The Friday Digest 24/01/14

This week's update features buttock cupping, heresy and an all-digital library ...

* Lions and donkeys: 10 big myths about the First World War debunked. 

* Just how did so many soldiers survive the trenches?

* Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese World War Two soldier who refused to surrender has died this week in Tokyo, aged 91. He remained in the jungle on Lubang Island near Luzon, in the Philippines, until 1974 because he did not believe that the war had ended.
 

* A portrait of sixteenth-century Welsh noblewoman, Catrin of Berain was discovered in the art collection of Nazi Hermann Goering, but how did it get there?

* Rabbi Abraham Skorka has said that Pope Francis wants to open the Vatican archives on Pope Pius XII's reign during the Second World War, to determine whether the Catholic Church could have done more to stop the Holocaust. Pope Pius XII led the Catholic Church from 1939 until 1958 and has been widely criticised for the decision to stay silent.

* Cruzeiro do Sul farm near Campina do Monte Alegre: the Brazilian ranch where Nazis kept slaves.

* The Second World War's toxic legacy of ill health and depression.

* Alderney's home-made piece of the Bayeux Tapestry is to be exhibited in the Bayeux Tapestry museum, Normandy, France. After experts suggested that the Bayeux Tapestry was incomplete as it did not feature William the Conqueror's Christmas Day coronation in 1066, islanders took up the challenge to finish the work and made a 10-foot panel in a year.

* Andrew Self asks what is history?
 
 

* Bones believed to be those of Alfred the Great, have been discovered languishing in a box in Winchester City Museum - and not buried in an unmarked grave as previously thought.

* Terra Incognita to Australia is an exhibition that  displays maps which changed the way the medieval and modern worlds were viewed and shaped. 

* Burned at the stake: your 60-second guide to heresy from History Extra.

* A look at buttock cupping and other health 'cures'. 

* Early newspapers in pictures.

* Have archaeologists finally found proof that the Carthaginians sacrificed their own children? 

* 5 things Publishing Perspectives learnt at Digital Book World 2014. 

* Does women’s fiction need a shelf of its own?

* The all-digital library in Bexar County Courthouse in San Antonio has proved to be a big hit with locals and visitors alike, but is a library without print books really a library at all? 

 Which history and publishing stories have you enjoyed reading this week?