Free Republic

The Wall Street Journal reported on a trove of Civil War era telegrams — many of them to and from Abraham Lincoln — that have never been decoded. The telegrams are owned by the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. They have started a project, "Decoding the Civil War," to transcribe and decipher their collection of nearly 16,000 Civil War telegrams between Lincoln, his Cabinet and Union Army officers. About a third of the telegrams were written in code. The library is crowdsourcing the project through the largest online platform for collaborative volunteer research, Zooniverse. They...

A message in a bottle delivered to a Confederate general during the American Civil War has been deciphered, 147 years after it was written. In the encrypted message, a commander tells Gen John Pemberton that no reinforcements are available to help him defend Vicksburg, Mississippi. "You can expect no help from this side of the river," says the message, which was deciphered by codebreakers. The text is dated 4 July 1863 - the day Vicksburg fell to Union forces.

NOTE: If I know anything about the rabid naysayers on FR, at least some of the RELIGIOUS [vs spiritual] types will wail and rant that ANYTHING having to do with numbers and The Bible has to be crossing the line into dealing with Biblically forbidden NUMEROLOGY. This is nonsense. The dictionary definition of “numerology” makes clear that numerology is the study of numbers, as the figures designating the year of one’s birth, “to determine their supposed influence on one’s life, future, etc.” [Quix color, bold emphasis on the definition from: HERE: http://www.infoplease.com/ipd/A0562554.html Clearly, the Biblically prohibited issue is INTEREST IN,...