Charles M. Barnes started a bookselling business from his home near Wheaton College in 1873, said Mary Anne Phemister, a Wheaton author who has written extensively on the city’s history. An alumnus of Knox College in downstate Galesburg and an ordained minister, Barnes came to Wheaton to follow his teacher and mentor, Wheaton College President Jonathan Blanchard, who had been Knox’s president. |
“Living in a small college town, Barnes got the idea of redistributing and selling his own books, and then his own personal library formed the nucleus of his business,” Phemister said. “The rest is history.” Read more at www.chicagotribune.com |
Dr. Bagnall, a specialist in Egyptian archaeology, remarked that at the time “Egyptians were certainly not making pottery like this.” Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of their time in art, technology and long-distance trade. |
| Writing had yet to be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe. |
Yet for detractors, Islam’s Prophet Muhammad is a polygamist who spawned a religion that subjugates women, condones violence, and was, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “spread by the sword.” |
In short, when his best-known modern portrait is a 2005 Danish cartoon that depicts a surly bearded man with a bomb hidden in his turban, Muhammad has an image problem. |
Enter Omid Safi, a scholar of Islam at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill whose new biography, Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters, attempts to discover the true Muhammad obscured by both hagiography and militant extremism. |
“I’m trying to help non-Muslims learn things about Muhammad that they’ve never known,” Safi said over a pot of Ethiopian coffee, “and help Muslims remember things they’ve forgotten.” Read more at www.chron.com |
| “They destroyed the whole country,” Hamzah, the head of the Babylon museum, said of U.S. forces in Iraq. “So what are a few old bricks and mud walls in comparison?”
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| U.S. forces did not exactly destroy the 4,000-year-old city, home of one of the world’s original seven wonders, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Even before the troops arrived, there was not much left: a mound of broken mud-brick buildings and archaeological fragments in a fertile plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.
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| But they did turn it into Camp Alpha, a military base, shortly after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Their 18-month stay there caused “major damage” and represented a “grave encroachment on this internationally known archeological site,” a report released this month in Paris by the United Nations’ cultural agency, UNESCO, says.
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| A roof collapsed in one of ancient Babylon’s temples. The historic city lacked regular upkeep, compounded by damage caused during the U.S. occupation starting in 2003.Read more at www.washingtonpost.com |
| Today Oxford University scientists are joining in a special celebration of the first test of Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity on the remote African island where the ground-breaking experiment took place. |
Detail from the plaque commemorating Eddington’s experiment which took place on the Island of Principe. |
29 May is the 90th anniversary of the first test of Albert Einstein’s new theory of gravity: a test that paved the way for the gravitational lensing technique now used by astronomers to search for mysterious dark matter and dark energy. |
| ‘Without Eddington’s clever experiment and the fortuitous timing of this total eclipse it might have taken ages before Einstein’s theory of gravity, first proposed in 1915, was proven to be correct,’ said Professor Pedro FerreiraRead more at www.ox.ac.uk |
| Delhi’s dastangos and Naseeruddin Shah will treat New Yorkers to the tales of Amir Hamza |
| In New York, the city where two collapsing towers inextricably linked Islam with terrorism, a unique initiative is under way to celebrate another facet of the religion — art and culture. Performers — from US to Iran, from Pakistan to France — will come together for “Muslim Voices: Arts and Ideas”, a 10-day festival that begins on June 5 and is organised by the Asia Society, Brooklyn Academy of Music and the New York University Center for Dialogues. India will be represented through an old art form — dastangoi or dramatic storytelling, which dates to medieval Iran and once brightened up balmy evenings on the steps of Jama Masjid. Delhi-based dastangos (storytellers) Danish Hussain and Mahmoud Farooqui, who have been keeping the art alive, will be joined by actor Naseeruddin Shah in New York.
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EDSAC, ENIAC, ABC, the list of World’s First is not that easy. Sir Maurice Wilkes, who developed one of the world’s first computers 60 years ago, will be speaking at a seminar entitled EDSAC: Inventing the User this afternoon (6 May) at the University Computer Laboratory. |
Sir Maurice and his team at the University Mathematical Laboratory began work on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic
Calculator (EDSAC) in the years following the Second World War. The machine, which was the world’s first usable stored-program
computer, ran its first program on 6 May 1949. |
Cambridge has been at the forefront of advances in computing for nearly two centuries. In the 1820s, Charles Babbage originated
the idea for the programmable computer, when he designed the ‘difference engine’, a machine to calculate mathematical
tables. Read more at www.admin.cam.ac.uk |
A scholar from Oxford’s English Faculty has discovered that a painting lauded as the only known portrait of William Shakespeare painted from life is almost certainly of somebody else. |
Professor Katherine Duncan-Jones, who has written a biography of Shakespeare and edited his sonnets, decided to investigate the subject after seeing the ‘Cobbe’ portrait, and reading that two other experts had identified versions of the picture as portraits of Sir Thomas Overbury. Read more at www.ox.ac.uk |
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