What the public remembers, it remembers in pictures. Wars, even more than other events, tend to survive in the popular imagination not just as a chronology of events, but also as an archive of images.

When it comes to remembering the World War I, most of us have had to content ourselves with a visual inheritance almost exclusively limited to black and white photography. No longer.

In a new book edited by historian Peter Walther, an extraordinary set of color images from the wartime photographer Hands Hilderbrand will be published for the first time. The pictures force us to alter our impression of the war as a gray and cloudy affair, confronting us instead with an unsettling portait of devastating iridescence.

As Europeans massacred one another with unprecedented efficiency on the fields of Flanders, they were greeted with sunshine and lush landscapes. As rounds of amunition dimpled the topography of Belgium and France, a new season would cause flowers to bloom over the craters left by explosive shells.

Jules Crittenden reports that federal agents are investigating whether CBS correspondent Lara Logan smuggled mementoes to the U.S.

Agents found out that Logan had items in her possession which belong back in Iraq, after a video profile on the beautiful reporter was aired called “Lara Logan’s Spoils of War.”

In the video, Logan shows off mementoes from Iraq and Afghanistan which she keeps in her Washington office. She explained she found the pieces in the ruins of the Olympic committee building after it was bombed by American forces.

COVINGTON, La. -- Eight people were arrested Tuesday in connection with the killing of a woman who apparently tried to back out of a Ku Klux Klan initiation ritual, St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Jack Strain said Tuesday.The woman was slain Sunday morning, allegedly shot to death by a Klan leader from Bogalusa. Her body was found Monday in a ditch in the small St. Tammany community of Sun, about 60 miles north of New Orleans, the sheriff said.

Fear of the politician with the unusual name and look did not end with last Tuesday’s vote in this rural red swatch where buck heads and rifles hang on the wall. This corner of the Deep South still resonates with negative feelings about the race of President-elect Barack Obama.

What may have ended on Election Day, though, is the centrality of the South to national politics. By voting so emphatically for Senator John McCain over Mr. Obama — supporting him in some areas in even greater numbers than they did President Bush — voters from Texas to South Carolina and Kentucky may have marginalized their region for some time to come, political experts say.

The region’s absence from Mr. Obama’s winning formula means it “is becoming distinctly less important,” said Wayne Parent, a political scientist at Louisiana State University. “The South has moved from being the center of the political universe to being an outside player in presidential politics.”

PEOPLE GUILTY of crimes linked to the Troubles will not be handed an automatic amnesty in any reconciliation process, the Eames-Bradley group - which is dealing with the legacy of violence - said yesterday.

Denis Bradley, who chairs the Consultative Group on the Past with Lord Eames, warned however that Northern Ireland society must face up to its history if it is to move on.

He said his group would publish its proposals on dealing with the legacy of the Troubles early in the new year, but he warned that everyone must help heal the wounds of what remained a sectarian society.

Two days after Barack Obama became the first African-American to be voted into the White House, the percentage of black voters who view American society as fair and decent jumped 18 points to 42% (see crosstabs).
Just a month earlier, only 24% of black voters viewed American society as fair and decent.

A new figure in humanity's history emerged last week when archaeologists announced the discovery of what could be one of the world's oldest known spiritual figures. After years of meticulous excavation just miles from Israel's Mediterranean coast, scientists from the Institute of Archaeology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem unearthed a 12,000-year-old grave that held the remains of a diminutive "shaman" woman. Buried alongside the woman's small, huddled corpse were selected pieces of animal bone, a cowtail, an eagle wing, the foot of another human, and, most curiously, some fifty tortoise shells deliberately arranged around the woman's body - all tell-tale signs, experts say, of her lofty social status at the time. "This is something very special; it stands apart," says Leore Grosman, the project's lead archaeologist.

Fifty years ago, a Republican senator from New York [Jacob Javits] predicted that by the year 2000, America would elect its first black president. Close enough. Read this extraordinary essay from December 1958 to see where we were as a nation -- and how far we’ve come.

[The Essay]

... Fantasy? To be sure, a speculation into the future as we look ahead from 1958. But a speculation based on realistic appraisal of fact for the march of progress and world events make it quite possible that a member of the Negro race will be appointed to a top cabinet post1 or elected to the Presidency or Vice-Presidency by the year 20002<. And by Negro, I am not quibbling here with regard to the vast but undetermined number of Americans who have 1/32 or slightly more of Negro blood. I am dealing here with a person whose skin pigmentation is obviously other than white. I also believe that racial and religious prejudices will be eradicated so thoroughly that minority group persons -- Catholic, Jewish, or other -- will be able to run for high office without any special handicap; they will run on their merits as racial equals with white Protestants....

Americans like to think they perfected the peaceful transfer of power from old regime to new: no crimes, no coups, no blood in the streets. But that doesn't mean the future Former Leader of the Free World has an easy time handing over the keys to the White House. It's not just ego that has a way of fouling up this transition; both parties have one eye on the history books, as the outgoing President airbrushes the epilogue and the arriving one prepares the prologue.

This election, given the circumstances and transformational mood, has been compared to Franklin Roosevelt's ouster of Herbert Hoover, another transition that occurred amid economic carnage. Happily for all concerned, this time both the incoming and outgoing President appear inclined to play nicer than their predecessors did.

It didn't help in 1932 that the two men neither liked nor trusted each other: Hoover called Roosevelt a "chameleon on plaid," while F.D.R. preferred the image of Hoover as a "fat, timid capon." In the final days of the campaign, Hoover denounced Roosevelt's "nonsense ... tirades ... glittering generalizations ... ignorance" and "defamation" on his way to losing to him in 42 of 48 states. Since Inauguration Day was not until March 4, 1933, and with the global financial system in tatters, there was urgent need for action — but Hoover's efforts to reach out to Roosevelt in the name of bipartisan cooperation were dismissed by critics as his trying to reverse the election results and force Roosevelt to agree to an agenda that would have effectively gutted the New Deal. Hoover's defenders, meanwhile, saw him as a "man on the verge of victory," notes biographer Richard Norton Smith, "who had arrested the downward spiral only to see it slip out of control through the irresponsible behavior of his successor."

A court ruled today that the National Security Archive may proceed with its effort to force the White House to recover millions of Bush Administration Executive Office of the President (EOP) e-mail records before the presidential transition. Rejecting the government's motion to dismiss the Archive's lawsuit, the Court ruled that the Federal Records Act permits a private plaintiff to bring suit to require the head of the EOP or the Archivist of the United States to notify Congress or ask the Attorney General to initiate action to recover destroyed or missing e-mail records.

"This ruling gives the public a clear voice in demanding preservation of our nation's history, even when that history is created at the White House," explained Sheila Shadmand, an attorney at Jones Day who is representing the Archive. "We can now give positive action to that voice and protect these records before they get carted off or destroyed as the current administration packs its bags to leave. In that sense, the ruling itself is as historical as the records it will protect."

"This is a major victory for the public interest in accountability at the White House," added Archive General Counsel Meredith Fuchs. "Through this lawsuit we have preserved over 65,000 computer backup tapes. This decision means those tapes will survive the end of the Bush Administration so that Congress, the courts, and eventually the public will be able to learn about the decision-making that took place over the last 8 years."

The National Security Archive originally filed its case against the Executive Office of the President and the National Archives and Records Administration to preserve and restore missing e-mail federal records in September 5, 2007. A subsequent lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has been consolidated with the Archive's lawsuit.

In a library deep in the western Indian countryside, in an academy surrounded by farms on all sides, five students are writing briskly in their ruled notebooks.

They are in their early 20s and newly enrolled, pimples dotting their faces and polish peeling from their nails.

But there is no discounting the gravity of their assignment: When they complete it, the world will have five more documented languages at its disposal.

One word at a time, they are making dictionaries of languages that they grew up with but that to the outside world scarcely exist. They are oral languages, whose sounds have perhaps never before appeared in ink.

AMBITIOUS plans have been unveiled for the rebuilding of the Temple of Artemis - one of the original seven wonders of the world at Selçuk, near Izmir.

The Temple of Artemis, or Artemision in Greek, recalled in both Greek and Byzantine anthologies for its magnificence, was once one of the Seven Wonders of the World. After decades of vandalism, religious conflict and decay it is finally to be rebuilt.

Dr. At&#305;lay &#304;leri, the founder of the Selçuk Artemis Culture, Arts and Education Foundation, met with Dr. Anton Bammer of the archaeology institute at the University of Vienna, Austria, a decade ago while Dr Bammer was leading a series of excavations in the area. During this period, experts searched for the techniques on how to rebuild Artemis.

The Pequot War, a conflict between English settlers and the Pequot tribe, is the focus of a new comprehensive study by a team of UConn researchers.

Kevin McBride, associate professor of anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS), says the war, which took place from 1636 to 1638 in southern New England, remains one of the most misinterpreted and least understood events in the history of early America.

McBride is working on the project with Connecticut State Historian Walter Woodward, assistant professor of history in CLAS, State Archaeologist Nick Bellantoni, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center.

Apocalypto fans might be forgiven for thinking the fabled collapse of the ancient Maya, the retreat of a civilization from pyramids and ceremonial centers across Central America from 800 to 1000 A.D., involved all sorts of cataclysmic events, war, famine and devastation. Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed detailed how environmental disasters might be to blame, a popular scholarly explanation for the Maya collapse.
"These models suggest that as ecosystems were destroyed by mismanagement or were transformed by global climatic shifts, the depletion of agricultural and wild foods eventually contributed to the failure of the Maya sociopolitical system," writes environmental archaeologist Kitty Emery of the Florida Museum of Natural History in the current Human Ecology journal.

But in that case, she asks in her study, what do the archaeological remains of what the Maya ate tell us about the collapse? To find out, Emery looked to the precious archaeological resources offering the keys to the past.

"We looked mostly at garbage pits," Emery says, 460 of them, left over from former centers of the Petexbatun region of Guatemala, "right in the heart of the central lowlands" where the Maya lived. Petexbatun (Peh-tesh-BAH-toon) is best known for the abandoned pyramid centers of Dos Pilas and Cancuen investigated by a group led by Vanderbilt University's Arthur Demarest for more than a decade. Sorting through trash heaps in the region, Emery and colleagues have collected the bones, shells and scraps thrown away by the Maya who once lived near these sites.

Emery looked at game animal remains from white-tail deer, red brocket deer and peccaries (small pig-like critters native to Central America) to see if the hunting went south on the Maya before the collapse. Did the Maya switch to less tasty animals as the collapse neared and the larder went bare?

Not so much, the study reports. "Resource depression, if it existed in this region during the collapse periods, is reflected by the reduced availability of a single species (white-tail deer) and not the cadre of nutritionally significant prey. It was therefore not a significant factor in the political and social changes ("the Maya collapse") that occurred at the end of occupation in the Petexbatun region."

In fact, looking back at the animal remains dating back to the earliest era of Maya occupation in the region, about 600 B.C., the hunting in Petexbatun seems to have been okay for a long time. Whenever the elite at a site were bent on impressing the neighbors, through marriages, alliances or other means, they went hunting for white-tailed deer, "food that was associated with fertility, leadership and status," Emery says. "They were showing off. It's an old story."

- Barack Obama, elected president as an agent of change, is building his new team with old hands from the Clinton administration.

His first appointment, chief of staff, went to Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois representative and veteran of the last Democratic White House. Leading Obama's transition team is John Podesta, who was President Bill Clinton's chief of staff.

Obama's most dramatic step would be to name New York Senator Hillary Clinton, his defeated rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, as secretary of state. Two Obama advisers confirm the idea has been discussed, though they say they don't know how seriously the president-elect is considering it or whether Clinton would accept it.

Faced from day one with an economic crisis and two wars, Obama's campaign theme of changing the way Washington works is about to be overtaken by getting to work in Washington. For that, experience helps.

``Once you become president-elect, the rubber hits the road, and you're going to want to put people in positions of power who have a proven track record,'' says Chris Lehane, who was a special assistant counsel to Clinton.

The presence of Clinton-era advisers has drawn fire on blogs: from liberals who viewed the Clinton administration as too centrist and conservatives for whom the former president remains a favorite target.

The other risk for Obama is that his administration ``can quickly look like the Clinton administration, now defined, by his campaign, as the status quo,'' says Julian Zelizer, a history and public-affairs professor at Princeton University in New Jersey.

Related Links

Transition 1980: Ronald Reagan