History - still with us

A synagogue dating back to the end of the Second Temple Era was discovered on the Tel Recheš Peak in the Galilee last week in a rare and unique archaeological find. …a huge and impressive room nine meters high and eight meters wide with walls lined with benches made of limestone blocks. Diggers also discovered one of the two foundational pillars supporting the synagogue's roof. …reveals insights into customs of the ancient Jewish community and sheds light on watershed moments in Jewish history.…

A chance meeting at the Republican National Convention solved a 15-year-old mystery that began on the morning of September 11, 2001.…

It will take another five centuries to clear the Somme battlefields before the area is safe, bomb disposal experts warned on Thursday after collecting 25 tons of munitions this year alone.… ‘We find all kinds of devices. The biggest to date was an eight hundred kilo, 15in British bomb at Thiepval… All the towns around here have been built on ground teeming with bombs.…"

…a group of researchers digging through amber mined in Burma uncovered a sample with a pair of tiny bird-like wings frozen inside… At around 99 million years old, these wings are some of the most pristine fossilized feathers ever found.… Astonishingly, the amber preserved every minute detail of the wings. If you look closely enough, you can see traces of hair, feathers, bones, and how they were all arranged. Even the feathers’ color has survived the eons and is still visible.…

Lost since the end of World War II in 1945, a tunnel dug by Jewish prisoners at Ponar (today Paneriai), near Vilnius, Lithuania, to escape from the Nazis was discovered recently using state-of-the-art mineral and oil exploration technology for underground predictive scanning.… For three months they clawed out a 35-meter-long burrow, using spoons and their bare hands. On the night of April 15, 1944 – the last night of Passover, 40 prisoners cut their leg shackles with a nail file, and crawled through the escape tunnel. Twenty-five of them were shot by the guards. Fifteen managed to cut the camp’s perimeter fence and escape into the Ponar forest. Eleven joined up with the partisan forces and survived the war.…

More than 16,000 items belonging to victims of Nazi death camp, Auschwitz were recently rediscovered in Poland.

Their whereabouts have been known since 1967, but shortly thereafter, communist upheaval stalled the recovery of these long-lost possessions.…

CYPRESS, Texas — The last known search and rescue dog who helped find victims of the September 11, 2001, terror attacks has died near Houston.

A sixteen-year-old Golden Retriever, Bretagne (pronounced Brittany) Corliss was greeted and saluted by approximately twenty-five firefighters when she arrived at a Cypress, Texas, veterinarian clinic…

…There are so few surviving veterans. The National World War II Museum estimates that by 2036, there will be no living veterans out of the roughly 16 million who served from the United States.…

…Archaeologists have made a truly remarkable discovery in London’s financial district, finding a collection of 410 wax tablets that date all the way back to AD 43 – the first decade of Roman rule in Britain.… The collection of 410 Latin tablets is the oldest and by far the biggest collection of early writing in Britain and gives a remarkable – if fragmented – insight into life in the first decades of Roman rule.…

…Archeologists have unearthed some 82,000 artifacts dating back to the 17th century at the Museum of the American Revolution construction site on 3rd and Chestnut streets… mid-18th century pottery from a tavern on Chestnut Street to granite foundations of the city’s first skyscraper, a patent medicine business.… [and] fragments of a English delftware punch bowl…

The Trojan War was a grander event than even Homer would have us believe. The famous conflict may have been one of the final acts in what one archaeologist has controversially dubbed “World War Zero” – an event he claims brought the eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age world crashing down 3200 years ago.

And the catalyst for the war? A mysterious and arguably powerful civilisation almost entirely overlooked by archaeologists: the Luwians.…

Seventy-one years after meeting for the first time, ninety-four-year-old Sid Shafner and ninety-year-old Marcel Levy were reunited for the first time in over twenty years.…

A man believed to be America’s oldest veteran is celebrating his 110th birthday on Wednesday.

Richard Overton, of Austin, Texas, fought in the 1887th Engineer Aviation Battalion in World War II, and served as a corporal in Hawaii, Guam and Iwo Jima.…

“I feel good. A little old, but I’m getting around like everybody else…”