In 2000, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received an anonymous tip that a luxury apartment near the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C., housed a private and possibly illegal collection of tribal art. People who had visited the apartment whispered that its walls showcased hundreds of artifacts, including many containing what appeared to be plumage from rare or endangered birds. There was no way to know for sure, since the collection's owner had forgone plaques and scholarly labels and arranged the items to complement his décor. An inquiry began, and the agency's questions were quickly met with paperwork--import permits, contracts, receipts--from the owner and his lawyer. But, even after the investigation closed, the rumors persisted. Eventually, photographs of the controversial gallery published in magazine profiles of the owner piqued wildlife officials' interest once again. Four months after the initial investigation, officials reopened the case and asked him to allow...

[Melanie Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.]

The atomic bomb fell on Nagasaki on the morning of Aug. 9, 1945. On Sept. 6, George Weller of the Chicago Daily News, fresh from covering the formal surrender of Japan aboard the USS Missouri, arrived in the city. He got there by impersonating an American colonel and forcing his way onto Japanese trains. He was the first Westerner to enter Nagasaki after the bomb.

By heading for Nagasaki, Weller was following his nose for news but also defying a ban imposed by Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who had declared Japan's southernmost island of Kyushu, where Nagasaki is located, off-limits to journalists. Weller reasoned that the war was over, the U.S. military's authority over journalists was now moot, and he ought to be free to travel wherever his story took him.

But MacArthur had the last word. Weller's dispatches, filed through U.S. censors in Tokyo, never reached Chicago. Weller always assumed...

"You’ll be touring Colonial Williamsburg," says Richard Handler, a U.Va. anthropology professor and associate dean for academic programs, "and stopping at, say, Raleigh Tavern. The guide is completely candid: ‘You’re looking at a reconstruction. The building burned in 1816 and was rebuilt in the 1930s the way it was thought to be, but we now know there are details that just aren’t right.’ Yet by the end of the tour, you’re in a meeting room in the tavern when [the guide] will say, ‘And this is the very room where the patriots met to debate the revolution.’"

Such doublespeak, Handler maintains, not only prompts head scratching among the crowds who tour the nation’s most renowned living history museum, but reflects an identity crisis afflicting the institution itself. Just as most of its guides don periwigs and breeches, yet address visitors not as characters reciting scripts, but as historical "interpreters" parlaying information, corporate...