Lerner would say years later that the women taught her during those six weeks how to survive and that the experience taught her how society can manipulate people. It was a lesson that the women's history pioneer, who died Wednesday at age 92, said she saw reinforced in American academia by history professors who taught as though only the men were worth studying.

"When I was faced with noticing that half the population has no history and I was told that that's normal, I was able to resist the pressure" to accept that conclusion, Lerner told the Wisconsin Academic Review in 2002.

The author was a founding member of the National Organization for Women and is credited with creating the nation's first graduate program in women's history, in the 1970s in New York.

Her son said she died peacefully of apparent old age at an assisted-living facility in Madison, where she helped establish a doctoral program in women's history at the University of Wisconsin.

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The New York Times notes that his recently published presidential biographies, "Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination That Changed America Forever" and "Killing Kennedy: The End of Camelot," have been the top two books on the list for the past full week, with the latter having sold about one million copies.

In fact, the Times suggests that O'Reilly might be "the most popular history author in America" in part due to his television fame, and partially due to the sheer volume of work he has pumped out over the years:

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Perhaps it's just that the necklace — a gradated strand of perfectly matched pink pearls — lacked a catchy name, or a curse? Nevertheless, this was a significant piece of jewelry. In the early 20th century, before the advent of cultured pearls and when the gems could only be found in one out of hundreds of wild oysters, the necklace was fabulously precious, worth "twice the price of the Hope Diamond" according to Crosby. The New York Times dubbed it "the Mona Lisa of pearls," an odd coincidence since Leonardo da Vinci's painting was also stolen around the same time. The pinching of the pearl necklace -- the property of one Max Mayer, a British jeweler -- did constitute front page news. But Joseph Grizzard, the legendary "King of the Fences" who masterminded the theft, never told his side of the story, so there's been no definitive firsthand account of the caper to move the story along.

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Wei Guangbiao said prehistoric man ate the bears in what is now part of the city of Chongqing in south-west China.

Wei, head of the Institute of Three Gorges Paleoanthropology at a Chongqing museum, said excavated panda fossils "showed that pandas were once slashed to death by man".

The Chongqing Morning Post quoted him as saying: "In primitive times, people wouldn't kill animals that were useless to them," and therefore the pandas must have been used as food. But he said pandas were much smaller in prehistoric times.

Wei said wild pandas lived in Chongqing's high mountains 10,000 to 1m years ago.

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He picked up a spoon and tinkled it against his glass. Suddenly, the room fell silent. Dad got to his feet.

“I’d just like to thank everyone for coming,” he announced. “I’m aware that some of you hail from just around the corner and that others have made the journey from much further afield. But I want you to know that you are all most welcome, and that it’s very much appreciated. Oh, and that there’s a small reception in the King’s Arms across the road after you’ve finished. Thanks once again, and see you in the pub!”

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With more than half the city's population fled and most of those remaining stricken by the virus known as Yellow Jack, Bronze John and "the Stranger's Disease" — yellow fever — Memphis resembled a post-apocalyptic landscape to rival that in any zombie film. At the peak of the epidemic, corpses lay in the streets as overburdened work crews struggled to convey them to mass graves. Looters rampaged through the posher homes in the only major urban center between St. Louis and New Orleans, guzzling their victims' liquor and collapsing with the fever at the scene of their crimes. At one point, a single man remained of the staff at the Western Union telegraph office, which was the sole, fragile information conduit between the quarantined city and an outside world looking on in horror and pity.

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"The world will not get better on its own."

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Hobsbawm's ideas will long survive him, especially through his major works, "The Age of Revolution," "The Age of Capital," "The Age of Empire," "History of the 20th Century," "The Age of Extremes," which has been translated into 40 languages since its 1994 publication. Despite shifting trends in the academy, Hobsbawm stuck by his Marxist guns throughout. Here are a few of his thoughts on war, capital and nationhood:

On war and capitalism:

"War has been the most convenient pseudo-solution for the problems of twentieth-century capitalism. It provides the incentives to modernization and technological revolution which the market and the pursuit of profit do only fitfully and by accident, it makes the unthinkable (such as votes for women and the abolition of unemployment) not merely thinkable but practicable. What is equally important, it can re-create communities of men and give a temporary sense to their lives by uniting them against foreigners and outsiders. This is an achievement beyond the power of the private enterprise economy when left to itself." (The Observer Review, 1968.)

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BEIRUT — A fire sparked by battles between Syrian President Bashar Assad's troops and rebel fighters tore through Aleppo's centuries-old covered market Saturday, burning wooden doors and scorching stone stalls and vaulted passageways. The souk is one of a half-dozen renowned cultural sites in the country that have become collateral damage in the civil war.

The damage to one of the best-preserved old souks in the Middle East was the worst yet to a UNESCO World Heritage site in Syria. Across the country, looters have broken into a historic castle, stolen artifacts from museums and damaged ruins in the ancient city of Palmyra, antiquities officials and Syrian experts say.

The Aleppo market, a major tourist attraction with its narrow stone alleys and stores selling perfume, fabrics and spices, had been the site of occasional gun battles and shelling for weeks. But amateur video posted Saturday showed wall-to-wall flames engulfing wooden doors as burning debris fell away from the storefronts. Activists said hundreds of shops were affected.

"It's a big loss and a tragedy that the old city has now been affected," Kishore Rao, director of UNESCO's World Heritage Center, told The Associated Press by telephone from Paris.

Most of the other sites recognized as heritage sites by UNESCO, the global cultural agency, are also believed to have suffered damage during the 18-month battle to oust Assad, Rao said. The ancient center of Aleppo - Syria's largest city - has been hit the hardest, he said.

"It is a very difficult and tragic situation there," said Ahmad al-Halabi, a local activist speaking by phone from the area. He said rebels and civilians were trying to control the blaze, but only had a few fire extinguishers.

The fire in the souk erupted late Friday and was still burning Saturday, following fierce fighting between regime troops and rebels trying to drive pro-Assad fighters out of the city of 3 million.

On Thursday, rebels launched what they said would be a "decisive battle" for the city, followed by days of heavy fighting, including shelling and street combat. Amateur video has shown rebels taking cover behind walls and makeshift barriers, attacking regime forces with grenades and assault rifles. Activists reported heavy shelling by pro-Assad troops.

Once considered a bastion of support for Assad, Aleppo has become the focus of the insurgency for the last two months, with rebels taking about half the city. Aleppo would be a major strategic prize: A rebel victory would give Syria's opposition a major stronghold near the Turkish border, while a regime victory would give Assad some breathing space.

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A Harvard scholar decoded Coptic script on the fourth century scrap and found the words "Jesus said to them, 'My wife …" Experts are split over the artifact's authenticity and the Vatican today weighed in, according to the New York Times, to discredit the finding:

“Substantial reasons would lead one to conclude that the papyrus is indeed a clumsy forgery,” the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, said in an editorial by its editor, Gian Maria Vian. “In any case, it’s a fake.”

The Vatican, of course, has some vested interest in Jesus retaining bachelor status, but it is not the only party doubting the parchment.

“It’s really pretty unlikely that it’s authentic,” University of Durham Professor Francis Watson told Reuters after he published a paper arguing the words on the fragment were a rearrangement of phrases from a well known Coptic text.

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Two researchers at the Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., working on the mammoth task of curating the social media content that surrounded (and helped shape) the Arab Spring, were struck by their findings -- or the gaps therein. Much of the shared online content has already disappeared.

As the Technology Review reported:

A significant proportion of the websites that this social media [around the Arab Spring] points to has disappeared. And the same pattern occurs for other culturally significant events, such as the the H1N1 virus outbreak, Michael Jackson's death and the Syrian uprising. In other words, our history, as recorded by social media, is slowly leaking away.

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Jordan Weissman writes:

The conclusion comes to us from an newly updated study by professors Peter Lindert of the University of California - Davis and Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Scraping together data from an array of historical resources, the duo have written a fascinating exploration of early American incomes, arguing that, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, wealth was distributed more evenly across the 13 colonies than anywhere else in the world that we have record of.

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For Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship, to be sure. But today’s GOP has demonstrated pretty clearly that it doesn’t understand Rick’s empathetic message to the world in a time of tremendous uncertainty.
Republicans hype the “Greatest Generation” when doing so fits their narrative that anyone who tries hard enough can make it in America. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose blowhard manner has made him the idol of the party, bellowed before the Tampa crowd that his father was part of the World War II generation, and that he is the beneficiary of his old man’s positive values. “He grew up in poverty,” Christie intoned. Paul Ryan and Rick Santorum similarly tout their humble connections in assuring voters that they come by their conservative values honestly.

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So what sort of story is the great Irish potato famine of the late 1840s, a catastrophe that killed a million people, drove over a million more from their homeland and permanently transformed the way the Irish people view themselves? It's a tragedy, obviously, but does it feature an antagonist comparable to Nazi Germany, as some Irish historians have claimed? Or, to use modern geopolitical terminology, was the Great Famine a form of genocide? Calling it that gives the carnage a label commensurate with the trauma Ireland suffered, but history, like justice, seeks more than just emotional truths.

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Until 1913 and the ratification of the 17th Amendment, Americans didn’t actually elect senators, state legislators did. The change seems unquestionably positive, but Rep. Jeff Flake, the front-runner for the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in Arizona, said this week when asked about repeal,"I think it’s better as it reinforces the notion of federalism to have senators appointed by state legislatures.” After he caught some flak for the remark, a spokesperson clarified, "As a supporter of the principle of federalism, Jeff Flake believes that the Framers of the Constitution gave state legislatures the power to appoint U.S. senators for good reason. However, he has not called for the repeal of the 17th Amendment.”

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Wheatley’s Sallust slips in and out of Germany on spying missions, often at crucial junctures. He tries to overthrow Hitler and bring down Vichy France. It’s all fantasy, of course, except that Wheatley writes around real events in what counted, in the radio era, as real time: His wartime novels appeared only a few months after the events their plots relied on.

And then it got even more real. The British military took notice of Wheatley’s work and thought he might have a thing or two to teach officers and bureaucrats about the Nazi mind. So convincing is Wheatley’s war fiction that Wheatley was taken up as the great imaginary mind of the war, in an effort the Brits dubbed “deception.”

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The world found him repulsive. His vertebrae, devastated by disease — perhaps extrapulmonary tuberculosis — curved in an S and slumped into a conspicuous hump over his right shoulder. His head hung at little more than four feet off the ground — if that. His arms were atrophied sticks, his hands those of a young child. When he walked, his twisted body lurched in the direction of his hump. His eyes sunk into his head. His expression was permanently careworn and weary. As a final indignity, God or happenstance had marred his face with a scar or a blotch about his nose.

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Britain's Sun newspaper reportedly found a man believed to be Laszlo Csizsik-Csatary, now 97, living in the Hungarian capital.

Sun reporters confronted Csatary at his apartment in an upscale suburb of Budapest about Canada revoking his citizenship in 1997.

Answering the door in a long-sleeve shirt and underwear, Csatary told the newspaper, “I don’t want to discuss it.”

He lived in Canada after the war, but disappeared after being stripped of his citizenship.

Csatary was also questioned about his role helping to organize the 1944 deportation of some 15,700 Jews to Auschwitz during World War II.

“No I didn’t do it, go away from here,” Csatary reportedly said in English before slamming the door.

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