NEW YORK, NY – The New-York Historical Society is pleased to announce that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded it a grant of $400,000 to support a traveling program and educational initiatives surrounding its new exhibition Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn.

Revolution! is the first museum exhibition to explore the revolutions in America, France and Haiti as a single grand narrative from 1763 to 1815, tracing their cumulative transformation of politics, society and culture across the Atlantic world. Itwill also be the first major history exhibition to be presented by the New-York Historical Society when it fully re-opens its galleries on November 11, 2011, after a three-year, $65 million renovation.

"The New-York Historical Society is deeply grateful to the National Endowment for the  Humanities for this very generous endorsement of our mission, which is to engage the broadest possible public in the enjoyment of learning about history," said Louise Mirrer, President and CEO of the New-York Historical Society. "Through this grant, we will be able to extend the reach of Revolution! and make it accessible to a much wider audience."

The NEH has awarded the grant through its “America's Historical & Cultural Organizations Implementation Grant” program, which supports museum exhibitions, library-based projects, interpretation of historic places or areas, websites and other project formats that excite and inform thoughtful reflection upon culture, identity and history....

Jacqueline Kennedy recalled in a series of oral-history interviews recorded in 1964, but just released, that President Kennedy felt strongly that Lyndon Johnson shouldn't become president, ABC News reports. In the months just before his death in 1963 he has even begun talking to his brother, Robert Kennedy, "about ways to maneuver around Johnson in 1968."...

Unraveling the mystery surrounding the shipwreck found last year during excavations of the World Trade Center site has resulted in several facts as well as theories. The 18th century vessel, likely a single-masted sloop, measured approximately 50 feet long, and had a shallow, double-ended draft aided by a small, tapered keel built of squared-off hickory that that ran from stem-to-stern. The hull was built from Philadelphia oak trees -- one of which had lived for at least 111 years and was still growing in 1773, its youngest sapwood preserved in one of the boat's timbers.

Maritime historian Norman Brouwer had suggested that the unusually crafted sailboat was from a small rural shipyard and the trees for its timber from the same forest. "The data we see suggest something very similar," says Neil Pederson of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory's Tree Ring Lab in Palisades, NY. "It's an interesting intersection in experts," he told Discovery News. He was part of a four-person dendrochronology team from the Tree Ring Lab working on samples of the vessel's white oak planks and its hickory keel. Other tree species used in the boat's construction included spruce and southern yellow pine, reported wood deterioration researcher Robert Blanchette of the University of Maine.

Looking up tree ring patterns for white oak timber samples is like hunting down a family's genealogy. To get the most accurate result, teams of people around the world need to have already done the manual labor of counting rings and entering forest timber chronologies into a database. Then it's a matter of sleuthing through generations of tree life-cycles to find a pattern that fits: where the timber samples and the trees share the same local climate of wet and dry years allowing them to make matching patterns of wide rings and skinny rings. So where to start?...

The headline writers at USA Today put it this way: "9/11: How One Day Changed Our World." National Geographic observed that the attacks of Sept. 11 would "alter the course of history."

But the shocking assaults in 2001 on the World Trade towers, the Pentagon and the planned hit on the Capitol were not the first surprise attacks that changed the way humans do business.

Through the centuries, there have been unexpected strikes on civilian targets that occurred during wars — declared or not — and peacetime attacks that came completely out of the blue. The Sept. 11 attacks fall into the latter category.

Sudden assailments have toppled societies and shaken civilizations. The element of surprise can be a very potent change agent. And, perhaps, the most powerful weapon of all.

One of the earliest accounts of an epic surprise attack comes from Greek mythology: the Trojan Horse. The episode, explains George Dameron, a history professor at Saint Michael's College in Colchester, Vt., is associated with the 10-year war between Greeks and Trojans....

PARIS, Sept 7, 2011 (Tierramérica) - The latest archeological findings in the Mirador Basin of Guatemala lend further credence to the theory that the Maya civilisation that once flourished there was brought down by environmental causes such as deforestation.

A major exhibition at the Musée du Quai Branly in París until Oct. 2, "Maya: From Dawn to Dusk", features over 150 pieces of art and ceramics from El Mirador, in northern Guatemala, and illustrates the scientific and artistic sophistication of this ancient Mesoamerican civilisation.

The artifacts - cups, sculptures, portions of stele (carved stone slabs) and ceramic reliefs – were recently uncovered at the archeological site in the northern department of Petén, near the Mexican border....

While they demonstrate the high degree of scientific and artistic development of the Mayas, the ceramics and especially the architecture suggest that their collapse was caused by the environmental degradation of the region, says U.S. archeologist Richard Hansen, the director of the Mirador Basin research project and scientific adviser for the Paris exhibition....

Most American children never receive any education about the union movement’s proper place in our country’s history and its many contributions to the nation’s development, according to a new report.

“American Labor and U.S. History Textbooks: How Labor’s Story Is Distorted in High School History Textbooks,” sponsored by the Albert Shanker Institute in cooperation with the American Labor Studies Center, surveys four major textbooks that together account for most of the market in U.S. history textbooks. The report found that these textbooks often present labor history in a biased, negative way, focusing on strikes and strike violence while giving little or no attention to the employer abuse and violence that caused the strikes....

In the spring of 1964, less than six months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. began conducting more than eight hours of interviews with Kennedy’s widow, Jacqueline. At her request, the transcripts and tapes were sealed from the public. Now her daughter, Caroline, is releasing the interviews in a new book, Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy, to be published on Sept. 14.

On a hot summer morning in Boston, Caroline Kennedy sat down to talk to PARADE about the conversations, which reveal a different side to the glamorous woman the world calls Jackie O but whom Caroline still calls “Mummy.” Inside the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Caroline, 53, wearing a beige summer coat, an off-white blouse, and a light beige skirt, displayed the elegance of her mother and the charm of her father, whose bust stood nearby.

This daughter of Camelot has managed to live a quietly public life on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with her husband, Edwin Schlossberg, and their three children (Rose, 23; Tatiana, 21; and John, 18), whom she credits with inspiring her to endorse Barack Obama in 2008. Save for a brief but awkward foray into politics—she expressed interest in Hillary Clinton’s vacated New York Senate seat in 2009 but then withdrew her name from consideration—she has carried her family’s legacy into the 21st century with grace and fortitude. In fact, as Caroline talks about her father, her brother, and her hopes for her own children, she exhibits the qualities she most admires in her mother: a sense of strength, a passion for reading, and the will to move forward despite the pain that has come her way.

PARADE: How did the Schlesinger interviews with your mother happen in the first place?
CAROLINE KENNEDY: In 1964, my mother, Uncle Bobby and Uncle Teddy, and others were looking for ways to create a living memorial to my father and inspire a new generation to go into public service and politics to make the world better, as he did. They also wanted to preserve the record of his administration. The technique of oral history was fairly new then, but the idea was to capture people’s recollections while they were still fresh. Over 1,000 people were interviewed, and Mummy decided she should be a part of it. She chose Arthur Schlesinger because she wanted to do it with somebody who shared her sense of history....

BEIRUT: Kamal Salibi, the most respected Lebanese historian of his generation, died in Beirut Thursday morning at the age of 82.

Born in Beirut on May 2, 1929, and raised in Bhamdoun, Salibi was educated at International College and the American University of Beirut. He earned his doctorate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His thesis, entitled “Maronite historians and Lebanon’s medieval history,” was supervised by noted Orientalist Bernard Lewis....

...Because American Indians lived everywhere in this country, the NPS could tell Native stories at almost every site. After all, it has chosen to tell the stories of settlers at most park units. Unfortunately, the NPS usually leaves out the Native stories in the parks, letting Indians vanish from most park landscapes.

Too much of the NPS’s interpretation of our history is incomplete, and it usually leaves out the Native stories. And when it does tell a Native story, all too often, it is through the eyes of other people, the way it has been done it in too many movies. In Dances With Wolves, for example, Kevin Costner portrays the Lakota sympathetically, but through the eyes of a white military man who falls in love with a white woman who had been adopted by the tribe. A less benign example of that can be found at Indiana Dunes National Seashore, which tells of the Potawatomi tribe through the experiences of a white man, Joseph Bailly. A sign at the Bailly homestead explains that he bought beaver furs and other items from the Potawatomi in exchange for various trade goods. Another sign says the United States gave Bailly $6,000 for counseling the Potawatomi when they sold their land in the Chicago Treaty of 1833. That was a huge sum of money back then, but the sign doesn’t say what he did in those negotiations that made the U.S. government so grateful. Nor does the sign finish the story—the Potawatomi ended up on a “Trail of Death” westward, across the Mississippi....

(CNN) -- Before Moammar Gadhafi, there were the Phoenicians. And the Greeks. The Romans. The first Arabs. They're a reminder that no civilization -- and no leader -- is forever.

The Libyan transitional leaders have a lot to deal with once they stop being rebels, and begin shaping a new Libya: Keeping law and order, setting up a rudimentary government, dealing with money -- and oil.

But what about Libya's other wealth? Its archaeological treasures?

They are all over the country.

In the south, in Acacus, rock paintings 12,000 years old cross an entire mountain range....

The former Gettysburg Country Club has belonged to the National Park Service for just five months, but plans are already underway to restore the land to its Civil War appearance of 1863.

However, significant alterations to the property, where the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg was fought in 1863, won't occur until after Gettysburg National Military Park completes a "Cultural Landscape Report."

According to GNMP Superintendent Bob Kirby, the park intends to raze four buildings that previously served as maintenance or storage sheds for a nine-hole golf course. The park is in the process of awarding a demolition contract to remove a golf cart barn, a rest-room building made of concrete block, a wooden shelter, and a small masonry structure used as a well-house.

They will likely be razed over the next month....

Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich on Sunday rejected demands to compensate Germans who were forced to work in neighbouring countries after World War II.

Erika Steinbach, the president of the Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV), which represents Germans who were displaced after the war, wants the government to compensate people who were required to labour in nearby countries following the defeat of the Nazis.

But the minister told Steinbach in a letter that what happened after the war was simply fate and cannot be compensated, according to the newspaper Bild am Sonntag.

The BdV is widely loathed in eastern Europe for consistently making calls for compensation to those Germans displaced during and after the war. While many Germans had to perform forced labour in neighboring countries, BdV opponents argue the war only took place because Nazi Germany started it....

YORK, ENGLAND—Helen Brower is a window cleaner and people pay five pounds ($7.25) an hour to watch her work.

Brower is one of a half dozen glaziers hired to clean and restore the world’s largest collection of medieval stained-glass windows. They festoon York Minster, one of Europe’s largest cathedrals and they need to be cleaned every 125 years....

On Wednesday and Friday afternoons, tours — with a maximum of 10 people — are conducted into the bowels of the cathedral to watch glaziers work on the medieval window panes. While down there visitors can also see remains of the Roman fortress that once stood on this site before the cathedral was built between 1220 and 1472. Yes, it took 252 years.

Another sign of York’s Roman heritage is the high stone wall surrounding the city’s ancient core. Much of it was built by the Romans back in 71 AD, about the same time they were building the colosseum in Rome....