The latest piece of public art on San Francisco Port land will likely stand 7 feet high and span 30 feet, honoring the Bay Area Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

The San Francisco Port Commission is expected to vote Nov. 14 on whether to allow the artwork’s installation near the east wall of the Vaillancourt Fountain at Justin Herman Plaza. It would be only the third monument to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the United States.

The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was part of an international brigade of men and women who volunteered to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War from 1936 through 1938. They were also the first racially integrated U.S. armed forces at all levels of command.

[T]here are some casualties of the elections including several long-term friends of the history and archive communities who went down to defeat. Most notable is Jim Leach (R-ID) who was a prime mover and supporter of the House Humanities Caucus. Leach is also one of the few strong and vocal Republican voices for the humanities and also a staunch advocate for funding for the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) which the White House Office of Management and Budget has been trying to zero out for the last two years. In the Senate, Mike DeWine (R-OH) who has been one of the prime movers of the “Presidential Sites Improvement Act” (S. 431) – legislation that seeks to provide up to $5 million a year in federal cost-share funds to support presidential sites – also tended to be pretty good on issues of concern to our communities.

Historians and environmentalists have reason to rejoice at the defeat of outspoken (actually just plain rude) cattle rancher Richard Pombo (R-CA), the present House Resources Committee Chair (and former National Parks Subcommittee Chair) who was soundly defeated by Democrat challenger Jerry McNerney who is an alternative energy proponent – his profession is that of a wind-power engineer.

Also on the positive side, Senator Robert C. Byrd (D-WV) won 64% of the electorate against his millionaire Republican challenger who pulled about 34% of the vote. While the victory is by a smaller margin than Byrd’s last election win six years ago when he captured 78% of the West Virginia vote, he returns to the Senate's as the institution's senior senator – the longest lived member of that body. If the Democrats take control he will be the most powerful member as he is poised to once again regain the chair of the Appropriations Committee. That’s good news for programs like the “Teaching American History” initiative.

Some prognostications: In the House, the senior Democrat on the House Committee of Education, George Miller, should he become Chair, would be a forceful advocate for federal grants of students and education reform in general. Good news in the education realm also if the Democrats take control of the Senate – Senator Edward Kennedy (D-MA) would probably become Chair of the Senate Education Committee. However, it is still unclear what Kennedy would do regarding the two issues of prime concern to history educators – the reauthorizations of the "No Child Left Behind" (NCLB) and the Higher Education Act.

If Henry Waxman (D-CA) becomes the Chair of the Government House Reform Committee there will be – in the words of Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists and author of the online publication “Secrecy News” -- “a new day in Washington.”

Chris Shays (R-CT) the present chair of the Government Reform subcommittee on National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations narrowly managed to hold onto his House seat. Shays has been a national leader in confronting the problem of overclassification of government records and has earned the respect of many who are concerned with these issues. This last Congress, he has conducted three hearings on secrecy in government and has probably done more useful work on this issue than any other member of Congress. If fellow New Englander Patrick Leahy (D-VT) rises to become Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee there would be, in Aftergood’ s view, be “an earthquake – a good one” as there would be a significant change in direction in terms of greater government accountability and oversight in the Senate as well.

The war in Iraq is as unpopular today as the Vietnam War was at its height -- yet there are no mass demonstrations on America's streets. Can an antiwar movement confined largely to the Internet and the voting booth change the course of a war?

ON MARCH 22, 2003, two days after the start of the bombing campaign that began the US-led invasion of Iraq, more than 100,000 people took to the streets of New York City in protest. At a rally there the month before, organizers had claimed that a crowd of 350,000 had shown up, and twice in the previous six months tens of thousands of antiwar protesters had rallied on the National Mall in Washington against what already seemed an inevitable war. In mid-February, one million antiwar protesters had marched in London and another million in Rome. And in the invasion's opening weeks, American antiwar activists promised to continue their own fight with a campaign of civil disobedience: In San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston, traffic slowed to a halt as protesters blocked major intersections, waiting to be hauled away by police.

At the time, the war's opponents may have still been a minority among Americans, but they were making themselves seen and heard. The day after the March 22 demonstration in New York, the Columbia University sociologist Todd Gitlin, who as an undergraduate had helped lead protests against the Vietnam War as president of Students for a Democratic Society, wrote in an opinion piece in The Los Angeles Times that the anti-Iraq war movement had "mushroomed into a global force unprecedented in speed and scale."
That the bombs were falling in the first place showed the limits of that force, but there was nevertheless a sense of momentum.

During the Vietnam War, by comparison, the country didn't see major demonstrations until the US intervention was several years old and deeply unpopular. If millions worldwide were mobilizing at a time when polls showed 70 percent of Americans supported the invasion of Iraq, one would only expect the demonstrations to grow if the public mood shifted.
Today, of course, public anger and frustration over Iraq is the dominant issue as the country heads into Tuesday's midterm congressional elections, in which Democrats are expected to make significant gains. A USA Today/Gallup Poll released late last month showed that 58 percent of Americans now think invading Iraq was a "mistake" -- the same level of antiwar sentiment that polls found in 1968, when the country was convulsed by some of the largest antiwar demonstrations in its history.
And yet since the start of the Iraq war -- and the loss of more than 2,700 American, and untold Iraqi, lives -- the country hasn't witnessed anything analogous to the mass demonstrations of the Vietnam era. There have been rallies and marches -- including one last year in Washington that drew an estimated 100,000but nothing that captured the public attention like the march on the Pentagon, the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the nationwide Moratorium of 1969, or the massive protests triggered by President Nixon's decision to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

[The writer is the professor of Islamic art and architecture at the Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne) ]

At the end of August, The Art Newspaper revealed the stunning news that Donny George, president of the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in Iraq, had been forced to flee the country in fear of his life and take refuge in Damascus. In recent months, Dr George sealed up the treasures of the National Museum in Baghdad behind concrete walls, as it was too dangerous to leave them exposed. He was replaced by a relation of the Minister of Tourism, who comes from the party of Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia cleric and leader of the resistance movement.

Quite rightly, the world reacted with horror to this new threat to Iraq’s antiquities. No technically competent director is left to protect one of the world’s finest archaeological heritages. A situation with catastrophic potential, such as a new pillage of the museum could take place or objects could be sold off en masse.

It is worth deconstructing this event, in order to understand what has really happened and what the dangers are.

Dr George has worked tirelessly since the invasion in 2003, to protect and recover the antiquities then pillaged from the museum. I have the highest admiration for what he has done. He was and is the right person to interface with Western archaeologists, for the recovery of smuggled artefacts and getting help from Western institutions. I suspect that relations with his own government were by no means so warm. The problem is not that he is a Christian, or that he was a Ba’th party official. In my experience, he did not have a great interest in the Islamic heritage, and no doubt this communicated itself to superiors, whose main interest is indeed Islam.

Frequently, archaeologists in Arab countries follow the role models provided by their Western counterparts. Dr George is one of them. Overwhelmingly, Western archaeologists in the Middle East concentrate on the ancient cultures—Egypt, Mesopotamia, Biblical archaeology, etc.—no doubt seen as the ancestors of their own culture. Medieval Islam is of little interest. In a recent meeting in Paris, intended to relaunch French excavations in Iran, there were 23 ancient expeditions, and one Islamic. Not an untypical example. Many of my colleagues have a genuine goodwill towards more recent studies, but others have no interest at all, and it shows.

It would not be surprising if less well-informed Muslims—I do not speak of the cultivated middle classes, who have a genuine interest in their past—were to see the archaeology of the Middle East as in some way belonging to the foreigners and not to themselves. In some cases, they are right: Hellenism and Rome in the East were colonial empires. In others they are not; a modern Shi’i Iraqi probably has the DNA of a Babylonian. In addition, of course, Islam has a revolutionary tradition, that is, Islam replaced earlier civilisations which were considered to be decadent. Islam has a high appreciation of Jesus, but his prophecy was succeeded by that of Muhammad.

Islamist governments, that is, governments of people with more or less fundamentalist Islamic opinions, are a fact of life in the Middle East these days. There may be more tomorrow. Some effort has to be made to deal with them, in order to protect the archaeological heritages of the countries they govern. Simply giving up on contact is not an option. The archaeological heritage cannot be replaced once it has disappeared. ...

In June 1604, fur traders led by Samuel de Champlain and Pierre Dugua found a site they thought would be ideal for the first settlement in New France. The tiny island in the middle of the St. Croix River, now part of Maine's Acadia National Park, had high bluffs and a clear view downriver to watch for their English rivals.

But winter that year came early and hard, and St. Croix Island proved to be a prison. The men were stuck, trapped by dangerous ice floes moving on the tremendous tides from the nearby Bay of Fundy. By February, they began to die of scurvy; in all, 35 of 79 colonists perished.

The disease was known, but not its cause. In his desperation to find out what was happening to his men, Champlain took the unusual step of ordering autopsies.

"We could find no remedies to cure these maladies," Champlain wrote in his memoirs in 1613. "We opened several of them to determine the cause of their illness."

Now forensic anthropologists studying the St. Croix burial ground have found a cranium with the skullcap cleanly sawed off, along with shallow cut marks they say would have been made by the expedition's barber-surgeon while removing the scalp. Although there are written records of earlier autopsies by European settlers in the New World, the St. Croix find is the earliest skeletal evidence of one.

Archaeologists from Vejle Museum think they may have found a third 'Jellinge stone' - a large rock with carved runes and considered the first examples of written language in Denmark.
The researchers have found seven stones in all, which they believe date from the 10th century. Jellinge stones tell of the founding of Denmark and of Christianity's arrival in the country.

Even if the stones do not yield a true Jellinge stone, the find is still significant.

One of the most arresting images from the last days of the Vietnam War shows an unruly crowd rushing the door of a plane in Nha Trang, a rural seaside city north of Saigon. The focal point of the photograph is a balding, middle-aged American who is landing a jab to the head of a Vietnamese man desperate to board.

The American is all grim determination; his jaw is clenched as he lunges right, extending his arm like a ramrod into the face of the intruder. Resolute in the crush of bodies, he is a bulwark in the bedlam of a turbulent era's violent finale.

The caption accompanying the UPI photo identified him only as an American official, but he was actually a charter pilot hired by the State Department to move Americans from the countryside to Saigon.

In 1985, after People magazine ran the photo with a story on the 10th anniversary of Saigon's fall, some of his war-era buddies identified him: He was Robert D. Hedrix, a North Dakota native and veteran of World War II and the Korean War who spent most of the 1950s, '60s and '70s in and around Southeast Asia as a pilot for the Air Force, the CIA and various commercial outfits.

Click here for a photo.

Ireland has the highest proportion of private homeowners in the world. However, the Irish are 21st-century serfs because they do not really own the land on which their houses are built.

A new book on who owns the land of this planet has found that it is the state rather than private Irish individuals which has ultimate control over the ground where homes stand.

Who Owns the World [subtitled The Hidden Facts behind Landownership; published November 2 by Mainstream] is the first compilation of landowners and landownership in every one of the world's 197 states and 66 territories. It reveals that the Queen, as head of 31 Commonwealth states as well as the UK, is the legal owner of approximately 6,600 million acres of land - one sixth of the earth's non-ocean surface. According to the book the value of the Queen's holdings is approximately £17,600,000,000,000 making her the richest individual on Earth. However, there is no way to easily value her real estate because there is no current market in the land of entire countries.

Its author, Kevin Cahill, an Irish-born Sandhurst-educated ex-army officer, points to the Irish Law Reform Commission's attempts to change the legal status of land ownership as evidence of the 'serf-like status' of Irish citizens. He contends it is the British who are to blame.

The reasons behind Sir Anthony Eden's mistake in dispatching British troops to Suez are among the most enduring mysteries of modern politics.

Rumours have circulated for decades that Eden, who was Prime Minister from 1955 to 1957 and was suffering from a debilitating illness at the height of the crisis in 1956, was taking addictive, painkilling drugs that could have clouded his judgement.

Private papers just uncovered in the Eden family archives provide a definitive answer, disclosing that he had been prescribed a powerful combination of amphetamines and barbiturates called drinamyl.

Better known in post-war Britain as "purple hearts", they can impair judgement, cause paranoia and even make the person taking them lose contact with reality. Drinamyl was banned in 1978.

A series of war games held in 1999 specifically to anticipate problems following an invasion of Iraq assumed a deployment of 400,000 troops to maintain order, seal borders and provide for other security needs. But the games, known as Desert Crossing, were apparently ignored by the Defense Department. When CENTCOM commander Gen. Anthony Zinni, after his retirement, advised planners to refer back to Desert Crossing as they prepared for the 2003 invasion, the response reportedly was, "Never heard of it."

Now, seven years later, documentation on preparations for the games and detailed After Action records have surfaced in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archive, which is posting the materials on its Web site today.

"The conventional wisdom is the U.S. mistake in Iraq was not enough troops," commented National Security Archive director Thomas Blanton, "but the Desert Crossing war game in 1999 suggests we would have ended up with a failed state even with 400,000 troops on the ground."

Desert Crossing, which amounted to a feasibility study for part of the main war plan for Iraq -- OPLAN 1003-98 -- tested "worst case" and "most likely" scenarios of a post-war, post-Saddam, Iraq. The After Action Report presented its recommendations for further planning regarding regime change in Iraq. The results drew some pessimistic conclusions regarding the immediate possible outcomes of an invasion. A number of these mirror the events which actually occurred after Saddam was overthrown.

* "When the crisis occurs, policy makers will have to deal with a large number of critical issues nearly simultaneously, including demonstrating U.S. leadership and resolve, managing Iraq's neighbors, and rapid policy formulation."

* "A change in regimes does not guarantee stability. A number of factors including aggressive neighbors, fragmentation along religious and/or ethnic lines, and chaos created by rival forces bidding for power could adversely affect regional stability."

* "Iran's anti-Americanism could be enflamed by a U.S.-led intervention in Iraq. ... The influx of U.S. and other western forces into Iraq would exacerbate worries in Tehran ... More than any other country in the region, the principals were most concerned by how Iran would respond to a U.S.-led intervention in Iraq."

* "Iraqi exile opposition weaknesses are significant ... The debate on post-Saddam Iraq [during the war game] also reveals the paucity of information about the potential and capabilities of the external Iraqi opposition groups ... [T]here was no dispute that if the United States were to support them, much must be done in order for these groups to be politically credible within Iraq."

A paper trail documents their lives as human property, from their passage across the Atlantic to their sale as slaves for sugar plantations. Now a newly discovered burial ground promises to shed light on the lives and deaths of Africans in the Caribbean.

Researchers from Denmark and the U.S. Virgin Islands want to unearth up to 50 skeletons next year, hoping to learn about their diet, illnesses and causes of death.

Descendants of slaves could discover ancestors through DNA tests. At public meetings, Virgin Islanders have also embraced the excavations as a way for Europeans to recognize their historic role in the slave trade -- and perhaps to make amends.

Most slaves in the Americas were buried in unmarked graves, and studies of slave graveyards ''are rarer than hen's teeth. The science that will come out of it will just be extraordinary,'' said David Brewer, an archeologist with the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The slaves are buried in shallow graves beneath mounds of stones and conch shells, some marked by small, illegible headstones. Brewer stressed that the bones will be disturbed as little as possible and reburied exactly as they were found.

One fingernail-sized shaving will be taken from each skeleton for a database of African DNA that could reveal links to other slave populations.

''This is the closest we can possibly get to telling the story of their lives as they knew it,'' said Pia Bennike, an anthropologist leading the team from the University of Copenhagen.

More than 100,000 enslaved Africans, mostly from what is now Ghana, arrived in the Danish West Indies from 1617 to 1807.

Many were sold at slave markets and shipped to the American colonies while thousands remained as the property of Danish colonists.
David Brion Davis, a Yale University historian, notes that Caribbean slaves died much faster than those on the mainland.

''Sugar production was a very, very taxing -- almost lethal -- kind of occupation,'' he said.

The Danes outlawed slavery in 1848. The United States bought the three-island territory from Denmark in 1917. An island group is hoping the project will boost its case for reparations from Denmark.

Davis said he is particularly interested in whether the genetic testing shows how often blacks and whites interbred.

He said the study holds great potential. ''There are probably gaps we don't even know about that will be filled in.''

The Canadian government had detailed lists of political activists and subversives it planned to arrest in the aftermath of a nuclear war or other national emergency, keeping such plans on the books until at least the early 1980s, according to new records obtained by an Ottawa historian.

Anywhere from 700 to 2,500 people, including babies, would have been held in internment camps before being shipped off to more permanent detention facilities.

Cold War historian John Clearwater obtained the records through the Access to Information Act while researching his book, Just Dummies: Cruise Missile Testing in Canada, which is being released today.

Clearwater said the federal government was shaken by the widespread opposition to cruise missile testing.

Although he knew the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service kept close tabs on peace groups during that period, Clearwater said he was surprised by the extent of the government's plans during the Cold War to round up citizens it saw as subversive.

"It's really about the fear," he said in an interview. "The government feared people who disagreed with it during a time of a national emergency."

Government plans to detain individuals were developed in the late 1940s and updated annually until the early 1980s, Clearwater noted. The first discussion of such a plan appears in 1948 when, on Dec. 15 of that year, the cabinet's defence committee discussed the detainment of 2,500 people.

The Canadian military was given the job of transporting the prisoners to camps but the RCMP was the main organization in charge of rounding up political prisoners and organizing the program.

At one point, it was decided that children of internees would be separated from their families and placed in foster homes or with relatives if the RCMP felt the relatives were not a political threat.

Plans and detainment orders, as well as numbers of people to be imprisoned, changed over the decades, said Clearwater. The 1969 version of the plan called for the immediate arrest of 611 men and 189 women in the event of a national emergency, according to the records. A further 279 people were on a secondary internment list.

In 1970, the list was narrowed to 588 men and 174 women. The prisoners would be held in camps before being sent to federal prisons. That year, the Penitentiary Service of Canada notified the RCMP it required at least seven days between the notice of a national emergency and the receipt of the first prisoner.

This was to allow for the actual criminal prisoners to be processed and released to make room for the political detainees. To do that, the government planned to "release all inmates in medium and minimum security with less than one year of sentence to serve," the records note.

[I]n spite of Americans' tendency to zip by them, historical road markers are making a comeback, thanks in part to new state programs that have reinvigorated an old genre.

New, more detailed, markers are filled with tales of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, and the organizations behind them want to ensure that their groups get recognized for their contributions to our collective history.

"We want to tell more of the story," says Scott Arnold, author of "A Guidebook to Virginia's Historical Markers: Third Edition," to be released by the University of Virginia Press early next year.

As manager of the historical highway marker program at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources from 1999 to 2005, Mr. Arnold saw the replacement of 400 old signs with new ones that "tell more of the story" -- among them the "illegal duel" marker on Route 120 -- and the installation of more than 900 additional markers.

his week, the 200-year-old neoclassical Baltimore Basilica will reopen its weighty oak doors after a two-year, $32 million face-lift. The restoration of America's first Roman Catholic cathedral is a triumph for preservationists, both for its history and design: it's considered the masterpiece of architect Benjamin Latrobe, best known for his work on the U.S. Capitol. After a dingy decline, the Basilica's lofty interior has been refashioned according to Latrobe's elegantly simple intentions, especially the restoration of skylights set high in the spectacular dome, which admit a heavenly light into the sanctuary below. But this successful makeover—paid for by private donations—highlights a real crisis: the hundreds of crumbling historic churches and synagogues across the country, whose shrinking congregations can't keep up—let alone restore—their decaying buildings.

Bad Arolsen, Germany -- The largest archive of Nazi files is supposed to provide documentation to former World War II slave laborers so they can qualify for compensation. Hope that the victims would benefit in their lifetimes was raised earlier this year when 11 nations, including Germany, Israel and the United States, agreed to make the archives more widely available.

But critics say the process remains so slow that tens of thousands -- now in their 80s and 90s -- will never see a dime.

Jack Terry, a 76-year-old retired psychiatrist from New York City, waited almost six years for information about his father, Chaim Szabmacher, an inmate of Poland's Maidanek death camp in 1942. "I wanted to know what information was available about his fate," said Terry, who is the sole survivor of a Polish-Jewish family. "In 2004, I finally received a very brief note saying he had 'died' in 1943."

Critics point to a lack of manpower, obsolete record keeping -- materials are filed only by individual names, not by concentration camps, weapons factories, ghettos or Nazi SS units -- an inadequate budget, and knotted red tape.

TOURISTS exploring Britain's ancient spiritual heritage are better off visiting Scotland's stone circles than "noisy, overcrowded" Stonehenge, according to research by the National Geographic Traveller.

In a survey of the world's best-known heritage sites, the magazine described the famous Megalithic attraction in the south-west of England as a "mess", lacking "charm and magic".

Instead, the magazine recommends the unspoilt stone circles in the north of Scotland which, despite growing visitor numbers, remain unspoiled by noise and intrusion.

The researchers' verdict on Stonehenge said: "What a mess! Compelling... over-loved... certainly the current experience lacks magic. Crowd control is a good thing, but over-regulation has made the visitor's experience rather disappointing; charm is gone.