Steve Goddard's History Wire

Coffin Returns

Nerves were on edge on the Yale campus in the 1960s when its antiwar chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, led outspoken opposition to the Vietnam War. But time heals, and at a reunion in New Haven Thursday, a wheelchair-bound Coffin, now 80, fit comfortably into the Yale community, as colleagues gathered for a two-day workshop and lovefest to honor one of the Vietnam era's primary spiritual leaders. The Hartford Courant reports:

"About 450 people came to pay tribute Thursday to the man who used his position as Yale's college chaplain to become one of the most influential figures in the anti-war movement of the 1960s and 1970s. It was in New Haven that Coffin encouraged students to resist the draft and where he took the controversial position of sympathizing with the Black Panthers during the chaotic murder trial of Bobby Seale.

"During his years as the university chaplain, from 1958 to 1975, Coffin forged a tense, but mutually respectful relationship with Yale's president at the time, Kingman Brewster. And although he and the administration clashed at times, Thursday's tribute was another sign that Coffin has since been accepted fully by the Yale establishment."

Vietnam's Independence Day

Just as Americans roll out the fireworks and parades to support Independence Day, BBC News reports that Vietnam is doing the same thing in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), celebrating the defeat of U.S. forces in South Vietnam in April, 1975, on a day Vietnamese have taken to calling Liberation Day:

"Speaking ahead of the celebrations, Prime Minister Phan Van Khai said the victory of 30 April 1975 was "forever written in our nation's history". But he added that Vietnam still faced many challenges and should move on from the past and look to the future."

New Life for the Barnes

A federal judge last year ruled, in effect, that your dead hand can't control the future from the grave. In deciding that the deficit-plagued Barnes Foundation over Merion, PA could move to patron-rich downtown Philadelphia, the court reminded the rich that attaching conditions to their bequests in their wills won't always be effective in the face of compelling pressures felt by new generations.

Now that passions from that court battle have cooled, Slate asked urbanologist and architecture critic Witold Rybczynski to consider what the new downtown Barnes might look like.

Birthing The Blues

No musical genre is as quintessentially American as the blues. Music lovers and the non-musical alike among us will respond to an American Heritage article on the birth of the blues:

"The blues, arguably the first truly American music, evolved from a Southern front-porch pastime into a global phenomenon. But for lovers of authentic blues, the Delta is still mecca. No one really knows when or where people started singing the blues, but it grew up in the Delta, where slaves sang work songs that were its ancestors. The Delta is still cotton country, with fields dotted with white bolls stretching over land enriched by repeated flooding. After the Civil War, sharecroppers kept singing their frustration, accompanying themselves on pianos, guitars, washboards, or whatever was at hand. In the early 1900s W. C. Handy, a black bandleader waiting for a train in the Delta town of Tutwiler, heard a man in rags slide a razor along the neck of a guitar, crooning he was “goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog.” Handy described it as “the weirdest music I ever heard.”

The Day The War Ended

If you're old enough to remember the end of World War II on Aug. 15, 1945, Smithsonian Magazine would like your recollections of that event and your reaction to it in 250 words or less for an upcoming article.

Who Doesn't Love Freedom?

Love of freedom is nothing new, as the Atlantic Monthly illustrates in a piece that includes poems on the subject by heavyweights of an earlier generation, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

his month the Library of America released an anthology titled Poets of the Civil War, edited by J. D. McClatchy. Several of these works were first published in The Atlantic Monthly by writers whose names stand tall in the annals of American culture. Among them are the founding fathers of The Atlantic—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—and leading literary figures of the time such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier. Founded in 1857 with the aim of arbitrating and disseminating a literary and intellectual "high" culture that was uniquely American, The Atlantic Monthly professed allegiance to no agenda or canon, with the exception of one unassailable stance: an uncompromising opposition to slavery."

Map, Anyone?

It's difficult to understand global history without an understanding of geography. HistoryChannel.com takes a step in that direction with its compendium of maps, organized by region. Here's a list of its most popular:

	1. African Slave Trade, 1441-1808
2.	Iraq
3.	European Empires, c.1700
4.	Napolean's Empire, 1800-1814
5.	Great Depression, 1929-1939
6.	Growth of The Roman Empire
7.	World Tectonic Plates
8.	World War I, 1914-1917
9.	United States
10.	Alexander's Empire, 323 BCE

Conspiracy to Destroy a Legacy?

"A spectacular new Vietnam War memorial that will someday be the centerpiece of the Wacker Drive riverwalk is under construction at Wabash and State. But, there's something missing: the plaque and time capsule included in Chicago's original war memorial dedicated by Mayor Jane M. Byrne in 1982," according to the Chicago Sun Times:

"Nearly two years after Mayor Daley insisted the artifacts were "in storage" and had been moved temporarily to make way for the reconstruction of Wacker Drive, City Hall acknowledged it can't find the Veterans Day 1982 dedication plaque with Byrne's name or the time capsule reportedly buried beneath it. As a result, all traces of Byrne will be removed from the new, $4.3 million plaza that will replace what was the nation's first public tribute to the soldiers who fought and died in Vietnam. That merely adds new fuel to Byrne's two-year-old claim about a systematic campaign to erase her legacy."

Japanese Atonement

High among the bloodiest battles of World War II was carnage inflicted on the Northern Mariana Islands. As the ABC Radio Australia reports, the emperor and empress of Japan are planning to journey there to mourn those losses on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II:

"The Japanese government says Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko will visit the main island of Saipan from June 27 to 28. The Northern Marianas were administered by Japan from 1914 to 1944, and were the scene of one of the bloodiest Pacific battles of the war. During their trip, the emperor and empress will mourn and pay tribute to the 60,000 people who died in the Northern Marianas during the war. Local news reports say they may also visit a cliff from which hundreds of Japanese jumped to their deaths rather than surrender to US forces."

DNA to the Rescue

Crime-fighting is evolving its own dichotomy of pre-DNA and post-DNA, illustrating the difficulty of nabbing suspects before genetic typing. The New York Times reports on a typical case, in which a three-decade old rape eluded police until a search of Manhattan police files turned up the DNA of the alleged perpetrator:

"The DNA matches have linked the man to a notorious series of unsolved rapes that terrorized Montgomery County in Maryland and drew comparisons with the rampage of the Boston Strangler. Manhattan authorities said the Maryland cases might be only the beginning, as other states run the suspect's samples through their own DNA databanks.

"The man, identified by his lawyer as Fletcher Anderson Worrell, 58, was located in an Atlanta suburb late last year after he tried to buy a shotgun. The background check turned up two arrest warrants for him in New York City."