colorado's southwest corner.

Farnsworth and other officials can't say what's missing because they know so little about what was there. Only about 18 percent of Canyons of the Ancients has been inventoried to assess historic, cultural or scientific values. That's more than the BLM knows about a great many of the places it administers. Less than 6 percent of the 262 million acres managed by the agency has been inventoried for cultural resources.

Although about 263,000 cultural properties have been documented, some archeologists calculate there are more than 4 million sites across the BLM's lands in the West.

With 100 archaeological sites per square mile, Canyons of the Ancients is regarded as the richest trove in an area famous for its remnants of American prehistory. Yet it has only one law enforcement officer to police the monument's 250 square miles.

At many federally managed cultural sites, damage is widespread, from casual pilfering by arrowhead collectors to excavating by professional thieves. Some haul power tools into canyons to cut out rock art panels.

A study released this summer by the National Trust for Historic Preservation determined that the BLM was too cash-strapped and understaffed to meet the challenge.

The report by the National Trust highlights the disparity in funding between the two land management agencies within the Interior Department: the BLM and the National Park Service. The park service administers Mesa Verde National Park, about 20 miles southeast of Canyons of the Ancients.

There, funding averages about $19 an acre. In contrast, Canyons of the Ancients operates at $2.27 an acre, though it is three times larger than Mesa Verde.

According to monument manager LouAnn Jacobson, more than 30 percent of Canyons' budget is funded through grants or gifts.

The National Trust report notes that in 2004 the park service spent $74 million on cultural resource management, though the BLM's 2006 budget for the same kind of work is $15 million. Recently, the Bush administration recommended a $5 million cut to the budget of the BLM's National Landscape Conservation System.

Critics of the BLM say the agency seldom pays for an inventory of its land until it is a candidate for energy leasing, when proposed surface disturbances are required to be studied. But Sally Wisely, the Colorado state BLM director, said protecting far-flung resources cannot be achieved with money alone.

"Even if we had a whole lot of additional resources, the nature of public lands in the West makes it difficult and challenging to protect," Wisely said. "The ultimate answer is an individual stewardship ethic, with every individual understanding what these resources are and what they mean to us. It means people behaving themselves out there and keeping themselves to a higher standard."

But agency officials conceded that people had been behaving badly.

IT was 1946. President Harry S. Truman was having a bad year. Never able to fill the shoes of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he endured ridicule in the press for his rough manners and political blunders. There were new economic worries: 10 million returning servicemen seeking jobs and homes; shortages of meat, coffee and tires; some 4.5 million autoworkers, steelworkers and others on strike. Republicans began to charge Democrats with having coddled Communists. Truman’s approval ratings barely cleared 30 percent.

The year ended in a blowout at the polls. Republicans picked up 55 House and 13 Senate seats and took control of both houses. Richard M. Nixon and Joseph R. McCarthy suited up and headed for Washington. Senator J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, urged Truman to name a Republican as Secretary of State and then resign, so the new appointee could become president (as succession rules then dictated). Truman scoffed, belittling the senator as “Halfbright.” Prospects for his liberal agenda were shattered, while bills like the Taft-Hartley Act, which weakened labor unions, came on the docket.

President Bush is having a bad year, too. And like Truman in 1946, he has cause to worry about the coming midterm elections.

The party occupying the White House almost always loses seats in midterms. One theory political scientists give to explain this tendency is called “surge and decline.” It notes that most presidents have coattails when they are elected, carrying the party’s candidates into Congress. But in other years those legislators have to run without the presidential surge, and many lose.

The 38th edition of the History Carnival, the leading roundup of history blogging, is at Frog in a Well: Japan. The twice-monthly History Carnival is a always looking for new material, and is also looking for hosts from November 1st on.