THE visitors were old and young, black and white, from neighborhoods nearby and cities on the other side of the world. But on a recent morning in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, they were all stopped in their tracks by one particular display....
The white, hooded robe was donated to the institute anonymously by someone who found it in a trunk in a house. The crude, partly burned wooden cross planted behind it was given to the museum by the local F.B.I. office. Together they stood in a plexiglass case, illuminated by a ghostly ceiling light, at the head of the museum’s aptly named Confrontation Gallery....
The Klan robe and the cross brought up vivid memories for another visitor, Pat’s husband, Willie Chambers, 67. “I was chased by the Klan,” recalled Mr. Chambers, who grew up in Selma, Ala., another flashpoint of the civil rights movement. “We knew who they were,” he said. “My mother told us, ‘Just don’t let them catch you.’ ”
In a case that has roiled scholars around the world in a broad range of disciplines, the Jerusalem District Court on Wednesday acquitted an Israeli antiquities collector, Oded Golan, of forging dozens of priceless archaeological artifacts, including an inscription on the burial box, or ossuary, of James, brother of Jesus.
"It is not every day that a court hears a case involving as many topics as this one," wrote Judge Aharon Farkash on the second-to-last page of his 475-page verdict.
"The complexity of the trial derived among other things from the fact that this was the first time that a court was asked to rule on a question of antiquities forgery, especially in the framework of a criminal trial," he said.
During the seven-year trial, the court heard testimony from experts in archaeology, the Bible, chemistry and geochemistry, geology, grammar and language, paleography, and more....
Anthony Lock is an academic and freelance journalist based in Sydney. His current research is concerned with the relationship between the sciences and arts, with a particular focus on applying Orwell's work to memetic study.
Gideon Rachman is chief foreign-affairs commentator for the Financial Times and author of Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety.
KAUFFMAN STADIUM, home of the Kansas City Royals, will become the hub of Major League Baseball in July when it hosts the All-Star Game for the first time since 1973, the year it opened. And Bob Kendrick is hoping the attendant swirl of publicity will extend to the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, about seven miles away at the fabled intersection of 18th and Vine Streets.
Mr. Kendrick, the museum’s president and executive director, is assembling a special exhibition at the museum this summer to draw some of the game’s expected crush of out-of-town visitors.
The museum exhibition will highlight the careers of several Negro Leagues players — Hank Aaron and Willie Mays among them — who went on to become big-league all-stars during Major League Baseball’s period of gradual racial integration between 1947 and 1959. (“What we’ve found is that they made a tremendous impact on the game right away,” Mr. Kendrick said.)...
A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.
The first comprehensive map of the Titanic wreck site has been created as researchers pieced together some 130,000 photos taken by underwater robots in the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean.
Resembling the moon's surface, the map shows debris and parts of the ship scattered across a 15 square-mile patch of ocean floor.
The detailed images might provide new clues about what happened after the "unsinkable" luxury liner hit an iceberg and sank on April 15, 1912, killing more than 1,500 of the 2,200 passengers and crew on board....
(NYC) Back in 1776, Nathan Hale’s only regret was that he had but one life to lose for his country.
But if he could see what has become of the statue of him that sits in City Hall Park, he might find it all, at the very least, a bit unfortunate.
Since 2007, if not earlier, the 13-foot standing figure of a bound and shackled Hale – freedom fighter, patriot, icon of liberty – has been itself chained off from the people.
The front of the statue can be glimpsed by only those who pass through the iron ring of security checkpoints that went up around City Hall more than a decade ago....
They have not yet begun to fight.
Brooklyn civic groups are leading a charge to discover the exact burial place of over 200 Revolutionary War soldiers killed at the dawn of the United States and dumped near the Gowanus Canal.
“These are the men who allowed America to come into existence — it’s a question that needs to be resolved,” said Marlene Donnelly, a member of the Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, which is working with archeologists to re-examine the region and urge action.
“The Battle of Gettysburg has an entire field put aside to remember it — and this one, we just don’t remember,” she added....
