An Israeli diplomatic initiative almost prevented the liberation of Jerusalem's Old City during the Six-Day War, according to a leading historian. Michael Oren, author of the celebrated history "Six Days of War," said Wednesday that new details gleaned from a British archive suggested that Israel's 1967 offensive in Jerusalem almost never happened.

Oren said he had learned that, as Israeli forces were poised to go in, then Prime Minister Levi Eshkol made a secret peace overture to King Hussein of Jordan, which controlled Jerusalem and the West Bank. Eshkol's proposal, made via British intermediaries, was that Israel stay out of the Old City -- site of the Temple Mount and Western Wall -- if Jordan agree to an immediate cease-fire, expel Egyptian officers from its ranks, and enter peace talks. But Hussein had no response and Israel took a united Jerusalem.

"It is clear that Hussein could not have accepted Eshkol's offer because the Arab world would have risen up against him," Oren told Ma'ariv.

CLINTON, Tenn. -- Fifty-one years ago, 12 black students became the first to attend a court-ordered, desegregated school in the South.

On Thursday, 12 life-size statues were unveiled in Clinton to commemorate those students who became known as the "Clinton 12." The bronze statues stand outside the Green McAdoo Cultural Center.

On their first day at Clinton High School on August 27th, 1956, the students walked down the hill from their neighborhood and passed a crowd of taunting, angry white people. The governor at the time sent troops to help uphold the law.

Governor Bredesen and other dignitaries attended Thursday's unveiling ceremony, along with the surviving members of the Clinton 12, and their families and friends.

The old hands at the C.I.A.’s publications review board, who maintain the agency’s memory hole, must have had a mordant chuckle over [Watergate defendant E. Howard Hunt's] “American Spy,” and connoisseurs of literary crimes and misdemeanors will find much to savor here. Hunt describes a foreign president’s wife as “the true power behind the thrown.” He makes Dwight Eisenhower president in 1950, at the start of the Korean War, instead of 1953, at its end. He mangles the names of, among others, the leaders of Iran and Nicaragua. He also identifies Mark Felt, a k a Deep Throat, as Howard Felt — a howler calling for a psychiatrist as well as an editor. The publishers of this book seem to have received an impossible last draft, handed it to a book doctor and closed their eyes.

The low point — and there is strong competition — comes when the author examines the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Hunt was falsely linked to the killing by conspiracy buffs, and this chapter can be read only as a twisted form of bitter revenge. He exhumes worm-eaten theories linking C.I.A. officers and their Cuban agents to the case and pretends to take them seriously. Then, with a straight face, he purports to put Lyndon B. Johnson’s finger on the trigger.

Mistakes about Bangalore in an Oxford dictionary have stirred anger in the hi-tech Indian hub where the government has joined historians in demanding an apology, reports said on Friday.

The 2005 edition of the Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place Names says Bangalore is a land of Bengalis who took their name from a local chief called Banga, the New Indian Express and Times of India reported on Friday.

Bengali is in fact the language spoken mainly in Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal, while Kannada is the principal tongue of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital.

The Oxford reference book also says that Kempe Gowda, known as the founder of Bangalore, belonged to the Hoysala dynasty - a chronological error because the dynasty had long ceased to be in power, the Times of India said.

Culture secretary Murthy said his department will write a letter to the British publisher, demanding withdrawal of the 2005 edition and an apology for the mistakes, the newspaper reported.

Chinese archaeologists studying ancient rock carvings say they have evidence that modern Chinese script is thousands of years older than previously thought.

State media say researchers identified more than 2,000 pictorial symbols dating back 8,000 years, on cliff faces in the north-west of the country.

They say many of these symbols bear a strong resemblance to later forms of ancient Chinese characters.

Scholars had thought Chinese symbols came into use about 4,500 years ago.

The Damaidi carvings, first discovered in the 1980s, cover 15 sq km (5.8 square miles) and feature more than 8,000 individual figures including the sun, moon, stars, gods and scenes of hunting or grazing.

Until the discovery, the earliest characters included 4,500-year-old inscriptions on pottery from Henan province in central China.

COPENHAGEN -- A new book about Denmark's so-called bog people suggests the Iron Age sacrifice victims were not brutally beaten as previously thought.

The bog people are a collection of well-preserved remains found in Danish peat bogs. Christian Fischer, director of the Silkeborg Museum, has written Trollund Man -- A Gift to the Gods, a compilation of more than 30 years of studies into the remains. Because the skulls of many of the remains are crushed, researchers previously believed the victims had been brutally beaten. But Fischer says the damage was likely caused by the weight of the peat pressing down on the bodies, the Copenhagen Post said Thursday. The newspaper said Fischer's research supports theories that the bog people were hung during rituals.

More than five years after it was completed, the Department of Energy last year finally released a landmark historical account of U.S. production of highly enriched uranium (HEU) from 1945 to 1996.

Conceived a decade ago as a bold initiative to set a new standard for international transparency and government accountability, the HEU study was released under pressure as an unwilling concession to the rule of law, i.e. the Freedom of Information Act.

The story of the five year campaign to win public disclosure of the HEU study and an initial assessment of its significance for nuclear nonproliferation policy were presented in a paper (pdf) by myself and Princeton physicist Frank von Hippel in the latest issue of The Nonproliferation Review.

See"The U.S. Highly Enriched Uranium Declaration: Transparency Deferred but not Denied" by Steven Aftergood and Frank von Hippel, Nonproliferation Review, Vol. 14, No. 1, March 2007.

The paper was discussed at a forum of the Monterey Institute Center for Nonproliferation Studies on May 17, with a response from Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive.

The world's oldest wooden anchor was discovered during excavations in the Turkish port city of Urla, the ancient site of Liman Tepe...by researchers from...the University of Haifa. The anchor, from the end of the 7th century BC, was found near a submerged construction, imbedded approximately 1.5 meters underground...

Urla [is] a port city located near Izmir, with more than 5,000 years of maritime history. Remnants of an ancient port were uncovered during the excavations.

The finds revealed that the port, which served the ancient [1st Millennium BCE] Greek settlement of Klazomenai, sunk following a natural disaster, probably an earthquake, in the 6th century BC. As there is no record of any such event occurring during this period, the actual cause of port's destruction remains a mystery.

During the recent excavation season, it became clear that a wooden log that was found wedged into the ground at the bottom of the ancient harbor in 2003 is actually a wooden anchor with a metal-covered crown. The anchor was found wedged into the ground one and a half meters below the surface and was dated from the end of the 7th century BC, which makes it the oldest wooden anchor found to date.

PILSEN, Czech Republic -- Zdenek Sverak, dressed in a professorial gray suit with red club tie, nodded a greeting to the sold-out crowd in a municipal theater here and began his lecture about Jara da Cimrman, the greatest Czech of all time.

Cimrman nearly made it to the North Pole before any other human, according to Sverak, but missed the mark by about seven meters, or 20 feet, because he encountered hostile natives. He invented the telephone and dynamite, though others took the credit. He even made the first light bulb but got to the patent office five minutes after Thomas Edison patented his own invention and thus missed another opportunity for worldwide fame...

Before long, the audience was giggling and then guffawing at Sverak's deadpan delivery because Jara da Cimrman, an unrecognized genius of the late 19th century, has never existed outside Sverak's and his associates' fertile minds.

In response to the release of the 2006 results for the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) for U.S. history and civics, Senators Edward M. Kennedy (D-MA) and Lamar Alexander (R-TN) have re-introduced legislation (S. 1414) to establish a new, 10-state pilot program under the NAEP to assess and improve the knowledge of American history and civics.

The Senators plan to consider the legislation as part of the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee previously passed a similar bill in September 2006.

S. 1414, the American History and Civics Achievement Act, amends the National Assessment of Educational Progress Authorization Act to direct the Commissioner for Education Statistics to give a priority to conducting national NAEP assessments of student achievement in U.S. History at least once every 4 years in grades 4, 8, and 12. Currently the history assessment is usually given every five to seven years.

It also requires the Commissioner to conduct trial State NAEP assessments, in at least ten geographically diverse States, of student achievement in U.S. history in grades 8 and 12, and in Civics in grades 8 and 12.

The legislation authorizes $7 million for the fiscal years 2008 and 2009, to conduct the trial assessments.

Related Links

Kennedy and Alexander Press Release

US students aren't history whizzes, but they're improving (CSMonitor)

Abraham Lincoln might have been in the early stages of a life-threatening type of smallpox when he delivered his Gettysburg Address, lauded as one of history's greatest speeches and an archetype of genius brevity...

The researchers suggest Lincoln's physicians downplayed the severity of his illness in an effort to reassure the public that their president was not dying...

Though some historians recognize that Lincoln was ill following his Gettysburg speech in 1863, they implicate a mild and non-lethal form of smallpox that occurs in people who have been immunized against the disease.

The finding, published in the current issue of the Journal of Medical Biography, suggests future writings on the 16th president should include the nature and gravity of "Lincoln's Gettysburg Illness."...

Armond Goldman and Frank Schmalstieg, both of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, reviewed the symptoms of Lincoln's illness cited in various sources. Then they compared this clinical profile with non-smallpox diseases, including monkeypox, chickenpox and herpes simplex type 1 infections, which could mimic smallpox...

Goldman and Schmalstieg found it was improbable Lincoln suffered from a disease other than smallpox...

Related Links

10 ailing presidents

MONTREAL -- Cost concerns led a 1985 Air India flight to take off from Toronto despite credible information that a terrorist attack was imminent, an inquiry into the two-decade-old bombing heard Wednesday.

The revelation was the latest in a litany of security oversights, unheeded warnings and miscommunication among security officials in the days before Air India Flight 182 was blown from the sky, killing 329 people.

The lapses are a catalogue of missed opportunities: repeated warnings as early as 1984 and up to days before the disaster of an attack by Sikh extremists; absent sniffer dogs at Toronto airport; a malfunctioning x-ray machine; a tardy policeman.

On Wednesday, the special tribunal heard from a baggage screener who testified that he overheard officials saying that keeping the plane on the tarmac was too costly to justify searching baggage already on board, even though three suspicious bags had been found among those being loaded onto the plane.

High school students resent being made to feel guilty during their study of Australia's indigenous past and dislike studying national history in general.

The History Teachers Association called yesterday for a rethink of the type of Australian history being taught in schools and the way in which it is taught.

History Teachers Association of [New South Wales] executive officer Louise Zarmati said..."This is a somewhat delicate subject but they don't like the indigenous part of Australian history"...

"The feedback I get is they're not prepared to wear the guilt. They find it's something that's too personal, too much of a personal confrontation for them. I think it sparks a lot of racism; it certainly did in my classroom. It makes it an unpleasant learning experience."

Australia's indigenous history has been a contentious issue in the ongoing "history wars" over the interpretation of European colonisation.

The Great Pyramid of Giza, the sole surviving member of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, stands today as the most massive puzzle in the history of civilization.

From the ancient Greeks to today's techno-geeks, many have asked this question: How was something this huge built with such precision?...

Now French architect Jean-Pierre Houdin has reopened this conversation with a controversial proposal that the giant tomb of the pharaoh Khufu (Cheops to the Greeks), who reigned from about 2589 B.C. to 2566 B.C., was built from the inside out with the use of internal ramps.

The theory challenges decades of archaeological thought about how the pyramid was built, and graces the cover of the current Archaeology magazine, published by the Archaeological Institute of America. But Egypt's chief archaeologist isn't impressed."I receive a theory every day," says Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities...

In Cairo last week, Hawass heard Houdin's presentation of his belief that the pyramid builders constructed a series of ascending internal ramps to lift the blocks from the ground and into place. The ramps remain inside the pyramid, detectable by sensors, Houdin says...

Microgravimetry, which can detect hollows beneath closed spaces, along with ground-penetrating radar could reveal the hidden internal ramps, Houdin says. But Hawass says he's not in favor of such testing, for now."The pyramids built directly after Khufu's do not have any evidence of an internal ramp," Hawass says by e-mail.

And [John Romer, author of The Great Pyramid: Ancient Egypt Revisited, released in April] dismisses Houdin's idea."In reality, huge amounts of well-documented facts exist concerning the genuine building methods employed," he says."Quite simply, we see the outline where a ramp ends in a quarry."

Related Links

How to build a pyramid (Bob Brier, Archaeology)

Pre-Islamic Middle Eastern regions were home to mysterious snake cults, according to two papers published in this month's Arabian Archaeology and Epigraphy journal.

From at least 1250 B.C. until around 550 A.D., residents of what is now the Persian Gulf worshipped snakes in elaborate temple complexes that appear to have been built for this purpose, the studies reveal.

The first paper, by archaeologist Dan Potts of the University of Sydney, describes architecture and relics dating to 500 B.C. from Qalat al-Bahrain in Bahrain.

Two rooms in what is now known as the Late Dilmun Palace each contain 39 pits, some of which surround what appears to have been an altar. At least 32 of the pits housed ceramic vessels containing bones from rat snakes and sea snakes.

The Hewlett-Packard Garage, a 12-foot by 8-foot shed at 367 Addison Ave. in Palo Alto, Calif., now stands beside such hallowed sites as the Alamo, Carnegie Hall and the White House.

The National Park Service on May 17 declared the site where Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard began their partnership in 1938 a National Historic Landmark, among those sites and some 2,400 others considered historically significant by the agency.

The garage, which first appeared in Palo Alto city records in 1924, housed the Hewlett and Packard workshop as the former Stanford University classmates tooled around with a used Sears Craftsman drill press to create an audio oscillator in 1938. They formalized their partnership as Hewlett-Packard the following year and moved on to larger quarters in 1940, but 367 Addison is regularly considered the birthplace of Silicon Valley...

HP purchased the property in 2000 and since restored the garage to its original state.