NEWS & BLOG

In Rocky Mount, North Carolina’s Best Friends Dog Park, a “historical” human bone was found early last week.

The Rocky Mount Police Department has opened an investigation into the situation. The evidence unit of the department collected the bone and partnered with the State Bureau of Investigation and a local Forensic Anthropologist.

The anthropologist considered the bone as a ‘historic” human bone based on the amount of weathering, also determining that the bone was around one hundred years old.

Original Post from ABC 11

Read More Here: https://abc11.com/human-bone-found-at-dog-park-best-friends-rocky-mount/10979713/

The Tocobaga Indians were natives of the Tampa Bay area from around the years 900 to the 1500s.

The Tocobaga people were known to build mounds within their villages. Mounds were large “piles of the earth” layered with shells or stones but also were known to be used as a burial site.

In 1879, just before construction destroyed many traces of earlier civilizations, a newspaper reporter named Sylvanus Tandy Walker created an invaluable record of the Native earthworks. Walker was an amateur naturalist and archaeologist who liked to sleuth out the area in his free time, and his map offered an intriguing study of a soon-to-be-altered landscape.

Walker’s map is now a part of the Smithsonian Museum’s archives. The map offers insight, and guidance to remains of the early life of Floridians and inspires current researchers to earn more about that time.

Original Post From Thomas Hallock/Smithsonian Magazine

Read More Here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/map-details-florida-disappearing-landscape-180978364/

The Mount Zion AME Zion Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. launched his civil rights career, will now be a museum.

Mount Zion AME Zion Church in Montgomery, Alabama, was first approved for a $500,000 grant in 2018. Leaders originally planned to turn the space into a museum and open it to the public by 2020, the Associated Press (AP) reports. But the Covid-19 pandemic and other complications delayed funding until now.

The church originally built in 1899 stood strong until 1990. The congregation decided to relocate to its current location.

The Zion church is known for many civil rights historic events making it an ideal place for a museum.

Original Post from Nora McGreevy/Smithsonian Magazine

Read More Here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/mlk-church-museum-grant-alabama-civil-rights-bus-boycott-180978446/

An Anne Frank Center is opening at the University of South Carolina, which will be the first museum in North America and the fourth in the world where visitors can walk through the famed story of the teenage Holocaust victim.

“The Anne Frank Center at USC is unlike anything the university has ever done before,” interim university president Harris Pastides said during an announcement ceremony Tuesday, according to news outlets. “Through the eyes of this little girl, who still lives, I would argue, we can change the world.”

The 1,060-square-foot (98.5-square-meter) center on the Columbia campus features a rendering of the attic where the girl’s Jewish family hid from the Nazis for more than two years during World War II. That exhibit includes a reproduction of the desk where Frank wrote was eventually published as “The Diary of a Young Girl,” which has been translated into 70 languages.

Original Post from Associated Press

Read More Here: https://apnews.com/article/lifestyle-travel-race-and-ethnicity-racial-injustice-south-carolina-c6e5a7d0f4e33591c2a608deee3d275b

Archaeologists surveying a Civil War cemetery in northern Virginia have chanced upon a surprising find: a buried pathway from the 1800s.

As Mark Price reports for the Charlotte Observer, researchers from the Northeast Archeological Resources Program (NARP) uncovered the 19th-century road—as well as a brick-lined culvert—at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefields National Military Park. The team was using ground-penetrating radar and magnetometer surveys to identify a suitable location for a proposed burial vault.

A new plaque facing the White House bears witness to a shameful chapter in United States history: when enslaved people helped build one of the nation’s seats of government. Unveiled in a ceremony last week, the sign is one of three informational markers that now stand at the northern entrance of Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C.

Conceived by the White House Historical Association (WHHA) in collaboration with the National Park Service (NPS), the center and rightmost signs discuss Jackie Kennedy’s role as the WHHA’s founder and the history of protests in Lafayette Square, respectively, per a statement.

But the leftmost marker is the most notable, as it explains how enslaved people aided the White House’s construction. Though small, the sign marks the first time that a public work has formally acknowledged the role that enslaved people played in the creation of the U.S.’ most iconic building, reports Joe Heim for the Washington Post.

Original Post from Nora McGreevy/Smithsonian Magazine

Read More Here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/new-plaque-tells-enslaved-people-who-built-white-house-180978342/