He had just changed his name and undergone plastic surgery to alter his eyes. All he wanted was to be left alone.

On May 30, 1942, Fred Korematsu was waiting for his girlfriend on a street corner in San Leandro, Calif., a small city near San Francisco. That day was just like any other day, except that Japan had attacked Pearl Harbor six months earlier, and anti-Japanese sentiment had reached a frenzy in the U.S. Korematsu, an American-born citizen of Japanese descent, was living in hiding. On Feb. 19, President Franklin Roosevelt had issued Executive Order 9066, mandating the mass roundup and incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast. Korematsu's family had already abandoned their home and flower-nursery business in order to report to the camps. Fred, a 23-year-old shipyard welder, chose to remain behind and take his chances.

But instead of his girlfriend, police officers showed up. By that time, it was illegal for Japanese Americans on the West Coast to be freely walking down the street. A local newspaper headline read "Jap spy arrested in San Leandro." Within three months, Korematsu was convicted in a federal court of violating military orders, placed on probation and sent to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, Calif., one of several horse-racing tracks that had been hastily converted to house thousands of Japanese Americans while 10 more permanent camps were under construction. Soon, the family was sent to an incarceration camp in the middle of a Utah desert....

Ukrainian communists are collecting funds to restore a statue to Josef Stalin, which was blown up in the Ukrainian city of Zaporzhe on New Year's Eve, UNIAN news agency said.

"[The communists] bring voluntary contributions to join the common cause initiated by the communists and veterans of Zaporzhe," the Communist party's regional committee in Bilopillia, in northeastern Ukraine, said....

The former dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin, lost his honorary citizenship of Nová Baňa in Banská Bystrica region after 64 years, as the newly-elected municipal council took the decision to withdraw the honorary citizenship from Stalin at its first meeting, the TASR newswire wrote....

No one has called for a holiday, but this weekend officially marks the birth of the automobile industry.

For the record, it was 125 years ago that an inventive German named Carl Benz applied for a patent from German officials on Jan. 29, 1886, for a vehicle driven by a small engine. “This marked the birth of the automobile. Mercedes-Benz has since had around 80,000 pioneering inventions patented,” the automaker notes on its website.

Moreover, while some historians might disagree, Daimler AG is fully prepared to support its claim to laying the foundation for the modern automobile industry that reaches every corner of the world today. It can back up its claim with the patent, which was eventually issued to Benz by German authorities and launched Mercedes-Benz. “There is a little bit of Mercedes in every car built in the world today,” Daimler AG chief executive officer Dieter Zetsche observed during an appearance at the recent North American International Auto Show in Detroit....

Monument to Victims of Holocaust in Palmniken of 1945 was unveiled in Yantarny Settlement on the Kaliningrad coast of Baltic Sea yesterday.

It was here, on ice and in ice-cold water of Baltic Sea, on the outskirts of Settlement Palmniken, where the Nazi shot down several thousand people - Jewish prisoners of concentration camps and ghettos - on the night of February, 1st, 1945....

Veteran Polish film director Feliks Falk has said that many women were punished unjustly for charges of collaboration with Nazi Germans during World War II.

Falk discussed the theme in Kielce on Saturday at a special screening of his latest film, Joanna. The movie won two of the top awards at last year's Polish Film Festival in Gdynia....

...Boston’s infamous Big Dig construction project, which rerouted the city’s central artery, unearthed a trove of archaeological treasures in a 19th-century brothel’s outhouse. Buried there were items of importance to the women who made their living outside the margins of polite society: hairbrushes, medicines, and vaginal syringes used for self-medicating and cleaning.

Now, a team of archaeology students from BU is studying these artifacts to find out what they reveal about how the residents of one Boston brothel lived. The building, long since torn down, existed on Endicott Street, near Boston’s North End, just two blocks from what was then the city’s red light district. The team hopes that by studying the more than 3,000 artifacts recovered from the outhouse and using old city records, they can gain insight into the day-to-day lives of prostitutes believed to have lived at the property between 1852 and 1883.

In the course of their work, the archaeologists have deduced that personal hygiene was of great importance to these women—besides the hairbrushes, medicines, and syringes, items found included toothbrushes, hair combs, and tobacco-related items.

During the massive highway project, construction crews excavated a site called Mill Pond, which in 1828 had been filled in when the city needed more space to expand.

Crews found a sealed, wood-lined privy (the under portion of an outhouse) filled with items that begged for further inspection. During the 19th century, before the advent of municipal trash collection, privies were used not only as toilets, but for general household waste disposal.

Because of limited funding, Massachusetts officials stipulated at the time of the Big Dig that the state would pay to study only those excavated items believed to have been manufactured before 1830....

It looked to be a routine excavation of what was thought to be a burial mound. But beneath the mound, archaeologists from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Museum of Natural History and Archaeology found something more: unusual Bronze Age petroglyphs. 

"We believe these are very special in a Norwegian context," says museum researcher and project manager Anne Haug.

The excavation in Stjordal, just north of Trondheim, was necessitated by the expansion of a gravel pit. Given that project archaeologists didn’t anticipate that the dig would be very complicated, the museum researchers dedicated just three weeks to the effort.

Then came the surprises. First, it turned out that mound builders had used an existing hill as a starting point - which of course saved them time and effort. The hill itself made the burial mound even larger and more monumental than it might have otherwise been.

But researchers suspected there might be another reason for the choice of the hilltop when they uncovered the remains of two cremations, or rather a fire layer that also contained bits of bone. Underneath they found many petroglyphs, including eight drawings showing the soles of feet, with cross hatching. There were also five shallow depressions, Haug says.

Two boat drawings and several other drawings of feet soles with toes were also found just south of the burial mound....

Archaeologists expressed deep concern on Sunday that many of Egypt's historical treasures were threatened by looters in the wake of the nation's uprising, while Egypt's top antiquities official said that all 24 national museums were now under protection of the Army and that damage to the main Cairo museum that shelters thousands of priceless artifacts appeared limited.

Officials in Egypt and American Egyptologists said they were worried, however, about reports of ongoing looting at Saqqara, a famous site south of Cairo that is home to Egypt's first stone pyramid and hundreds of tombs spanning three thousand years of the country's deep cultural history.

While deep concern - or even panic - continues to sweep through the community Egyptologists in the United States, Zahi Hawass, secretary general of Egypt's Supreme Council on Antiquities, said Sunday that, "Nothing is stolen from the Cairo museum." He is now directing a team to assess the damage at Saqqara and other outlying sites where archaeological digs are ongoing.

Speaking via cell phone from Cairo, Hawass said that a few items were broken - including a statue of King Tutankhamun riding a jaguar - after looters smashed windows on the roof of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities and descended into the building with ropes Friday night. He added that all of the broken artifacts could be restored....

KENNESAW, Ga.—When Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman arrived here in June 1864, he wrote to his superiors, "The whole country is one vast fort."

Gen. Sherman and his 100,000 men encountered 65,000 Confederates dug in along 12 miles of earthworks at Kennesaw Mountain. After fierce fighting, the rebels retreated to nearby Atlanta. Several more battles ensued before Union forces took the city, dealing a crippling blow to the South.

The detritus of war—bullets, uniforms, cannon shot, swords and, of course, corpses—was strewn across the region in the aftermath. Trenches, both intricate defenses built over weeks by engineers and shallow pits frantically dug by infantry under fire, snaked for miles.

Today, metro Atlanta—a land of expressways, subdivisions and shopping malls—has grown to about 5.7 million people, from about 10,000 in the 1860s. So it's easy to assume that evidence of the famous clash of armies has been obliterated except for that preserved in museums, parks and monuments....

On a dusty patch of road just north of Los Angeles, one man's dream of honoring an era of cinema is about to become a reality.

Charlie Chaplin's bumbling, lovable "Little Tramp" character is arguably the most famous icon of the silent film era. Today, the Tramp remains popular all over the world. Chaplin first brought the character to life in 1914, helping launch the silent era. Interestingly, when Chaplin retired the character in 1936, the silent film era ended.
But where exactly did it happen?

"I remember I saw it in a book, right around the time I had moved out here. I couldn't believe it was so close to where I lived. When we drove out and found it, right at that moment, I knew that we'd want to honor it some day. And now that it's the 75th anniversary, well, what better time?"

Author, historian and Charlie Chaplin buff E.J. Stephens explained to AOL News recently what inspired him to organize what undoubtedly will be one of the most memorable Chaplin celebrations in history....

Each day, when the General Assembly is in session, 81-year-old Bud Roderick slips on a pair of white gloves.

At precisely three minutes before the gavel bangs in the House of Delegates, Roderick - dressed always in a blue blazer, gray slacks, white shirt - opens a glass case, tenderly removes a golden mace and carries it on extended arms into the chamber.

In a Capitol rich with pomp, few things embody it more than Virginia's solid silver, 24-karat-coated ceremonial mace.

Weighing in at 10 pounds plus, measuring nearly 4 feet long with a head that's shaped like a crown, the staff is a throwback to the days of kings and queens....

The long and controversial road to bring a statue of Revolutionary War Gen. Francis Marion to Johnsonville may be nearing its end.

Johnsonville City Administrator Scott Tanner said fundraising for the statue is closing in on its original goal of $100,000.

As of Dec. 8, the total amount of pledged funding reached $82,981 with the total amount received being $65,481. The funding includes major donations from Florence County and Santee Cooper.

“We’re getting there,” Tanner said. “Originally, we wanted to have the fundraising completed in February, but we just weren’t able to.”

The last major contribution, of $5,000, was made Nov. 1 by Progress Energy....

WASHINGTON — Hours before President Obama delivered his State of the Union address, a senior adviser to the president confided that his tone would be “self-consciously optimistic.” And so it was....

It was perhaps no accident that Mr. Obama took Lou Cannon’s biography of that other optimist and purveyor of American exceptionalism, Ronald Reagan, with him to Hawaii over Christmas. Or that one of the Washington wise men the president consulted recently was Kenneth M. Duberstein, a chief of staff to President Reagan.

“Optimism,” Mr. Duberstein said in an interview, “is a force multiplier.”

One axiom of politics is that the optimistic candidate wins, as Jimmy Carter discovered after his so-called “malaise” speech (he never actually used the word) during the 1979 energy crisis. He lost to Mr. Reagan a year later. And people forget that Mr. Carter, the peanut-farming Georgia governor with the toothy grin, seemed the sunnier candidate in his 1976 campaign against Gerald Ford, who used his 1975 State of the Union address to inform Americans that “the state of the union is not good.”

Still, happy talk can take a political leader only so far, and there are hazards in Mr. Obama’s sudden surge of rhetorical sunshine, especially when nearly 1 in 10 Americans is out of work, the federal deficit exceeds $1 trillion and Mr. Obama’s prescription — targeted “investment” in areas like education, clean energy and high-speed rail — requires spending of the sort that makes many Americans deeply uneasy....

A French architect campaigning for a new exploration of the 4,500-year-old Great Pyramid of Giza said on Thursday that the edifice may contain two chambers housing funereal furniture.

Jean-Pierre Houdin -- who was rebuffed three years ago by Egypt in his appeal for a probe into how the Pyramid was built -- said 3-D simulation and data from a US egyptologist, Bob Brier, pointed to two secret chambers in the heart of the structure.

The rooms would have housed furniture for use in the afterlife by the pharaoh Khufu, also known as Cheops in Greek, he told a press conference.

"I am convinced there are antechambers in this pyramid. What I want is to find them," he said.

In March 2007, Houdin advanced the theory that the Great Pyramid had been built inside-out using an internal spiral ramp, as opposed to an external ramp as had long been suggested.

He proposed mounting a joint expedition of Egyptian antiquities experts and French engineers, using infrared, radar and other non-invasive methods to check out the hypothesis.

The idea was nixed by Egypt's antiquities department. A Canadian team from Laval University in Quebec will seek permission this year to carry out thermal imaging from outside the Pyramid to explore the theory, Houdin said.

Penny Feiwel was the last of the British women who served as volunteers on the side of the Spanish Republic during the civil war of 1936-39.

She was one of about 75 women from Britain who joined the International Brigades following the military coup launched by Francisco Franco and other generals with backing from Hitler and Mussolini. Like Feiwel, known in Spain by her maiden name of Phelps, most of them were nurses and worked in makeshift frontline hospitals in conditions of great hardship and danger. Phelps herself suffered serious injuries in a bombing raid that put an end to her service in Spain.

Born into a working class family of nine brothers and sisters in Tottenham, she left school at 13 to go into domestic service, but hated it. She then tried factory work before deciding at the age of 18 to train as a nurse, working in several London hospitals, including Homerton and Charing Cross.

By her mid-20s she was eager to overcome her lack of school education, so spent 1934 studying English, history, economics and psychology at Hillcroft College, Surbiton, Surrey, which specialised in teaching working women from less privileged backgrounds. There, she began moving in more politically aware circles. Through college principal Mabel Ashby she found work for two years in the Welwyn Garden City household of the clothes designer and socialist Tom Heron, owner of Cresta Silks. Among her four charges was the eldest child Patrick, who as a teenager was already showing signs of being a gifted artist. "I was accepted into the family and they had a great influence on me," she recalled later in life. "I even went to Italy with them many years later. They educated me, really."...

Authorities in Vinnytsia, central Ukraine, have unveiled a plan to turn the remains of Hitler' Eastern Front military headquarters into a tourist attraction.

The museum is planned to be established by May 9, the anniversary of the Victory Day over Fascism.

"It is time to make the Wehrwolf headquarters a tourist destination, a memorial to the victims of fascism," the head of the local administration, Mykola Djiga was quoted by UNIAN news agency.

"This museum should remind us about the time that our people endured, their sacrifices and heroism. It should also show the face of the fascist enemy. We must show what enemy we had defeated," he said.

The Wehrwolf headquarters, consisting of about 20 wooden cottages and barracks and three bunkers, are located some 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) north of Vinnytsia....

Texas proudly cloaks itself in history, but one of the most momentous anniversaries in state history will pass this week without a whisper of official acknowledgment.

One hundred and fifty years ago, on Feb. 1, 1861, Texas seceded from the Union, joined the Confederacy and marched headlong into the Civil War.

Tuesday will be just one historic milepost among hundreds of big days over the next four years as the nation continues its struggle to understand -- and quarrels over -- the Civil War, which started April 12, 1861, at Fort Sumter, S.C., and dragged on until May 13, 1865, at the Battle of Palmito Ranch near Brownsville.

While some states have launched ambitious Civil War commemorative programs -- with much fanfare and more than a little controversy -- Texas isn't officially joining this campaign.

Some members of heritage groups say the state should be flying its flag....

Would-be looters broke into Cairo's famed Egyptian Museum, ripping the heads off two mummies and damaging about 10 small artifacts before being caught and detained by soldiers, Egypt's antiquities chief said Saturday.

Zahi Hawass said the vandals did not manage to steal any of the museum's antiquities, and that the prized collection was now safe and under military guard.

With mass anti-government protests still roiling the country and unleashing chaos on the streets, fears that looters could target other ancient treasures at sites across the country prompted the military to dispatch armored personnel carriers and troops to the Pyramids of Giza, the temple city of Luxor and other key archaeological monuments.

Hawass said now that the Egyptian Museum's collection is secure from thieves, the greatest threat to the collection inside is posed by the torched ruling party headquarters building next door.

"What scares me is that if this building is destroyed, it will fall over the museum," Hawass said as he watched fire trucks spray water on the still smoldering NDP headquarters....

PROVIDENCE, R.I.—The Rhode Island Black Heritage Society has announced the release of a booklet chronicling a Rhode Island black church's early years that was originally published in 1906.

The "History of the Olney Street Baptist Church," released this week by the society, is a 12-page historical record compiled by A.A. Wheeler, who served as the church historian and assistant superintendent of its Sunday school....

In the 20th century, Jews created bombs. Weapons of mass destruction.

Most famously, there was J. Robert Oppenheimer who ran the Manhattan Project, which gave the world the atom bomb. After him came Edward Teller, the Hungarian Jew who engineered an incredibly destructive upgrade: the hydrogen bomb.

And then there was Samuel T. Cohen, the lesser-known Jewish physicist who rounds off this troika but whose invention, the neutron bomb, has been relegated to ignominy. Like the other two, Cohen, a Manhattan Project veteran, was present at the creation.

Cohen died last year on November 28 at the age of 89, and received the requisite New York Times obituary in recognition of his unique contribution to the technology of mass killing. But neither the Times nor other notices of Cohen’s death took note of the unique document that he left behind before he died: a no-holds-barred, angry memoir, titled “F*** You: Mr. President.”

It is an autobiography unlike anything ever published by a Manhattan Project insider. Cohen’s memoir lays bare a trove of revelations about the combustible mix of geniuses who came together for that historic enterprise — and self-revelations about Cohen’s own life and what motivated him to devote his career to wholesale death....

For years it has been buried, swallowed up by layers of earth, muck, and water, a once-prominent landmark concealed by time.

And the late-1700s wharf might have remained that way — embedded for the ages — had it not been for a recent accidental find.

Last June, as workers excavated portions of Newburyport’s Water Street for the city’s new waste-water operations building, they unearthed large, centuries-old slabs of granite. Based on maps and archaeological research, the giant rectangles of rock were identified as the capping stones of a 19th-century wharf built onto an earlier Revolutionary War wharf owned by Captain William Coombs.

And, as the city’s infrastructure project has continued for the past several months, archeologists have periodically been on-site to document additional finds from the 1700s and 1800s, including more capstones, cribbing supports, and, this month, timbers from an adjacent wharf.

Although many of the structural artifacts are too damaged or contaminated to save, local officials and historians call the find an extraordinary one, providing a conduit between modern times and the country’s beginnings....

For years, the site was left to crumble and decay. But now, following extensive renovation, the factory where the Auschwitz ovens were designed and built has reopened as a memorial. It shows the intimate involvement of German industry in the mass murder of the Holocaust.

For years, the site was little more than a typical industrial ruin -- the kind of modernist decay that became synonymous with Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. The crumbling buildings just outside the city center of Erfurt were fenced off and left to the squatters who made the complex their home.

But ever since the company which owned the plant went bankrupt in 1994, historians have had their eyes on the location. Its history, after all, is intimately tied with the darkest chapter of Germany's past. The factory once belonged to Topf & Söhne, the company which supplied the Nazis with the ovens used at Auschwitz and other death camps to cremate Holocaust victims.

And on Thursday, after years of planning, a memorial exhibit in the former administration building opened its doors -- just in time for Jan. 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"Nowhere else in Europe is the involvement of industry in the Nazis' machinery of death as visible as it is in the company in Erfurt," Rikola-Gunnar Lüttgenau told the German news agency DPA on Tuesday....