The Princeton Battlefield has been a place of quiet contemplation for more than two centuries, where scholars and aspiring history buffs can walk on the hallowed ground of one of the nation's most pivotal battles. Yet a new struggle has emerged on this land in recent years, not between the redcoats and the rebels, but between an academic institution and a local preservation society.

At stake is a parcel of land, roughly 25 acres in size, owned by the Institute of Advanced Study, on which the Institute wants to build faculty housing. Members of the Princeton Battlefield Society — a volunteer group dedicated to preserving the Revolutionary War site — claim that the parcel is part of the original battlefield and must be saved.

"There are some sites that are hallowed ground, that are just too sacred to be played with," said Jerry Hurwitz, president of the Princeton Battlefield Society.

Hurwitz said that by developing the land, the Institute will permanently destroy an important part of history.

Critics of the planned development say the Institute, situated on over 500 acres of wooded and open property, has plenty of land to build on without compromising the small tract adjacent to the eastern edge of the battlefield, which is now a state park.

Four decades after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, the streets, avenues, boulevards and highways that bear his name remain crossroads of the nation's past and future.

In Atlanta, not far from where King grew up and preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive winds through the heart of the city. For 10 miles, the road dedicated in King's name in 1976 stretches past homes, schools, restaurants, liquor stores, strip malls, churches, barbershops, a roller-skating rink, boarded-up government flats and a gated apartment community, all the way to the city's downtown and its golden-domed Georgia Capitol building.

THE archaeological site in Thonotosassa, which means “land of flint” in the Seminole-Creek language, is nothing much to look at: a few pits dug in the sandy soil among gnarled live oak trees, with cattle grazing round. No one guards it. Yet this place, about 17 miles (27km) north-east of Tampa, is a good spot to find Indian artefacts, on high ground close to fresh water. Robert Austin, an archaeologist who has dug there often, says that some of the remains discovered date back 12,000 years.

The chance of finding ancient objects draws thieves, too, to dig for arrowheads, flints and pots. A good arrowhead can fetch thousands of dollars. Trespassers usually scout the scene of the would-be crime during daylight hours, then return with shovels at night. No one stops them.

Last month five men were arrested at Thonotosassa on suspicion of intending to loot it. They said they were collectors, and had no intention of selling the arrowheads they were looking for. They have now been charged with trespassing.

The problem is not confined to one area of the country, or even to the open air; 26 bowls and bottles of the Caddo Nation, about 600 years old, were stolen from Southern Arkansas University in August 2006. But lack of security at Indian archaeological sites makes them particularly vulnerable.

Made from humble material, Ossabaw Island's three tabby slave cabins now represent a historical and archaeological treasure of immeasurable value.

The 19th-century tabbies are "probably the most-intact examples of their type in North America," said Georgia state archaeologist David Crass. They represent "wonderful archeology that can give voices to those who were voiceless in our history books."

The cabins survived the Civil War, stood through hurricanes and dodged coastal development, a remarkable achievement, said Crass, because they "were never intended to be permanent buildings."

Built of a rugged mixture of oyster shells, lime, sand and water, the tabby structures represent a remarkable historic record by themselves. The artifacts they have harbored for decades add a second layer of significance.

Archaeologist Daniel Elliott, president of the nonprofit LAMAR Institute, led extensive excavations on the cabins in 2005 and 2006. Buttons, ceramics, bottle glass, tobacco pipes, nails, marbles, and bullets have been unearthed, along with a diversity of food bones.

One discovery was especially telling - a half-cent coin dated 1825.

The reporter who uncovered a 60-year pattern of expelling African Americans from communities around the country and wrote a series about it last year says the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the flagship of the newspaper company he works for, tried to undermine what he produced.

In a book scheduled to arrive in retail stores by March 5, Elliot Jaspin quotes his boss, the Cox Newspapers Washington bureau chief, Andy Alexander, speaking of Julia Wallace, editor of the Atlanta newspaper.

"Wallace's refusal to run the series rankled Alexander," Jaspin wrote. "'I think we both know what's going on here,' he told me in frustration at one point. 'They are afraid of angering white people.'"

The book, "Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America," builds upon the four-part "Leave or Die" series Jaspin wrote last year.

The series was sponsored by Cox's Austin American-Statesman in Texas, and also ran in the Albany (N.Y.) Times Union; the Journal-News in Hamilton, Ohio; the Palm Beach (Fla.) Post; the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News; the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer and the Middletown (Ohio) Journal.

Using computer-assisted reporting, Jaspin documented that, "Beginning in 1864 and continuing for approximately 60 years, whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions. They drove thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white," as he wrote in the first installment.

One of those communities was Forsyth County, Ga., which is part of the Journal-Constitution's circulation area. In 1987, the county drew national attention, including a tense visit by Oprah Winfrey for her television show, after whites attacked a biracial brotherhood march.

According to Jaspin, who still works in the Cox Washington bureau, the Journal-Constitution has consistently soft-pedaled the racism in Forsyth County in its reporting. For him, that soft-pedaling was part of the story.

The Clovis People, a prehistoric group of mastodon hunters distinguished by their unique spear points and once thought to be the first Americans, likely populated North America after other humans had already arrived, a new study concludes.

The Clovis and their hunting technologies were not the first inhabitants of the New World, researchers write in the Feb. 23 issue of the journal Science, addressing a longstanding debate on the first New World humans.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Religious parties in the National Assembly were on Wednesday up in arms against teaching Pakistan’s pre-Islamic history in schools...

Members of the six-party Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal also staged a token protest walkout over the inclusion of chapters about Hinduism, Buddhism and ancient emperor Chandragupta Maurya in the history textbooks for classes VI to VIII after a heated discussion...

Five MMA members had raised the history textbook issue... [and claimed] that the inclusion of chapters they considered objectionable had caused a “grave concern amongst the public”...

[The] Minister of State for Education...accused the religious parties of seeking to keep students ignorant about glorious periods of the sub-continent’s history such as the Indus Valley or Gandhara civilisations....

“That may be your history, (but) ... our history (starts) from Makkah [Mecca] and Medina,” MMA member Farid Ahmad Piracha shouted as he led his alliance’s walkout...

The lighthouses of the Golden Gate are going the way of the crow's nest, the sextant and Morse code.

The romantic icons of the sea have been replaced by high-tech buoys, shipboard computers and global positioning satellites. The Coast Guard no longer needs the lighthouses, no longer wants them and is giving them to the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

"They're obsolete," Petty Officer Russ Tippets said Wednesday. "They're no longer relevant in today's maritime realm."

National Park Service officials are working out a deal to take over the lighthouses at Point Montara [1875], Point Bonita [1854], Point Diablo [1923], Lime Point [1883] and Alcatraz [1875]. The goal is to have them refurbished within a few years so the public can visit them.

"It's an exciting opportunity," said Chris Powell, spokeswoman for the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. "Lighthouses are part of the history of this area, and people are captivated by them."

The writer Edward Jay Epstein claims in an op ed in the Wall Street Journal that the Spanish judge investigating terrorism has found that Ramzi Binalshibh and Mohamed Atta lied when they claimed they had seen no one else but each other on visits to Spain. Epstein says this suggests that it's possible others were involved in the 9/11 plot than has previously been disclosed, including perhaps, people in Spain, Iran, Hezbollah, Malaysia, Iraq, the Czech Republic or Pakistan.

Maybe it is his compelling life story. Or perhaps it’s his insistence that Americans can look beyond race and rally around fresh ideas and the possibility of change. But by the time the charismatic African-American senator begins to speak passionately of his unwavering opposition to the war in Iraq, it is clear that something about the man and his message is resonating with the audience.

The man is former Senator Edward W. Brooke, Republican of Massachusetts and the first black politician popularly elected to the United States Senate, way back in 1966. Now, nearly three decades after leaving office, Mr. Brooke is promoting his autobiography, “Bridging the Divide.” More than just a personal window into a vanished era, his story, for many, offers some salient insights and more than a few parallels to the politics of today.

“But for him, there would not be a Barack Obama,” said Michael Jones, senior executive vice president for the National Association of Securities Dealers, who took his 15-year-old son, Michael Jr., to the Politics & Prose Bookstore and Coffeehouse in Washington to hear Mr. Brooke earlier this month. The two were part of a standing-room-only crowd of about 300 that ranged from octogenarians to elementary school students, all gathered to hear Mr. Brooke speak just hours after Senator Obama, the Illinois Democrat, announced his candidacy for president.

The embarrassing case of a boat stranded at a Northern Ireland museum is to be the subject of yet another review by officials...

Stories surrounding The Result, a historic schooner, have been likened in Parliament to something from [the TV sitcom]'Yes, Minister'.

The vessel still lies under cover in the grounds of the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum -- some 37 years after it was bought.

It has been estimated that around £627,000 [$1.2 million], at today's prices, has been spent on its purchase and maintenance to date.

Members of the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) were reduced to laughter at the case during a hearing last June.

Historic buildings in the Islamic world are often covered with breathtakingly intricate geometric designs. Both artists and mathematicians have long puzzled over them, wondering how the patterns were created.

Now, a Harvard physicist has some new ideas about the designs and the advanced math behind them.

The research, conducted by Peter Lu of Harvard University and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton University, appears in the journal Science.

ROME -- A 5,000-year-old golden artificial eye that once stared out mesmerisingly from the face of a female soothsayer or priestess in ancient Persia has been unearthed by Iranian and Italian archaeologists.

The eyeball —- the earliest artificial eye found -— would have transfixed those who saw it, convincing them that the woman —- thought to have been strikingly tall —- had occult powers and could see into the future, archaeologists said.

It was found by Mansour Sajjadi, leader of the Iranian team, which has been excavating an ancient necropolis at Shahr-i-Sokhta in the Sistan desert on the Iranian-Afghan border for nine years...

They said the eyeball consisted of a half-sphere with a diameter of just over an inch. It was made of a lightweight material thought to be derived from bitumen paste. Its surface was meticulously engraved with a pattern consisting of a central circle for the iris and gold lines “like rays of light”...On either side of it two tiny holes had been drilled, through which a fine thread, perhaps also gold, had held the eyeball in place.

Thirty-five years ago today, President Richard Nixon got off a plane in Beijing, China. That began a new era in US-China relations. The opening for it came with something that's now called ping-pong diplomacy. The World's Mary Kay Magistad has more on how it started. [audio report]...

[CIA editorial note:] This article draws extensively on operational files and other internal CIA records that of necessity remain classified. Because the true story of these two CIA officers is compelling and has been distorted in many public accounts, it is retold here in as much detail as possible, despite minimal source citations. Whenever possible, references to open sources are made in the footnotes.

* * *

Beijing’s capture, imprisonment, and eventual release of CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau is an amazing story that too few know about today. Shot down over Communist China on their first operational mission in 1952, these young men spent the next two decades imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, while their government officially denied they were CIA officers. Fecteau was released in 1971, Downey in 1973...

George W. Polk was honored as a truth-teller. A correspondent for CBS News, he was murdered in Greece in 1948. A coveted, respected award named after him, the George Polk Award, was established in 1949 and is given every year to journalists in numerous specialties. According to a statement on the official website, the winners have exemplified the unearthing of"myriad forms of scandal and deceit." They comprise a two-generation roll call of distinguished names in journalism...

Polk cut a dashing figure as a newsman, but he also cut out the real story of his World War II service as a naval officer and replaced it with a huge fraud. He deserves to join the growing roster of American journalists whose dishonesty has gravely injured their profession...

Related Links

Richard B. Frank: George Polk's real World War II record (extended web version)

The Australian and British governments today will be pitted against each other in a heavyweight court battle over whether scientists can conduct tests on Aboriginal remains.

The Australian Government yesterday announced it would seek to join the legal fight to stop researchers at London's Natural History Museum testing the skulls and bones of 17 Tasmanian Aborigines.

It will apply to be part of a court battle beginning late today in the British High Court, when the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (TAC) applies to have a temporary ban on testing made permanent.

The TAC last week won an interim injunction in London to stop the museum testing the remains amid fears they could be damaged.

In the fierce struggles of the 19th century to abolish slavery, Abraham Lincoln remains the mythic American champion. In Britain, however, that honor belongs to William Wilberforce, the Christian activist and member of Parliament who thundered against the slave trade for 20 years. Friday marks the 200th anniversary of his legislative triumph — a campaign rich with lessons for modern-day reformers.

When Wilberforce first raised his voice in the House of Commons for the cause of abolition in May 1789, he spoke for 3 1/2 hours. Yet the absence of partisanship must have taken his colleagues by surprise. "I mean not to accuse anyone," he insisted, "but take the shame upon myself, in common indeed with the whole Parliament of Britain, for having suffered this horrid trade to be carried on under their authority."

Wilberforce built a human rights coalition that cut across political and ideological lines, uniting Whigs with establishment Tories and Anglicans with evangelicals and Quakers. His success, it seems, owed much to his genuine devotion to the plight of African slaves, regardless of the political costs.

A convert to evangelical Christianity, Wilberforce is greatly admired in religious circles today, if not always imitated. Early in his parliamentary career, he made a vow to avoid the corruptions of political influence — and kept it. He was known for his intellectual seriousness and personal charm. French author Madame de Stael confessed her surprise after dining with him: "I have always heard that he was the most religious, but I now find that he is the wittiest man in England."

A group of South Carolina professors and historians are gathering oral histories to preserve a piece of the state's civil rights history. They have been traveling throughout the state to videotape leaders and grass-roots participants in the struggle for civil rights as they recount their experiences growing up and during the movement.

Their research and documentaries are being carried out individually and for different projects, but they share a common goal of preserving the state's carried out individually and for different projects, but they share a common goal of preserving the state's history for generations to come.

For example, Fred Moore knew he had a lot to lose in 1955 when a group of activists approached him, asking him to lead a student boycott of the White Citizens Council's businesses in Orangeburg County.

Moore was student body president at South Carolina State College, and the school's president, Benner Turner, reminded him he was about to graduate, that he had a shot at a Harvard Law School scholarship, that he had a future. This was not his fight, Turner said.

But Moore, a James Island native, was raised to demand dignity, he said. The council's discrimination against the black men and women who signed a petition for desegregation was wrong. Moore never graduated from South Carolina State. He was expelled just two weeks before graduation for his role in the protests.

The hitherto unknown 8mm colour film of JFK's last motorcade, donated to the Sixth Floor Museum in Dallas, does not cover the assassination itself. Instead its centrepiece is a radiant Jacqueline Kennedy, waving to the crowds lining the downtown pavement, a few blocks from Dealey Plaza where her husband John was assasinated.

The sky is cloudless, Dallas' skyscrapers are bedecked with the national flag, and excited bystanders wave at the camera as they wait for the Kennedys. Most poignant of all however is the image of the First Lady: "The clearest, best film of Jackie in the motorcade," says Gary Mark, curator of the museum which released the 39-second film on its website to coincide with Monday's Presidents Day holiday in the US.

This being the Kennedy assassination however, even these apparently innocuous pictures will be scrutinised by conspiracy theorists. The film clearly shows the President sitting beyond Jackie, his suit jacket bunched up on his back - which may bear upon claims that disparities in the bullet marks on his jacket and body prove Lee Harvey Oswald could not have been the only gunman.

Instead of the grim visage of George Washington staring out from the hard metal of the new $1 presidential coins, imagine the face of one-time cooper's apprentice — and Connecticut native — Samuel Huntington. That, according to historian Stanley Klos, is who should have been on the coin that entered circulation last week.

Klos, a Florida resident, has filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission and threatened to file for an injunction to stop the further distribution of the U.S. Mint's presidential coins, unless the Mint acknowledges the 10 men who served as president of the United States before Washington.

Klos' FTC complaint charges the Mint with propagating myths as history. He said he is not looking to stop the use of the coins, or even to get coins for the men who have been slighted; he just wants this nation to acknowledge its past.

The controversy arose because the Mint and Congress decided to honor the presidents who have served the nation under its second Constitution, ratified in 1788. (That's the one that starts, "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union&")

Residents of a 15th-century New World mining colony founded by Christopher Columbus turned to desperate measures in the face of rapidly deteriorating conditions, a new study suggests. According to researchers from the University of Arizona, the colony of La Isabela's situation was so dire that the miners tried to smelt their own supplies by extracting silver from lead ore they brought with them from Europe. Archaeologists working at the site—located in what is now the Dominican Republic—in the 1990s found slag and other by-products of mining operations indicating that the miners had processed some ore there. The initial conclusion was that the ore had been found near La Isabela, processed there, and found to contain no significant amount of silver or other precious metals. But the new report suggests that the colonists, beset by hunger, disease, hurricanes, mutiny, and conflicts with the natives, were instead pilfering their own supply of ore.

In a chandeliered room at the Justice Department, the longtime head of the counterespionage section, the chief of the public integrity unit, a deputy assistant attorney general, some trial lawyers and a few FBI agents all looked down at their pant legs and socks.

While waving his own leg in the air in illustration, Paul Brachfeld, inspector general of the National Archives and Records Administration, asked the group rhetorically if "something white" could be easily mistaken if it was wrapped around their legs, beneath their pant legs.

Former national security adviser Sandy Berger leaves court Sept. 8, 2005, after being fined and put on probation for taking classified documents from the Archives. A recent House committee report says the case was mishandled.

Under debate during the Nov. 23, 2004, meeting was Brachfeld's contention that President Clinton's former national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger could have stolen original, uncatalogued, highly classified terrorism documents 14 months earlier by wrapping them around his socks and beneath his pants, as National Archives staff member John Laster reported witnessing.