In the 1950s, few people in the United States or Europe paid attention to a German woman's memoir of civilians fighting off starvation, sexual assault, and sudden death during the Russian occupation of Berlin.

Readers might have blanched at the descriptions of soldiers routinely raping helpless women left in the city at the end of World War II. Perhaps no one wanted to think about German suffering. Or maybe the author's wry personality lacked appeal at the time.

Now, more than five decades later, the reissued version of "A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City," is making waves across the globe, lauded as a journalistic masterpiece and a stunning literary achievement.

The book also has joined an exclusive club: It's one of a handful of war-related works that took decades - even generations - to be appreciated.

For example, "Parade's End," British novelist Ford Madox Ford's epic 1920s fiction series about...

Gen. Douglas MacArthur can't be seen around these parts without his bodyguards.

The old soldier stands high on a bluff here looking out to sea, binoculars slung around his neck and an officer's cap perched jauntily on his head. In a cordon in front of him are several burly riot policemen, their shields raised in defensive posture. At least a dozen other officers, some in plainclothes with wires dangling in their ears, are fanned out around the flowerbeds, on the lookout for trouble.

For nearly half a century, a 16-foot bronze likeness of the late war hero has dominated a park near the shores where thousands of U.S. troops under his command landed Sept. 15, 1950, to expel North Korean forces. It is considered one of the decisive battles of the Korean War, one that many here credit for the eventual success of the prosperous, free-market nation that is South Korea.

But not all. A movement to tear down the statue has been gaining momentum recently among...

[Rebecca Traister is a staff writer for Salon Life.]

On Thursday Sept. 8, Shelly Henley Kelly, the immediate past president of the Society of Southwest Archivists composed a letter to the editors of major newspapers.

"Imagine that Washington D.C. is struck by a CAT 5 hurricane and the National Archives has been damaged and/or flooded," Kelly, an archivist at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, wrote. "Archivists and conservators are trained to have a disaster response/disaster recovery plan. They will get in and begin the massive effort to reclaim the damaged documents... But what happens when the archivist is prevented from returning to the repository? How long can the many important documents, photographs, sound recordings documenting our nation's history and culture sit alone, un-airconditioned, possibly wet, before they rot beyond any hope for recovery?"

This, Kelly argued in her letter, is precisely what has been...

For years, Mary K. Carter felt that New York's two-century history as a slave state was treated as an embarrassing secret, mostly ignored in school curriculums.

"Many people are surprised when you talk about slavery's existence in New York," said Carter, a Freeport resident and retired middle-school teacher in the Rockville Centre school district. "They're surprised because it's taught as something that happened in the South."

So when the education department at Hofstra University began working on a curriculum to help school children understand how the enslavement of Africans helped build New York's wealth and power, she joined the team.

That curriculum has been named this year's "exemplary social studies program" by the nation's largest association of social studies teachers.

The curriculum - a 268- page guide for teachers that includes links to Web sites, primary documents and suggested lesson plans - will...

The only Tasmanian ever to become Prime Minister, Joseph Aloysius Lyons, presided over a year which changed Australia as perhaps no other -- 1932.

It was a fateful year of momentous events which included the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the birth of the Australian Broadcasting Commission, the mysterious death of the legendary racehorse Phar Lap, the dismissal of the New South Wales Premier Jack Lang by Governor Philip Game, and the start of Test cricket's infamous Bodyline series.

All these nation-defining events, crises and scandals have been the subject of various books, television series and documentaries, but it took American-born journalist Gerald Stone to recognise that all this stuff of national legend happened within a single year and roll the stories together into one book called simply 1932 - a Hell of a Year.

Joe Lyons does not figure in all the events -- the Bodyline series and Phar Lap's death, for instance, happened without...

History is an asymmetrical mess. The past foretells the future; the future arrives and, often enough, exposes the past as an amiable fraud.

The history of Sept. 11, 2001, was explained, for instance, on Dec. 29, 1913 when William A. Dunning stood before the annual meeting of the American Historical Association and caught hold of a luminous ray of truth.

"If the lesson of the past is sought as a guide to any policy," Dunning said, "the lesson that is learned and acted upon is derived from the error that passes as history at the time, not from the truth that becomes known long after." In short: "The deeds of men have been affected more by the beliefs in what was false than by the knowledge of what was true."

Romans went to battle convinced that two boys, suckled by wolves, founded their city. Medieval kings justified their tyranny from biblical accounts written centuries after the fact. Otto von Bismarck, the Prussian...

Four years later, few doubt that 9/11 ushered in a new epoch. What's less obvious is that that day also marked the "end" of an era. For Sept. 11, 2001, was the last day of the 1990s.

Of course that's not literally, chronologically true. But just as the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote a history of the 19th century, which, he decided, started in 1789 and ended in 1914, so we can look back on the 1990s and see that they too were not an exact match with the dates on the calendar.

That was not obvious at the time. But now it's possible to speak of the 1990s as an era of sharp definition, the way we recall the greedy '80s or the swinging '60s (which you might say began with the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and ended along with the Vietnam War in the mid-'70s). They were the no-worry '90s.

Viewed from here, the 1990s were a kind of vacation, a pause between two eras of anxiety and conflict. They began on Dec. 8, 1991, with the fall...

Gardens reflect their designers' sensibilities as surely as houses reveal their owners' personalities. Nowhere is this more evident than at Canterbury Shaker Village in Canterbury, New Hampshire. There, amid captivating blossoms and exuberant growth, it is possible to step back in time and experience what it meant to be a Believer.

The village was established in 1792 by the followers of Mother Ann Lee, who fled England in 1774 to escape religious persecution. By the mid-1850s, Canterbury comprised 3,000 acres and more than 100 buildings overseen by 300 sisters and brothers of the United Society of Believers, a celibate sect also known as the Shaking Quakers, or Shakers, because of their use of dance in worship rites. At the time, the Shaker movement was at its peak. Historians differ on how many Believers there were across the country, but between 4,000 and 6,000 brothers and sisters are estimated to have lived in about 18 communities from Maine to Kentucky. Today, only a...

The Banneker-Douglass Museum in Annapolis is now closer to Church Circle, with its front door moved 10 paces to the left - bringing a visitor into a stark space where the old and new architecture of the museum meet.

Inside the Franklin Street entrance, gleaming black floor tiles and a modern light oak staircase make a seamless match with the tall right wall from the exterior of the 1890s brick building. All this sets the stage for a maritime mural of the City Dock circa 1870, the post-emancipation period, right in the middle of the story the museum is there to tell.

"You see the old [church] facade and at the same time view the new gallery space, showing you where we were and where we are now," said Jeffrey H. Greene, the facilities manager overseeing the project for the state.

With the mission of illuminating African-American history and culture in Maryland, the state's official repository of related archival material is in the final...