Civil War

In 1986, lawmakers decided the problem of illegal immigration had to be dealt with. More than 3 million people were living in the United States after crossing the border illegally or overstaying their visas. A new law signed by President Ronald Reagan gave legal status and a path to citizenship to most of those unauthorized residents - helping many secure a slice of the American dream but also giving fuel to critics who sought to turn "amnesty" into a pejorative. Less than 30 years later, the number of immigrants living in the country illegally is thought to have nearly quadrupled, and the freighted baggage of amnesty looms over new efforts to reform the nation's immigration laws.

MARAAT NUMAN, Syria - Each morning, after saluting the Syrian flag and before the warplanes take off, soldiers at army bases across Syria are given political orientation. During the lectures, conscripts and career officers alike are repeatedly told that opposition forces are fueled by sectarian hatred and want to tear the country apart. The message - of a war waged by Sunni Muslims against Syria's Alawite and Shiite minorities - is well understood. To Syrian soldiers, "It has essentially become sectarian; the Sunnis fight out of fear and the Alawites fight out of conviction," said Muhammad Zinedden, a Sunni conscript who defected in February from the 17th Engineering Regiment in Raqqa province.

Most of us are curious about our family lineage. For Vanessa Williams, who recently took part in the show "Who Do You Think You Are" and explored her family's history, the task was both surprising and informative. Here, she talks about what she learned and how she plans to use that information. How did you become interested in finding out about your lineage? I've always been interested, but I was introduced to Ancestry.com [one of the websites that help people research their family backgrounds]

WASHINGTON - Sen. Dianne Feinstein made headlines recently by demanding a forceful U.S. response to Syria's use of chemical weapons against its population. Less noticed was that the California Democrat wasn't urging deeper military involvement or other dramatic steps, but only a new push for action by the United Nations Security Council, which has already rejected Western-backed resolutions on Syria three times. In this cautious approach, Feinstein, who is chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is not alone.

Hearts Touched by Fire The Best of "Battles and Leaders of the Civil War" Edited by Harold Holzer Modern Library: 1,264 pp., $38 The Civil War The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It Edited by Brooks D. Simpson, Stephen W. Sears and Aaron Sheehan-Dean Library of America: 814 pp., $37.50 The sesquicentennial commemoration of the Civil War is contested territory. A "secession ball" held last December in Charleston, S.C., and the Feb. 19 reenactment of the inauguration of Jefferson Davis as president of the Confederate States of America in Montgomery, Ala., signal controversy, not consensus.

The looters left signs only trained eyes could see: scars in the earth where shovels were used to dig up relics of Civil War battles. Investigators found 73 refilled holes in January on weed-covered Wise's Field, a remote piece of western Maryland real estate where Union and Confederate soldiers clashed during the Battle of South Mountain on Sept. 14, 1862. Authorities don't know what was taken from the federally owned land along the Appalachian Trail.

Eleven months after PBS first aired Ken Burns' 11-hour documentary series "The Civil War," the nation is still caught up in that chapter of U.S. history, supporting a Civil War cottage industry of sorts. The award-winning series, currently in repeats on some PBS stations, has spawned a best-selling gift book (by Geoffrey Ward with Ric and Ken Burns; Alfred Knopf; $50), an audio book, a soundtrack and a video set. Civil War books, long out of print, have been reissued by publishers.

Compared to Confederate contemporaries Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson or President Jefferson Davis, Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin is relatively unknown. A Jewish man raised in Charleston, S.C., who entered Yale Law School at 14 and became a U.S. senator, he was appointed by Davis as his attorney general in 1861. Benjamin, assisted by his shrewd intellect and gifts as an orator, was rumored to have eventually masterminded the assassination of Abraham Lincoln through Confederate spy rings.

The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Abraham Lincoln 150 years ago this week, has often been criticized by blacks, by radicals and also by mainstream historians who doubt its significance as a turning point in the Civil War and in American history. The skeptics range from conservatives in Lincoln's time, to Howard Zinn and Gore Vidal more recently, and include Richard Hofstadter, who wrote in his classic 1948 book "The American Political Tradition" that the Emancipation Proclamation "had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.

Multi-star generals attended his Arlington National Cemetery funeral. His name adorns a fighter jet. His words echo in the halls of Congress. Since Marine Sgt. William C. Stacey, age 23, was killed Jan. 31 on a remote hillside inAfghanistan'sHelmand province, a letter he wrote to his family has gained much attention from politicians and the news media. "It's quoted by liberals, conservatives and generals and people across the political spectrum. They use it in different ways.

Efrain Rios Montt, the former Guatemalan military dictator who ruled his country during one of the bloodiest phases of its civil war, was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity Friday for the systematic massacre of more than 1,700 Maya people. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The landmark ruling by a panel of three Guatemalan judges came after a dramatic trial that featured testimony from dozens of ethnic Ixil Maya, who described atrocities committed by the army and security forces who sought to clean the countryside of Marxist guerrillas and their sympathizers during the 1982-83 period that Rios Montt, an army general and coup leader, served as the country's de facto leader.

BAGHDAD - Shiite-dominated areas in southern and central Iraq were rocked Monday by car bomb explosions that killed at least 22 people and fueled fears that the country is sliding into a civil war. The violence occurred as Iraqi security forces surrounded the Sunni cities of Ramadi and Fallouja demanding that the area's tribes hand over those responsible for killing five Iraqi soldiers over the weekend. Authorities gave the tribes 48 hours. The deadline passed, but Jaber Jabri, a member of parliament from Ramadi, said late Monday that a tentative deal had been reached to defuse the situation.

MEXICO CITY - On the first day of trial, a witness named Bernardo Bernal recounted how, as a 9-year-old in the spring of 1983, he hid in a stream and watched Guatemalan soldiers kill his parents and two younger brothers. On the second day of testimony in Guatemala City, a man named Pedro Chavez Brito described how soldiers found him and his siblings hiding in a traditional sauna in their village on Nov. 4, 1982. His sister was carrying a newborn. " 'You are a guerrilla, you gave food to the guerrillas,' they said to my sister," the witness said, according to an unofficial transcript of the genocide case in Guatemala.

The U.S. government is paying billions to war veterans and their families, including monthly payments to the children of Civil War veterans. More than $40 billion annually is being paid out to soldiers and survivors of the Civil War, the Spanish-American War in 1898, both World Wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. Two children of Civil War veterans -- one in Tennessee and the other in North Carolina -- are each receiving $876 a year.

ANTAKYA, Turkey -- Large protests marking the two-year anniversary of the Syrian uprising were held across the country Friday as the opposition vowed to continue its fight to topple President Bashar Assad. As the fighting entered a third year, there were scant signs of a political solution that some world leaders have been pushing. More than 70,000 people have been killed, many of them women and children, according to the United Nations. In Damascus, the capital, government security forces spread out across many neighborhoods in an effort to prevent large demonstrations, opposition activists reported.