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A historian claims to have conclusively proved the identity of the "Man Who Never Was", whose body was used in a spectacular plot to deceive the Germans over the invasion of Sicily in the Second World War, Ian Johnston reports.

""A People's History of the United States" chronicled the nation's development through voices of women, minorities and the working class, telling the American story as series of episodes where the state and big business colluded to crush socialism. American Leftists celebrated the work at a time when conservatism as embodied by President Ronald Reagan was ascendant. More than one million copies have been sold. Zinn was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1922 into a Jewish immigrant family. During the Second World War he enlisted in the US army and flew in planes that bombed targets in Germany, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. He wrote in the magazine "The Progressive" in 2006 that his military service had informed his anti-war views. "Once we decided, at the start, that our side was the good side and the other side was evil ... we did not have to think any more. Then we could commit unspeakable acts and it was all right," Zinn said. Zinn earned a bachelor's degree from New York University in 1951 and later a master's and a doctorate in history from Columbia University in New York. Weeks before his death Zinn wrote in "The Nation" magazine of his disappointment with President Barack Obama. "I think people are dazzled by Obama's rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president - which means, in our time, a dangerous president - unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction." "

"On the ground floor of the British Museum is one of the most important artefacts in archaeological history, the Rosetta Stone. Effectively a tax decree dating from the reign of Ptolemy V in the second century BC, it enabled scholars to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Without it the entire field of Egyptology would be very different. But along its left-hand edge runs a painted inscription, still visible today, that testifies to a different historical agenda. "Captured in Egypt," it reads, "by the British Army 1801." And, as the historian Holger Hoock points out in this learned, engrossing book, the famous stone is just one example of the extraordinary connections between art, war, archaeology and empire in the age of Nelson and Wellington. As the colour plates in Hoock's book make clear, the arts during the reigns of George III and George IV were saturated in the rhetoric of military glory and masculine prowess. Although Napoleon quipped that Britain was a nation of shopkeepers, he would have been more accurate to call it a nation of warriors. The period opened with Britain about to fight and win the Seven Years' War, arguably the first global conflict; it ended with Britain as the world's undoubted superpower, "unsurpassed in global reach and power". And to those who built and maintained the largest empire in history, art mattered - not merely for its own sake or as an expression of civilisation, but as a way of projecting power and affirming national identity. Painters produced huge canvases celebrating great victories, sculptors chiselled poignant memorials mourning the fallen, archaeologists ransacked the deserts of the Middle East for classical antiquities, all of them contributing to a vast project to celebrate Britain's new-found glory. "

Our world is more interconnected than ever. We call it globalization, but without good histories to explain how we got here, we cannot begin to know where we are heading. The new master's program at Columbia and the LSE will ask students to explore our world by studying the forces that have been remaking it: migration, trade, technological revolutions, epidemic disease, environmental change, wars and diplomacy. Working with preeminent historians in the field, students will analyze large-scale historical processes, pursue empirical research, and produce their own comparative and cross-cultural histories. This two-year program connects vibrant intellectual communities in two global cities. It culminates in a master's degrees in international and world history from both institutions.