The Hoxne Hoard is the largest hoard of late Roman silver and gold discovered in Britain, the largest collection of gold and silver coins of the fourth and fifth centuries found anywhere within the Roman Empire. It was found by Eric Lawes, a metal detectorist in the village of Hoxne in Suffolk, England in 1992; the hoard consists of 14,865 Roman gold and bronze coins and 200 items of silver tableware and gold jewellery. The objects are now in the British Museum in London, where the most important pieces and a selection of the rest are on permanent display. In 1993, the Treasure Valuation Committee valued the hoard at £1.75 million. The hoard was buried in an oak box or small chest filled with items in precious metal, sorted by type, with some in smaller wooden boxes and others in bags or wrapped in fabric. Remnants of the chest and fittings, such as hinges and locks, were recovered in the excavation; the coins of the hoard date it after AD 407, which coincides with the end of Britain as a Roman province.

The owners and reasons for burial of the hoard are unknown, but it was packed and the contents appear consistent with what a single wealthy family might have owned. It is that the hoard represents only a part of the wealth of its owner, given the lack of large silver serving vessels and of some of the most common types of jewellery; the Hoxne Hoard contains several rare and important objects, such as a gold body-chain and silver-gilt pepper-pots, including the Empress pepper pot. The hoard is of particular archaeological significance because it was excavated by professional archaeologists with the items undisturbed and intact; the find helped to improve the relationship between metal detectorists and archaeologists, influenced a change in English law regarding finds of treasure. The hoard was discovered in a farm field about 2.4 kilometres southwest of the village of Hoxne in Suffolk on 16 November 1992. Tenant farmer Peter Whatling had lost a hammer and asked his friend Eric Lawes, a retired gardener and amateur metal detectorist, to help look for it.

While searching the field with his metal detector, Lawes discovered silver spoons, gold jewelry, numerous gold and silver coins. After retrieving a few items, he and Whatling notified the landowners and the police without attempting to dig out any more objects; the following day, a team of archaeologists from the Suffolk Archaeological Unit carried out an emergency excavation of the site. The entire hoard was excavated in a single day, with the removal of several large blocks of unbroken material for laboratory excavation; the area was searched with metal detectors within a radius of 30 metres from the find spot. Peter Whatling's missing hammer was recovered and donated to the British Museum; the hoard was concentrated in a single location, within the decayed remains of a wooden chest. The objects had been grouped within the chest; some items had been disturbed by burrowing animals and ploughing, but the overall amount of disturbance was low. It was possible to determine the original layout of the artefacts within the container, the existence of the container itself, due to Lawes' prompt notification of the find, which allowed it to be excavated in situ by professional archaeologists.

The excavated hoard was taken to the British Museum. The discovery was leaked to the press, the Sun newspaper ran a front-page story on 19 November, alongside a picture of Lawes with his metal detector; the full contents of the hoard and its value were still unknown, yet the newspaper article claimed that it was worth £10 million. In response to the unexpected publicity, the British Museum held a press conference at the museum on 20 November to announce the discovery. Newspapers lost interest in the hoard allowing British Museum curators to sort and stabilise it without further disruption from the press; the initial cleaning and basic conservation was completed within a month of its discovery. A Coroner's inquest was held at Lowestoft on 3 September 1993, the hoard was declared a treasure trove, meaning that it was deemed to have been hidden with the intention of being recovered at a date. Under English common law, anything declared as such belongs to the Crown if no one claims title to it. However, the customary practice at the time was to reward anyone who found and promptly reported a treasure trove with money equivalent to its market value, the money being provided by the national institution that wished to acquire the treasure.

In November 1993, the Treasure Trove Reviewing Committee valued the hoard at £1.75 million, paid to Lawes as finder of the treasure, he shared it with farmer Peter Whatling. Three years the Treasure Act 1996 was enacted by Parliament which allowed the finder and landowner to share in any reward; the Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service surveyed the field in September 1993, after it was ploughed, finding four gold coins and 81 silver coins, all considered part of the same hoard. Both earlier Iron Age and mediaeval materials were discovered, but there was no evidence of a Roman settlement in the vicinity. A follow-up excavation of the field was carried out by the Suffolk County Council Archaeological Service in 1994, in response to illegal metal detecting near the hoard find; the hoard burial hole was re-excavated, a single post hole was identified at the southwest corner.

Phu Loi Base Camp is a former U. S. Army base north of Saigon in southern Vietnam. Phu Loi airfield was established by the Japanese in the 1940s and was located 20 km north of Saigon in Bình Dương Province. During the First Indochina War the base was used by the French as a prisoner of war camp for captured Viet Minh. Following the end of the war it was used to imprison opponents of the Ngo Dinh Diem government; the U. S. Army base was established in 1965; the 2nd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division comprising: 2nd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment 1st Battalion, 18th Infantry Regiment 2nd Battalion, 18th Infantry Regimentwas based at Phu Loi from December 1965-February 1966. The 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division comprising: 1st Battalion, 505th Infantry Regiment 2nd Battalion, 505th Infantry Regimentwas based at Phu Loi from September 1968-December 1969 Other units stationed at Phu Loi included: 11th Combat Aviation Battalion: 128th Assault Helicopter Company 173rd Assault Helicopter Company before moving to Lai Khe 205th Aviation Support Helicopter Company 213th Aviation Support Helicopter Company AVEL Central Avionics 2nd Battalion, 34th Armor 34th Engineer Battalion 1st Battalion, 27th Artillery 6th Battalion, 27th Artillery 2nd Battalion, 32nd Artillery A Battery, 5th Battalion, 42d Field Artillery 44th Signal Battalion 82nd Brigade Support Battalion 3rd Battalion, 197th Artillery The base is abandoned, but a small section serves a museum.

The former airfield is still visible on satellite images

Ira Berlin was an American historian, professor of history at the University of Maryland, former president of Organization of American Historians. Berlin is the author of such books as Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America and Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Berlin grew up in The Bronx, New York, received his Ph. D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1970. He wrote extensively on American history and the larger Atlantic world in the 18th and 19th centuries. Berlin focused in particular on the history of slavery in the United States, his first book, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South, was awarded the Best First Book Prize by the National Historical Society. Berlin's work is concerned with what he termed the "striking diversity" in African-American life under slavery, he argues that this diversity is evident with attention to the differences in African-American life under slavery across geography and time.

In his 1998 book Many Thousands Gone, which covers the history of North American slavery through the 18th century, Berlin differentiates among four regions and their respective forms of slavery: the Chesapeake, the Lowcountry of South Carolina and Georgia, the Lower Mississippi Valley, the North. He further differentiates each of these regions across three distinct "generations," emphasizing shifts over time. Berlin argues that geographic and temporal differences in the first two centuries of North American slavery had important consequences for African American culture and society, he founded the Freedmen and Southern Society Project and served as director until 1991. The project's multi-volume Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation has twice been awarded the Thomas Jefferson Prize of the Society for the History of the Federal Government, as well as the J. Franklin Jameson Prize of the American Historical Association for outstanding editorial achievement, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.

In 2003, Berlin was the chief advisor for the HBO documentary Unchained Memories. In 2007, he was an advising scholar for the award-winning PBS documentary Prince Among Slaves, produced by Unity Productions Foundation. Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South ISBN 978-1-59558-173-0 Tells the story of the free black men and women who lived in the South before the Civil War. Freedom: A Documentary History of Emancipation, 1861-1867 Selections from the holdings of the National Archives; the Black Military Experience ISBN 978-0-521-22984-5 Collection of first-hand accounts from the National Archives. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, edited by Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman Essays. Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, edited by Ira Berlin and Philip D. Morgan ISBN 978-0-8139-1424-4 Essays. Families and Freedom: A Documentary History of African-American Kinship in the Civil War Era, edited by Ira Berlin and Leslie S. Rowland ISBN 978-1-56584-026-3 Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America 1999 Bancroft Prize from Columbia University.

Owsley Award. Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves 2003 Albert J. Beveridge Award of the American Historical Association; the Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States Appearances on C-SPAN