ATLANTA -- As he treks across the Dixie roads he traveled as a young FBI agent in the mid-1960s, Jim Ingram gets a similar question from many people about his quest to solve murder cases dating back to the civil rights era.

"We say, 'Look, a law has been broken, and we're committed,'" says Mr. Ingram, who came out of retirement at the FBI's request. "Then they say, 'Why are you doing this now?' Ingram answers: "Because it was not carried to its final conclusion 40 years ago."

The US government recently announced that it is reexamining nearly 100 such cold cases –- an effort that's being helped by changing attitudes of law enforcement and the public in the South, even among former supremacists...

But circumstances were different during the civil rights era. "In the 1960s...there were Klan members in law enforcement, and it was a direct pipeline back to the very people they were investigating," says former US Attorney Doug Jones, who brought two Ku Klux Klan members to trial in 2002 for a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls in Birmingham, Ala. "Today, people are coming forward to assist."

The love life of the IRA leader Michael Collins will be exposed to fresh scrutiny when letters about his relationship with his fiancée and the wife of a society portrait painter are auctioned. The correspondence is among 600 lots in an Irish independence sale in Dublin on April 17.

Letters and diaries from Moya Llewelyn Davies, a close friend of Collins, record her memories of the IRA commander. In a series of diary entries and letters to a friend, Mrs Llewelyn Davies - who it has been rumoured also had an affair with Collins - recalls his romantic attachments.

KASHIHARA, Japan -- The Cultural Affairs Agency began work Tuesday to disassemble the stone chamber of the seventh- to eighth-century Takamatsuzuka tomb in the ancient village of Asuka, Nara Prefecture, for outdoor reassembly in a bid to preserve its colorful wall paintings designated as national treasures.

This is the first time the agency has taken apart a stone chamber containing national treasures.

It plans to take out 16 pieces of stone from the roughly 1,300-year-old chamber over four months before spending about 10 years to restore the chamber and its wall paintings, officials said...

A special crane developed solely for the Takamatsuzuka work will be used to hoist the stone pieces, whose condition have deteriorated severely since their discovery 35 years ago, the officials said...

The Takamatsuzuka tomb...contained skeletal remains of someone believed to be of high rank, possibly a crown price...

[Japan Times separately reported a new head of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, which"has been under fire in connection with the revelation that murals in the Takamatsuzuka tomb in Asuka, Nara Prefecture, were damaged during preservation work in 2002 and secretly repaired."]

Related Links

Takamatsuzuka tomb murals (Google Images)

Longtime readers of Intellectual Affairs may recall that this column occasionally indulges in reference-book nerdery. So it was a pleasant but appropriate surprise when the Bodleian Library of the University of Oxford provided a copy of its new edition of the very first dictionary of the English language. It has been out of print for almost 400 years, and the Bodleian is now home to the one known copy of it to have survived.

Available [May 1] as The First English Dictionary, 1604 (distributed by the University of Chicago Press), the work was originally published under the title A Table Alphabeticall. It was compiled in the late 16th century by one Robert Cawdrey. The book did not bring him fame or fortune, but it went through at least two revised editions within a decade. That suggests there must have been a market for Cawdrey’s guide to what the title page called the “hard usuall English wordes” that readers sometimes encountered “in Scripture, Sermons, or elswhere.”...

In his introductory essay, John Simpson [editor of the Oxford English Dictionary] points out that the OED now lists 60,000 words that are known to have been in use in English around the year 1600. Cawdrey defines about 2,500 of them. “We should probably assume that he was unable to include as many words as he would have liked,” writes Simpson, “in order to keep his book within bounds. It was, after all, an exploratory venture.”

But that makes the selection all the more interesting. It gives you a notion of what counted as a “hard word” at the time. Most of them are familiar now from ordinary usage, though not always in quite the sense that Cawdrey indicates. He gives the meaning of “decision” as “cutting away,” for example. Tones of the preacher can be heard in his slightly puzzling definition of “curiositie” as “picked diligence, greater carefulnes, then is seemly or necessarie.”

Related Links

U.Chicago Press 'First English Dictionary, 1604' press release

ATLANTA -- U.S. scientists have discovered ancient Greeks unwittingly created a sophisticated acoustic filter while building a fourth century B.C. theater at Epidaurus.

Despite many attempts to replicate the Epidaurus theater's design, the Greeks never achieved the same acoustic effect that allowed people in the back rows to hear music and voices with amazing clarity.

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have...discovered it's not the slope or the wind -- it's the seats.

The rows of limestone seats at Epidaurus form an efficient acoustics filter that hushes low-frequency background noises, such as the murmur of a crowd, and reflects the high-frequency noises of the performers off the seats and back toward the seated audience -- thereby carrying an actor's voice all the way to the back rows of the theater.

The research by acoustician and ultrasonics expert Nico Declercq, a Georgia Tech assistant professor, and engineer Cindy Dekeyser appears in the April issue of the Journal of the Acoustics Society of America.

The charred bones that were long believed to be remains of St. Joan of Arc don't belong to the French heroine but are instead the remains of an Egyptian mummy, a new study has shown.

Philippe Charlier, a forensic scientist at the Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Paris, France, obtained permission last year to study the relics from the church in Normandy where they are housed.

The relics were said to have been retrieved from the French site where Joan was burned at the stake in 1431.

Charlier's team studied the relics —- including a fragment of cloth and a human rib -— under the microscope and subjected them to chemical tests...

Final proof came from carbon-14 analysis, which dated the human remains to between the third and sixth centuries B.C.

Chemical scans of all the relics further suggested Egypt as the place of origin, as the profiles closely matched those of Egyptian mummies rather than burned bones.

BARCELONA -- It was a spy story with a plot out of James Bond. During the Falklands War, Argentina planned to blow up a British warship in Gibraltar.

The main protagonist was a former left-wing guerrilla turned spy who specialised in mine attacks on warships.

A Spanish film-maker, Jesus Mora, has made a documentary about Operation Algeciras. For many years, no one in authority would admit the plot existed but Mora got the former Spanish prime minister Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo and the chief of the Argentine navy at the time, Admiral Jorge Anaya, to confirm it...

RICHMOND, Va. -- This is what the Museum of the Confederacy, the onetime "Shrine of the South," has come down to:

Attendance has dropped by nearly half over the past decade. The museum has been losing about $400,000 each year for a decade. Employees have been laid off, hours curtailed. A recent report by a panel of outside experts in museum management concluded that the 117-year-old institution was at a "tipping point" that was going to affect "its very existence."

And this is in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Things are so bleak that the museum will likely have to sell its $7 million site to raise cash. It needed a $400,000 emergency grant from the state legislature earlier this month to allow it more time to look for a new home.

It may even have to change its name. That same doleful report said the Museum of the Confederacy, though it has made efforts to distance itself from being an unabashed shrine, still "conjures up in the public mind images of slavery, racism, and intolerance...[It] carries enormous, intransigent, and negative intellectual and emotional baggage."

AARSCHOT, Belgium -- During the week, Ivonne Janssens, 57, is a hospital cleaner. But come the weekend, she climbs the narrow steps of a three-story medieval tower and turns into a 14th-century duchess with a faux-emerald necklace, a linen headdress, a leather satchel full of fake gold coins, and a retinue of mercenaries to fend off invading French knights...

Across this country of 10 million, a growing number of Belgians are trading in their jeans for suits of armor. They are rubbing stones together to make fire, eating their dinners out of cauldrons, re-enacting heroic battles and participating in mock hangings...

Herman Konings, a Belgian behavioral psychologist who studies national trends, attributes the medieval craze to excessive nostalgia for a more glorious past. The fad has emerged at a time when the country, divided between Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north and French-speaking Wallonia in the south, is experiencing deep anxiety about its identity.

Konings argues that little Belgium, better known for its beer than its heroic past, is fed up with being the laughingstock of Europe. This, he says, is prompting Belgians to hark back to a period when Bruges and Antwerp were trading centers that surpassed Paris and London, and Flemish "primitive" painters like Jan Van Eyck were the envy of the world.

"Throughout our history, we have been attacked by everyone, from the Romans to the Vikings to the Dutch," he says, explaining that Belgians are tired of being picked on. "The late Middle Ages was a time when we were mastering the world. So at a time of national doubt, they provide a great escape as well as a sense of security."

SHIJIAZHUANG, March 30 (Xinhua) -- Chinese archaeologists working in Shexian county in north China's Hebei province have discovered a group of 800-year-old tombs from the Song Dynasty (960-1279) and Jin Dynasty (1115-1234).

Archaeologists with the Hebei provincial cultural relic research institute say that the tomb group, which covers an area of 2,600 square meters, comprises 17 tombs.

Welcome to Memoir Week at Slate. Over the next three days, our critics will be weighing in on new memoirs. What has been most striking to us at Slate is how many memoirs these days are anything but coming-of-age stories; instead, they tackle issues and subjects larger than the self. Elizabeth Rubin and Mike Vazquez dissect the story of Ishmael Beah, who became a child soldier in Sierra Leone at the age of 12. Ann Hulbert looks at two memoirs about autism and asks why autism has become a metaphor for our times. Stephen Metcalf studies the scarlet history of the biography. Jess Row returns to Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior to see how this seminal memoir holds up. And Meghan O'Rourke and Dan Chiasson discuss the role of autobiography in poetry 40 years after Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath helped start a vogue in confessional poetry.

Josef Stalin is speaking to his son Yakov, who has just telephoned to say that he will soon head off to battle the Nazi invaders.

"I sometimes was not fair to you. Forgive me. I devoted little time to you," the Soviet dictator apologizes. "Son, go and fight. This is your duty." He then switches to Georgian, the language of his childhood, and adds with even greater feeling: "If you have to die, do it with dignity. And you must be confident that your father, Stalin, will do everything for our victory."

The poignant scene — for viewers who can stomach it — is part of a controversial 40-episode TV drama, "Stalin Live," now airing on a nationwide network here. The show's structural device is an elderly Stalin, in the last weeks of his life, recalling episodes in his younger days, most presenting him in a favorable light.

For Stalin admirers, of whom there are many in Russia, the series is an entertaining and educational look at the man who turned the Soviet Union into a superpower. To critics, it is a dangerous distortion of history that threatens to misinform a younger generation about a leader responsible for the deaths of millions of people, and reinforce a trend toward greater authoritarianism in politics.

CAIRO -- Al-Ahram daily reported on Tuesday a new archaeological discovery by an Egyptian excavation mission in northern Sinai.

Secretary General of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities Zahi Hawwas was quoted as saying that an old military fort dating back to the 18th Dynasty (1347-1337 BC) was discovered after 10 years of excavating the area situated on the route linking Egypt to Israel.

Hawwas also said that the fort found was constructed on the ruins of a military base used by the Hyksos who invaded Egypt in the 17th century BC and were later driven out of the country by King Ahmose, the founder of the 18th Dynasty.

The [Russian] Foreign Ministry on Tuesday criticized the Polish curators of the Auschwitz museum for delaying the opening of an exhibit over the identity of the camp's victims.

The directors of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum near Oswiecim, Poland, are insisting that those killed at the Nazi death camp be referred to as Polish, not Soviet, citizens in the exhibit, which is dedicated to Soviet liberation of thousands of the camp's prisoners...

The ministry called the museum's decision to keep the exhibit closed "absurd." "We are convinced that the memory of the victims ... should not be held hostage by historical-political speculation," the ministry said in a statement released Tuesday...

Museum officials object to Russia's insistence that prisoners who came from areas of Poland annexed by the Soviet Union be referred to as Soviet citizens, [museum spokesman Jarek] Mensfeld said.

"It should be pointed out that just because parts of Poland were controlled by Soviet forces does not mean those who perished were any less Polish," he said.

Some of the Polish territory seized by Soviet troops in accordance with the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact went on to become parts of Belarus and western parts of Ukraine.

Related Links

Auschwitz museum denies martyrology closure (Poland.pl)

Norman G. Finkelstein has been more controversial off his campus than on it. On his frequent speaking tours to colleges, where he typically discusses Israel in highly critical ways, Finkelstein draws protests and debates. When the University of California Press published Finkelstein’s critique of Alan Dershowitz and other defenders of Israel in 2005, a huge uproar ensued — with charges and countercharges about hypocrisy, tolerance, fairness and censorship. But at DePaul University, Finkelstein has taught political science largely without controversy, gaining a reputation as a popular teacher.

But the debate over Finkelstein is now hitting his home campus — and in a way sure to create more national controversy. Finkelstein is up for tenure. So far, his department has voted, 9-3, in favor of tenure and a collegewide faculty panel voted 5-0 to back the bid. But Finkelstein’s dean has just weighed in against Finkelstein....

Much of the criticism from the dean focuses on Finkelstein’s book The Holocaust Industry. The book argues that supporters of Israel use the Holocaust unreasonably to justify Israel’s policies. While the book does not deny that the Holocaust took place, it labels leading Holocaust scholars “hoaxters and huxters.” A review of the book in The New York Times called it full of contradictions (at one point he rejects the idea that the United States abandoned Europe’s Jews and then he later praises a book for which that idea was the central thesis) and full of “seething hatred” as he implies that Jews needed the Holocaust to justify Israel. The reviewer, Brown University’s Omer Bartov, a leading scholar of the Holocaust, described the book as “a novel variation on the anti-Semitic forgery, ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ “...

Education Adviser Ayub Quadri yesterday said the interim government has already taken initiatives to correct all sorts of history distortion from primary and secondary level textbooks to be distributed among students next year.

"I also directed my colleagues to identify all types of distortion of history, especially that of liberation war and contribution of liberation war heroes including Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and Ziaur Rahman. I hope we will be able to amend or remove all types of distortion in new textbooks for 2008. From which students will learn real history of the liberation war," Ayub Quadri said at a views exchange meeting with journalists at the secretariat.

He also said the education ministry has identified most distortions of history in the textbooks for classes one to ten.

"The history of the liberation war has been changed over and over again while our children remained in the dark about the true history," said a regretful Quadri.

"It is impossible to correct the information in the existing textbooks immediately, but new textbooks for the future years will be free from all distortions," he added.

PYONGYANG, North Korea -- The Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on Tuesday lashed out at Japan for distortion of history textbooks, calling Japan's moves an open mockery and challenge to its neighbors and the world at large.

The Japanese authorities had become "all the more undisguised in their moves to distort history despite unanimous censure and condemnation by the public at home and abroad" the official KCNA news agency reported, quoting a Foreign Ministry statement.

Japan's renewed total denial of the history of aggression is an open mockery and challenge to its neighbors and the international community demanding justice and truth, it said...

It added that the incumbent Japanese government's falsification of the stark historical facts is designed to repeat the country's crime-woven history at any cost.

“In the past decade,” the Yale historian David Blight has recently written, “the neo-Confederate fringe of Civil War enthusiasm . . . has contended that thousands of African Americans, slave and free, willingly joined the Confederate war effort as soldiers and fought for their ‘homeland’ . . . . Slaves’ fidelity to their masters’ cause - - a falsehood constructed to support claims that the war was not about slavery - - has long formed one of the staple arguments in Lost Cause ideology.”

In this paper we discuss a graphic example of Blight’s contention by examining a Civil War-era posed studio photograph of black Union soldiers with a white officer. We maintain that this photograph has been deliberately falsified in recent years by an unknown person/s sympathetic to the Confederacy. This falsified or fabricated photo, purporting to be of the 1st Louisiana Native Guards (Confederate), has been taken to promote Neo-Confederate views, to accuse Union propagandists of duplicity, and to show that black soldiers were involved in the armed defense of the Confederacy. As of the date of this website this photograph is being sold on the web by an on-line retailer, www.rebelstore.com, which promotes itself as “The Internet’s Original Rebel Store,” and advertises this photograph as a legitimate photo of “Members of the first all Black Confederate Unit organized in New Orleans in 1861.”

[UPDATE: The retailer recently pulled the photo.]

Historians of the Vietnam era suggest that those who look to Congress for decisive action to end the current war will be disappointed. But they say that today, just as in the 1960s and 70s, Congress both reflects and amplifies public disillusionment; its votes, however symbolic, could set political limits on the president’s options.

“Congress becomes the public voice of opposition,” said Robert Dallek, the presidential historian, who has dissected the interaction of Congress with both Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon. “And it’s happening more quickly this time because Iraq stands in the shadow of Vietnam.”

The Library of Congress, where thousands of rare public domain documents relating to America's history are stored and slowly decaying, is about to begin an ambitious project to digitize these fragile documents using Linux-based systems and publish the results online in multiple formats.

Thanks to a $2 million grant from the Sloan Foundation, "Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress" will begin the task of digitizing these rare materials -- including Civil War and genealogical documents, technical and artistic works concerning photography, scores of books, and the 850 titles written, printed, edited, or published by Benjamin Franklin.

According to Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, which developed the digitizing technology, open source software will play an "absolutely critical" role in getting the job done...

Image processing for an average book takes about 10 hours on the cluster [of Linux computers], and while the project still uses proprietary optical character recognition (OCR) software, Kahle says that many open source applications come into play...and the software performs "a lot of image manipulation, cropping, de-skewing, correcting color to normalize it -- [it] does compression, optical character recognition, and packaging into a searchable, downloadable PDF; searchable, downloadable DjVu files; and an on-screen representation we call the Flip Book."...

A good number of the historic materials in question are old, fragile, and in such rough shape that placing them in Scribe's cradle, or even attempting to read them, could irreparably damage them.

[Dr. Jeremy E. A. Adamson, the library's director for collections and services] says that some of the books, for example, have pages "that have become brittle with age"; while Adamson says these materials are in a broad range of conditions that limit their physical handling, he uses the general term "brittle books" to describe it. No list of such brittle materials at the Library of Congress has been made, but Adamson says that "they comprise a percentage of virtually every collection."

Adamson says the project's objectives include the development of a more formal classification and description of these "brittle" materials, and to "establish digitization workflows based on that classification of condition."