The largest treasure in the J.Paul Getty Museum's collection, a replica of an ancient Roman villa buried by Mount Vesuvius, is just months from reopening, but already it's being covered by a poisonous ash of bad publicity. And some of it might drift over other museums, too.

The Getty Villa in Malibu, which has undergone a six-year, $275 million renovation, will showcase the museum's collection of more than 40,000 antiquities from classical Greece and Rome. But the top Getty official who led the project, antiquities curator Marion True, won't be there for the opening celebrations in January: She had to resign. Worse, she goes on trial in Italy next month on charges she conspired with European dealers to traffic in looted ancient artworks. She and the Getty deny any wrongdoing.

It's an embarrassing comedown for a mighty institution. The Getty has been the envy of the museum world, with access to billions of dollars in trust accounts, the power to dominate art...

[Eric Hobsbawm has taught history and written in Britain, the US and elsewhere. His most recent book is an autobiography, Interesting Times: A 20th-Century Life. He is president of Birkbeck College.]

Most work in the field of Jewish history deals with the almost invariably vast impact of the outside world on the Jews, who are almost invariably a small minority of the population. My concern is with the impact of the Jews on the rest of humanity. And, in particular, with the explosive transformation of this impact in the 19th and 20th centuries: that is to say, since the emancipation and self-emancipation of the Jews began in the late 18th century.

Between their expulsion from Palestine in the first century ad and the 19th century, the Jews lived within the wider society of gentiles, whose languages they adopted as their own and whose cuisine they adapted to their ritual requirements; but only rarely and intermittently were they able and, what is equally to the...

Summary: During Richard Nixon's first term, when I served as secretary of defense, we withdrew most U.S. forces from Vietnam while building up the South's ability to defend itself. The result was a success -- until Congress snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting off funding for our ally in 1975. Washington should follow a similar strategy now, but this time finish the job properly.

Richard Nixon was elected in 1968 on the assumption that he had a plan to end the Vietnam War. He didn't have any such plan, and my job as his first secretary of defense was to remedy that -- quickly. The only stated plan was wording I had suggested for the 1968 Republican platform, saying it was time to de-Americanize the war. Today, nearly 37 years after Nixon took office as president and I left Congress to join his cabinet, getting out of a war is still dicier than getting into one, as President George W. Bush can attest.

There were two things in my office that first...

In the early morning of Nov. 4, 1966, while Florence slept, the Arno River, overwhelmed by unprecedented rains, suddenly overflowed its banks and unleashed a lethal mixture of water, mud and debris. The city never had a chance. Its narrow streets served as perfect conduits, leading the river into the heart of Florence.

At 9: 45 a.m., a wall of water six metres high reached the Piazza del Duomo, home to the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, the city's most distinctive landmark. It forced its way through the bronze and golden doors of the Baptistery, tore off the marble lid of a Roman sarcophagus, and ripped through the cathedral's administrative archives, which date back to the 14th century. In all, some 6,000 volumes documenting the construction of the cathedral were submerged in mud, rendering large parts of them virtually illegible.

But that was then. Today an international team of scholars, aided by sophisticated imaging technology, is attempting to...

The year 1948 resonates with Israelis just as 1776 does with Americans -- as the year their nation was born in blood during a war for independence against all odds.

For Palestinians, 1948 means something very different. It marks the defeat of the Arab armies, the failure of Palestinians to establish their own state and the beginning of exile. It was the year 750,000 Palestinians became refugees in neighboring Arab countries -- the start of a period they call "The Catastrophe," or al-Nakba in Arabic.

The battle lines of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict extend to the classroom, where the two sides' versions of their shared history diverge sharply. Now, two university professors aim to change the way the conflict is taught by exposing Palestinian students to Israeli history lessons and Israeli students to the Palestinian version of history.

The project is the work of Dan Bar-On, a social psychology professor at Ben Gurion University in...

Long before Christopher Columbus sailed to the so-called New World in 1492, there was already a civilization in Southern California, an established world with its own life and landscape. Indeed, long before Los Angeles Basin was transformed into a smog-filled, celebrity-obsessed metropolis, it was home to the Native American Gabrielino/Tongva nation, some of whom lived in a place called Kuruvungna.

To Indians, Kuruvungna is a sacred site; in the Tongva language, the name means "a place where we are in the sun." To the state of California, it is a registered landmark. To most Angelenos, however, it is the campus of University High School in West L.A., and on Sunday, it will be the site of the Gabrielino/Tongva Springs Foundation's 11th annual Life Before Columbus Day Native American Arts and Crafts Festival.

"It's to show the public, 'Hey, we're still here. We never went away,' " says Gabrielino Indian and foundation spokeswoman Angie Behrns...

The 200th anniversary of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, a two-year national celebration culminating in November, has focused public attention on the Columbia River, at whose mouth the historic trek ended in the winter of 1805. Following in the footsteps - or the wake - of those intrepid explorers, as I did recently on Cruise West's small ship Spirit of '98, on a round-trip cruise from Portland, brought life and color to a tale that I had heard before, but which I had pretty much marginalized.

A simple recitation of the facts does not do justice to the significance of the 8,000-mile round-trip journey of the two soldiers, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Their names are woven into the fabric of American history. At the behest of President Jefferson, they led a party of 45, collectively known as the Corps of Discovery, on a journey of exploration into the Pacific Northwest, an area about which little was known other than the fact that it was rich in animal furs and...

After three days of eating barbecued pork fattened on rice bran, eggs Benedict on rice-flour waffles, saffron rice pudding, rice truffles and a parade of Lowcountry specialties ladled over rice, there was just one thing left to say.

Campbell Coxe, a tall, sunburnt farmer, stepped up to the microphone.

"This isn't whiiiite rice," he said, drawing out the "white" with an exaggerated accent. "This is a gourmet rice."

Carolina Gold rice is that, and more. It's a grain with a past gilded in wealth and shadowed by slavery. Once so prevalent in South Carolina that it inspired a cuisine --- as well as innumerable rice poster beds --- Carolina Gold slipped virtually out of existence for much of the last century.
...
Long-grain white rice is a staple food for much of the world. Carolina Gold, just one variety of thousands of long-grain rices, is a passion. An alliance of rice growers, historians and agricultural...

[Uradyn E. Bulag teaches socio-cultural anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He is the author of Nationalism and Hybridity in Mongolia (Oxford 1998) and The Mongols at China’s Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity (Rowman and Littlefield 2002).]

... More than at any other period in modern times, there now is a real opportunity for Central/Inner Asia to become once again “Central”, as famously discussed by the late world systems theorist Andre Gunder Frank. [4] He argued that twice in history strong energy outbursts from Central/Inner Asia powerfully reshaped the world. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, of course, there is no military power indigenous to the region that the rest of the world needs to reckon with, but Central/Inner Asia has become a zone of great significance and profound upheaval, not only because of its strategic location in the US-led war in Afghanistan and Iraq, but equally...