The University of Oregon awarded honorary degrees on Sunday to 20 Japanese-Americans who were expelled during World War II. The university's president called the ceremony a step in redressing a "tragic legacy."

Beginning today, The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List is available on its website. In its 150th year of publishing, the country's oldest continuously published magazine challenged 10 award winning historians and authors to determine who have been the 100 most influential figures in American history.

Written and compiled by associate editor Ross Douthat, The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List engaged 10 panelists to consider influence based on a person's impact, for good or ill, both on his or her own era and on the way we live now. The balloting was averaged and weighted to emphasize consensus -- and candidates received extra points if they appeared on multiple ballots.

Our goal in compiling the Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List wasn't to end a debate about historical influence, but to start one," says James Bennet, editor of The Atlantic. "We're not planning to engrave this list on a marble wall somewhere. Instead, we hope it will provoke discussion and even some serious disagreement about who made America and how. Why is Walt Disney ranked ahead of Elizabeth Cady Stanton? How did Woodrow Wilson make the top 10 but not Ronald Reagan? How can Bill Gates be ahead of Elvis Presley, or Presley ahead of Lewis and Clark, or Lewis and Clark ahead of Ralph Nader, or Nader ahead of Richard Nixon? The debates over the rankings in our offices have been fascinating and, at times, feisty. We hope other people have as much fun debating them as we have. But the point of the exercise is a serious one: to help us understand the influences that have shaped modern America, and made us who we are today."



The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List begins in ranking order with Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and John Marshall. Every panelist cast a vote for these seven figures, proving that a political career was the surest way to a historical legacy.

While we are still a country of immigrants, the native-born comprise the bulk of the list; just seven of the final 100 were born outside the continental United States. Also, the East Coast had a head start; 63 of the 100 were born in the original 13 colonies; and 26 in New England alone. The Atlantic's List of inventors included Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bill and Eli Whitney. Founding and leading a religion landed many on the List including Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy. And finally, more than 30 of the figures on the List are writers.

Panelists did vote for many 20th century figures -- as well as many athletes, musicians, artists, and entertainers. For every vote for a 'mutton- chopped' Victorian, at least one vote went to a more contemporary cultural figure, such as Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan, or Tiger Woods. But the consensus favored Gilded Age industrialists and our Founding Fathers.

One of the panelists, historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Doris Kearns Goodwin, looked "for public figures who changed the daily lives of people, both at the time and afterward. In particular, I looked for great public figures who made it possible for people to lead expanded lives -- materially, psychologically, culturally and spiritually."

To see a complete listing of The Atlantic's 100 Most Influential Americans List and to cast your own vote for the most influential Americans visit their website.

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News.

The so-called Principals who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined" interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.

Highly placed sources said a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.

The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.

South Florida archeologists are busy in Southwest Miami-Dade working to preserve ancient artifacts found in an area once inhabited by Tequesta Indians.

Robert Carr, Executive Director of the Archeological and Historical Conservancy, a nonprofit organization that specializes in preserving historically significant sites, told CBS4's Ileana Varela experts have known about the site for about three decades but the decision to excavate it and save the artifacts came when Miami-Dade County decided to widen the road next to the site.

Previously secret U.S. Air Force official histories of the Vietnam war published today by the National Security Archive disclose for the first time that Central Intelligence Agency contract employees had a direct role in combat air attacks when they flew Laotian government aircraft on strike missions and that the Air Force actively considered nuclear weapons options during the 1959 Laos crisis.

The newly declassified histories, which were released through Freedom of Information Act litigation by the National Security Archive with the law firm James & Hoffman, include the Air Force's detailed official history of the war in northern Laos, written during the 1990s but hidden in classified form for years. Also declassified were Air Force historical studies on specific years of the Vietnam War, documenting in great detail the Air Force's role in planning and implementing the air war in North and South Vietnam. Among other significant disclosures in these histories are:

*Air Force interest in nuclear options during at least two flash points in the Southeast Asian conflict: Laos in 1959 and in 1968 during the battle of Khe Sanh.

*CIA operational commitments for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion hampered the Agency's ability to carry out Kennedy administration policy in Laos.

*CIA proprietary Air America directed search and rescue missions in Laos in addition to its role in combat operations.

*The U.S. ambassador in Laos served as the field commander of the so-called "secret war" there, a role that has been largely undocumented.

This briefing book was made possible through a lawsuit brought in March 2005 by the National Security Archive after it discovered through its Freedom of Information Act audits that the Air Force had a pattern and practice of mishandling FOIA requests, including failing to process requests, destroying records, discouraging requesters, and excessive delays. The Washington, D.C., law firm James & Hoffman successfully argued the case before federal Judge Rosemary Collyer, who in April 2006 granted partial summary judgment to the Archive. She found that "the Air Force has indeed failed miserably to handle Archive FOIA requests in a timely manner." The court ordered the Air Force to resolve the Archive's requests--some pending as long as 18 years--as expeditiously as possible. The requests for the Laos history and the Vietnam War studies were originally filed in 1988 and 1990; the Air Force finally processed them pursuant to the court's order and released more than 500 pages of previously-classified histories....

Five years ago this week, looters ransacked the Iraqi National Museum, stealing centuries-old artifacts that celebrated Iraq's role as the cradle of civilization. Some headlines at the time exaggerated the size of the damage, erroneously reporting 170,000 items missing. Investigators later discovered that some important artifacts, including gold jewelry from Nimrud, had been hidden at Iraq's Central Bank since the Persian Gulf War in 1991.

Today, investigators say that about 15,000 pieces were either stolen in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 or went unaccounted for in the months and years before the conflict began. About half have been recovered. But the impact of the thefts -- amulets, Assyrian ivories, sculpture heads, ritual vessels and cylinder seals -- is still being felt in art circles and black markets throughout the world.

"The numbers can't tell the whole story," said U.S. Marine Reserve Col. Matthew Bogdanos, a New York assistant district attorney who has made the hunt for antiquities his specialty. "These things remind us of our common beginnings."

Few Germans know the global space race started on a remote and sandy island off the Baltic coast, an unremarkable place with wide open skies and a carpet of pine trees.

But it was at the Peenemuende testing site in 1942 that a team of engineers under Wernher von Braun laid the foundations for sending man to the moon and the Cold War missile race. They were testing the world's first long-range ballistic missiles for the Nazis.

Germans don't celebrate the site because of the moral ambiguity at the heart of one of the last century's most significant technological breakthroughs....

In many countries, the site would be a focus for national celebration but Peenemuende's sober Historical Technical Information Centre battles even to secure public funding.

"In Germany, we cannot have the same attitude towards our technical history as in Britain or the United States because of the historical associations," said Muehldorfer-Vogt, pointing to a fierce row over a school name to illustrate his point.

An extraordinary insight into the private life of one of Hitler's most feared henchmen has come to light after more than 60 years hidden in a British home.
Viktor Lutze was a key figure in the Nazi leader's rise to power and served as chief of staff of the reviled SA - more commonly known as the brownshirts.

Yet intimate pictures seized from his house by Allied forces cast him in the unlikely role of a family man who enjoyed day trips and games of table-tennis.

Almost 100 private photographs once treasured by the one-eyed thug reveal the wealthy and care-free existence he was able to enjoy away from the Fuhrer.

Here's an arresting allegation: More slaves are now imported (though the current word for this is trafficked) into the United States annually than were imported in an average year during the American colonial era.

That is one of the talking points used lately by the author of an arresting new book on global slavery, "A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery," by E. Benjamin Skinner.

In fact, of course, at the height of the legal slave trade in the 19th century, many more African slaves were "trafficked" to the United States than are arriving now, but globally there may be more people in slavery than ever. Still, it comes as a shock to read Skinner's accounts of the people - the U.S. State Department estimates 600,000 to 800,000 brought across international borders each year - forced to work around the world under threat of violence for no pay.

Oliver Stone's new film,W, portrays George Bush as a foul-mouthed, dried-out drunk with a baseball obsession and a difficult relationship with his father.

Filming is expected to begin any day in Louisiana. The movie should be in cinemas before Mr Bush leaves office next January.

Stone says the film won't be an anti-Bush polemic. Rather, as he told Daily Variety, it will be "a fair, true portrait of the man that asks the question: how did Bush go from being an alcoholic bum to the most powerful figure in the world?"

An early script describes Mr Bush as a party animal living in the shadow of his esteemed father before he uses religion to turn his life around. He finds a new purpose in life – which is to achieve the presidency ahead of his brother Jeb, who was being groomed for high office by his father.

The Catholic Church has issued a list of 5,900 people who were forced by the Nazis to work as gardeners, grave-diggers and hospital orderlies at Catholic facilities in Germany during World War II.
The German church has already paid 1.5 million euros ($2.4 million) in compensation to 587 survivors since their ordeal was made public several years ago.

During the Nazi era, huge numbers of Eastern Europeans were forced to do factory or farm work at low pay, replacing millions of men conscripted into Hitler's army. Employers that are still in existence today have contributed to compensation trusts.

The Library of Congress–the largest library in the world and the oldest U.S. federal cultural institution–on Saturday, April 12, debuts an immersive, new "Library of Congress Experience," offering visitors unique historical and cultural treasures brought to life through cutting-edge interactive technology and a companion Web site.
The experience comprises a series of new ongoing exhibitions, dozens of interactive kiosks, an inspiring multimedia "overture" on the collections and programs of the Library, and a continuing online educational experience at the upcoming Web site myLOC.gov. All exhibits are free and open to the public.
Detailed information on the Experience can be found at a new microsite, www.loc.gov/experience/.

The site also enables the public to participate directly in the Experience by way of "Inspiration Across the Nation." Because the Experience celebrates and showcases the creativity and contributions of our nation’s early cultures, great minds and other founding influences, people nationwide will have the opportunity to submit to the Library their own creative works in the form of stories, poems, video, audio, photos–anything that can be transmitted in an electronic file.
Select entries will be chosen to be part of the Library’s permanent collections, joining the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and other cultural and historic legends.

THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS EXPERIENCE

The Art and Architecture of the Thomas Jefferson Building

Visitors to the Library’s historic Thomas Jefferson Building enter directly into the first floor Great Hall via three bronze doors, which will be opened to the public for the first time in nearly two decades on April 12, the day before Jefferson’s 265th birthday.
From there they are directed to one of two orientation galleries flanking the Great Hall, where information about events and how to navigate the new Experience is presented on overhead monitors. A multimedia "overture" plays on a multi-screen collage in each orientation gallery.
There visitors receive a Passport to Knowledge, a guide to the "greatest hits" of the Experience with instructions for self-guided audio tours. Later in 2008, a unique barcode on the Passport to Knowledge will allow visitors to play a game-based activity called Knowledge Quest and to "bookmark" objects of interest for later exploration on a personalized Web site at myLOC.gov.
In the Great Hall, interactive technology allows visitors to zoom in on the artistic and architectural details of the space, and enhances a display of two of the Library’s most prized objects: the Gutenberg Bible and Giant Bible of Mainz.
Creating the United States
On the second floor (mezzanine level) is the new exhibit "Creating the United States", where visitors are first greeted by an interactive video wall that senses their presence and reveals varied historical information based on where the visitor is standing.
"Creating the United States" tells the story of how our Founding Fathers used creativity, collaboration and compromise to form our nation, with a focus on the words and phrases that created the republic. Visitors can examine and interact with historic drafts of the Declaration of Independence, George Washington’s copy of the Constitution and John Beckley’s Bill of Rights.

Thomas Jefferson’s Library

Visitors can explore Thomas Jefferson’s library, featuring thousands of original volumes that provided the foundation for the Library of Congress and its universal collections. They also can navigate books through page-turning technology and learn how one of America’s greatest thinkers was inspired.
Exploring the Early Americas

The Library of Congress Experience incorporates the "Exploring the Early Americas" exhibit, which opened in December 2007.

The exhibition tells the story of the Americas before the time of Columbus, as well as the period of contact, conquest and their aftermath. It features unique objects from the Library’s Jay I. Kislak Collection, as well as Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 Map of the World, the first document to use the word "America."
More details can be found at:

www.loc.gov/today/pr/2007/07-233.html.

Conventional wisdom says that the longer the Democrats fight over their party's presidential nominee, the greater the chance of a GOP victory in the fall. But an analysis of the races since 1968 shows that in many contests, at least one of the nominations wasn't decided until June; one was fought until August. So is the CW right? Check out our examination of electoral history for the answer. Hint: Bill Clinton's 1992 experience was an anomaly.

It's a good bet that whoever wins in November will be greener than George W. Bush. The next president is likely to launch the nation on the path toward reducing dangerous CO2 emissions. But any legislation emerging from Congress will probably be no more than a directional signal, a declaration of intent or a down payment—a start, but at best a modest beginning. To go further, to truly tackle the greenhouse effect, will require the one thing from voters that few politicians dare to ask for and fewer achieve: massive public sacrifice.

It takes a very great leader to extract sacrifice from the voters who elected him (or her). Almost always, there is some precipitating event, some calamity, that enables a call to arms. War presidents have seized on provocations (Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor) or hyped or made up one (the sinking of the Maine, the attacks on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin). During the early days of the cold war, Harry Truman managed to persuade Congress to pay for the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe by exaggerating the Soviet threat to invade the West. (Sometimes, said his Secretary of State Dean Acheson, it is necessary to make things "clearer than the truth.") Advocates of invading Iraq managed to confuse voters into believing that Saddam Hussein was somehow involved with the 9/11 attacks.

But what event will suffice to wake up voters to global warming? Al Gore and his PowerPoint presentations and affecting movie raised the consciousness of opinion makers and many citizens. But scary movies are not enough to make ordinary taxpayers willing to pay higher taxes for fuel, drive much smaller cars and otherwise watch their energy consumption (though Europeans seem to be able to do all the above). If we wait until the water starts lapping over Manhattan to really do something to affect climate change, it will be too late.

At Politico, we love politics for some of the same reasons people love sports: the endless human drama.

Unlike a lot of people, of course, we don’t have the freedom — or, truth be told, the desire — to root for one side or the other to win. But we do have a clear preference for great characters and for watching how they react during moments of high pressure.

It was in this spirit that we sat down to ponder the 50 greatest political moments of the past 50 years.

Like all lists, ours is pretty random. We could have easily come up with other choices — and indeed, we left dozens on the cutting room floor....

Archaeologists now believe a dozen skeletons discovered in a mass grave in the centre of Oxford may have belonged to executed criminals from Saxon times.

A team of three archaeologists have been digging in the quadrangle of St John's College in Blackhall Road, off St Giles, for nearly two weeks since the discovery was made.

The bones of 12 or 13 bodies have gradually been uncovered after a body part was discovered 80cm below ground level by diggers excavating the plot before a new quadrangle is built.

Recent findings by a Russian-American research team suggest that prehistoric cultures were hunting whales at least 3,000 years ago, 1,000 years earlier than was previously known.

University of Alaska Museum of the North archaeology curator Daniel Odess presented the team's findings at the Society for American Archaeology annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia last week.

"The importance of whaling in arctic prehistory is clear. Prehistoric settlements were situated and defended so that people could hunt whales," says Odess. "Yet, as important as whaling is, we know very little about how, where and when it began."

A recently disclosed memo gave U.S. interrogators the ability to use harsh methods -- what many call "torture" -- to extract information from terrorist suspects after 9/11. Around the world, critics saw it as another blow to American prestige and moral authority.

The 2003 document also invokes wartime powers to protect interrogators who violate the Geneva Conventions, for example, by the use of waterboarding -- when a prisoner is made to think he is drowning.

Half a world away, the divisive debate over whether waterboarding constitutes torture comes into sharp relief at the infamous S-21, Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

This is where the genocidal regime of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge imprisoned and brutalized its enemies from 1975 to 1979. I visited the once secret S-21, now a museum, with Van Nath, a former inmate. He remembers being brought here blindfolded and terrified:

"I thought that was the end of my life," he told me. "In my room people kept dying, one or two every day."

His inner circle called him The Doctor, because of his Ph.D in mathematics. Some of his operatives called him Our Big Brother. The Central Intelligence Agency called him by a code name — which intelligence sources reveal as Pulsar One. Whatever you call him, Ahmad Abdul Hadi Chalabi, a shrewd Iraqi Arab from a family of Shiite bankers, literally changed the world. The United States, which he referred to so respectfully as a “strategic ally,” had sponsored him, flown him and his people to Iraq, even toppled Saddam Hussein for him, as he would boast. The Iraq War has many critics and some fierce defenders, but many insiders on both sides of the debate agree on this: without Chalabi there would have been no war.

By a 4-1 vote Thursday night, the Perryville City Council rejected a proposed subdivision that would have been near Kentucky's largest Civil War battlefield."I'm relieved," said Sherry Robinson, a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who had spoken against the proposal."Right now, we're ecstatic." Marion"Pete" Coyle Jr., the landowner who had wanted to develop a portion of his farm on U.S. 150 just west of downtown Perryville, had little comment after the vote."I'm upset right now," Coyle said as he left City Hall.

He called himself Galt — Eric Starvo Galt.

He drove in from Alabama on the weekend of March 23, 1968, and paid $10.50 for a week's rent in a seedy rooming house on 14th Street near Peachtree, in Atlanta's hippie district.

Three weeks later, FBI agents discovered he had left something behind in his hurriedly vacated room: a map of Atlanta with the locations of a particular church, office and home circled in pencil. A thumbprint on the map linked the stranger to fingerprints found on items dropped outside another seedy rooming house in Memphis, including a rifle.

Eric Galt, the FBI announced, was the alias of an escaped prisoner named James Earl Ray, and he was wanted for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

Forty years ago today, a single sniper shot ended King's life in Memphis. It could have happened in Atlanta. Investigators believed that Ray had followed King for 2 1/2 weeks, from California to Alabama to Georgia, where he settled into Midtown, then a transitional neighborhood light-years away from the high-rent, high-rise district of today.

Standing outside the First Bank of Charleston, it's hard to picture exactly where Col. Joseph Andrew Jackson Lightburn dug in his log breastworks and aimed his cannons across the Elk and Kanawha rivers to slow the advancing Confederate army.

"My guess is it was over there, in the bank's parking lot," says John Bullock, an engineer, member of the Charleston Land Trust and, on this day, amateur historian and Civil War buff. After walking around a bit, Bullock decides the fortifications might have been placed a block or two away.

Though Bullock has a map, hand-drawn by a participant of the Sept. 13, 1862, Battle of Charleston, it's no match for the grid of city streets that overlays the West Side 146 years later. The map shows several rivers and streams and one road (Point Pleasant & Charleston Road, now Washington Street). Small symbols indicate gun placements, a handful of homes and graveyards.

But the crude map is not to scale, leaving modern-day observers to make educated guesses. Where was that cornfield near downtown - at the site of Charleston Town Center or a bit farther east?
Since he first learned a couple of years ago that Charleston was the site of a Civil War battle, Bullock has been on a mission to not only educate others but to create a lasting reminder - perhaps in the form of a historical trail.

Virginia markets its history well, he says. "It's hard to drive in Virginia without seeing one of those brown signs that indicate a federal or historical site." Why not bring some of those brown signs to Charleston?

There are more than 100 specialty license plates in Florida, and now they want another. However, this one may be controversial.

Representative Don Brown of DuFuniak Springs proposed a bill that creates a license plate displaying the Confederate Heritage Flag.

The bill has no co-sponsors and is considered “dead” because no committees have taken the bill up for debate.

Representative Brown admitted he thought it would stir controversy.

“It is not about racism, it’s not about slavery, it is about an acknowledgement that many of these people’s families have documented that they had friends and family or family who lost their lives fighting for a cause they believed in,” said Brown.

SCOTLAND, Md. (AP) - Civil war buffs are headed to St. Mary's County this morning to work on restoring the last remaining earthen walls of Fort Lincoln.

Fort Lincoln was the site of Hammond Hospital, built by the Union Army after General George McClellan's unsuccessful campaign to capture Richmond. The site later became a prison for Confederate soldiers after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

Raleigh, NC: Each April, a stranger creeps into Oakwood Cemetery and drapes a single gravestone with a black sash.

He lights a candle in tribute to a doomed Confederate hanged for firing a last-ditch shot at Raleigh's Yankee occupiers.

Chuck Gooch has spent 21 years as the cemetery's superintendent and hasn't any idea who leaves the sash on the tomb of the soldier known only as Lt. Walsh. "We usually leave it up until it starts looking bad or the wind takes it down," he said.

After 20 years, the soldier's secret admirer remains a small-time legend among history buffs who like to guess at his identity. The guessing begins anew each April 13, the death date of the hotheaded Texan with no known first name.

Shreveport Mayor Cedric Glover and Bossier City Mayor Lorenz Walker will declare Confederate History Month in the two cities next week, repeating a similar declaration from last year.

Shreveport was the prize sought by Union President Abraham Lincoln in the 1864 Red River Campaign that culminated in the back-to-back battles of Mansfield and Pleasant Hill. In June 1865, Shreveport was the last capital city of the Confederate States to surrender to Union forces, carving a unique spot in the city's history.

It also was the city to which Confederate President Jefferson Davis was headed when he was captured by Union forces, and the last place on land where the Confederate flag waved, he penned in his memoirs.

Scott Solice, a member of Sons of Confederate Veterans, said he wonders why Shreveport and the rest of northwest Louisiana have not begun to plan ways to capture tourist dollars with this heritage for the approaching sesquicentennial of the Civil War, which will be observed nationally from 2011-15. Civil War centennial events from 1961-65 drew tourists globally to most Southern states and a few Union states, such as Pennsylvania and Vermont.

[Andrew Wagner is a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wis.]

Should anyone cherish a society in which 40 percent of the population was once enslaved? A society in which the proportion of slaves to freedmen was one to 25? That, after all, was the reality of life in the Confederate States of America.

Of course, the answer to this question is a personal one. However, when governments start getting involved in answering this question, the situation rapidly gets out of hand....

So far this year, two states — Mississippi and Georgia — have signed and sealed proclamations declaring April to be a month for Confederate remembrance.

Mississippi’s proclamation approaches the issue in a relatively neutral manner. Their document proclaims a Confederate Memorial Day when “we recognize all those who served in the Confederacy” that gives Americans the opportunity “to reflect upon our nation’s past” and “gain insight from our mistakes and successes.”

All in all, the document isn’t very controversial. While my personal insight from looking at the history of the Confederacy is that it should be cursed rather than remembered, everyone’s entitled to a different personal opinion.

Whereas Mississippi takes an appropriately subdued approach to the topic, Georgia’s proclamation makes a mockery of history and the reality of life in the Confederacy. Georgia’s Confederate History Month proclamation asserts “Georgia has long cherished her Confederate history.” This alone isn’t too alarming, although I question why anyone would want to publicly announce how much they cherish a slave society.

But the most disturbing part comes immediately thereafter. Here, the proclamation claims to recognize the “many African Americans both free and slave who saw action in the Confederate Armed Forces” as well as those who “participated in the manufacture of products for the war effort.”

The net effect of this language immensely confuses the issues surrounding the Confederacy. In this rendition of history, it almost sounds as if blacks and whites all banded together to fight for states’ rights and liberty. Considering that only 1.5 percent of the Confederacy’s population was free blacks, I somehow doubt this was the case.

I bet the slaves who were forced to work in the war industries had a much different perspective on what was going on there. Furthermore, I suspect the many slaves who worked in the cotton plantations that helped fund the Southern war effort didn’t have a particularly positive view of their situation either. In fact, I suspect they were much more likely to curse what they were doing than to cherish it.

The idea that white and black southerners willingly joined together to fight northerners simply isn’t supported by the available evidence. What little joint fighting and effort that occurred is insignificant, especially given that the South did not create a program to offer slaves freedom in return for fighting until the last few months of the war. It’s clear to me that on this subject the state of Georgia is fundamentally wrong. Under the guise of remembering the tragedy of the Civil War, Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue has affixed his signature to a document that obscures and molds history into a parody of itself.

A COLD War bunker, designed to withstand a direct hit by a nuclear bomb and built less than 20 years ago, has received one of the highest categories of listing in English Heritage's register of buildings of architectural and historic importance.

But the 17th century riverside inn, the Pike and Eel in Needingworth, has been de-listed because of the quality and size of 20th century additions.

The "Magic Mountain", as the former US Air Force avionics building at RAF Alconbury is known to planners, was one of the last of a number of hardened structures designed to protect U2 and TR-1 spy planes at the base.