[HNN Editor: In this piece the author discusses Jonathan Brent's new book about the Yale project: Yale University Press's publication of scholarly books based on Soviet archives.]

... Although he discusses some of the academic issues that lay at the heart of the Yale project, the point of Inside the Stalin Archives is somewhat different: Brent is less interested in what his series meant for Western academics and more interested in explaining the strange atmosphere of post-Soviet Moscow, and in particular the ways in which Russia's twisted past continued to shape its present.*

Elsewhere—in East Germany, for example—the collapse of communism meant that the archive doors swung wide open, and researchers of all kinds flooded inside. But in Moscow, each archive (state, party, military) made its own decisions about which documents to release and to whom to release them. Some, among them the Russian state archive, where gulag documents are kept, were relatively...

Those who wonder about digital media shortening our attention spans usually fret about businesspeople glued to BlackBerrys or students multitasking through homework. For another measure of how our society has changed, consider this new-product launch from April 15, 1952:

The scene is glitzier than Steve Jobs releasing the latest iProduct: a black-tie gala in the Jade Room of New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, attended by Rockefellers, Vanderbilts and a representative of the queen of England. What's being launched? A 54-volume set of books, with 443 works by 74 authors totaling 32,000 pages of small type.

These were not just any books, but "Great Books of the Western World," marketed by Encyclopaedia Britannica. The authors included Aristotle, Aquinas, Milton, Locke, Hume and Mill along with some especially dense texts such as Apollonius' "On Conic Sections." The celebrities who bought the special Founders' Edition at $500 per leather-bound...

I don't know of anyone who is happy about the current economic situation, but while we're waiting for a turn-around, here's a question to ponder: Can a bad economy ever be good for parks?

In at least one case, the answer seems to be"yes," because the Great Depression played a key role in saving the Yorktown Battlefield from private development.

Back in the mid-1920s, prosperous Americans were becoming increasingly interested in leisure activities, and good train service, a growing highway network and budding air travel made weekend trips more practical for the well-heeled. A sleepy historic village in southeastern Virginia caught the attention of real estate developers looking for a site for a golf-based resort.

The gently rolling terrain, view of the nearby York River, and relative proximity to large population centers made the area a fine site for the Yorktown Country Club, and at that time the place where America finally achieved victory in its quest for independence...

Robert Roy Britt of Live Science reports on the research of a team led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor John Valley that shows increased dryness in the Eastern Mediterranean between 100 and 700 of the Common Era (CE), with dramatic dips in rainfall in 100 CE and 400 CE. It raises questions about whether climate is somehow implicated in the decline of the Roman Empire (traditionally considered to have fallen in 476 CE) and the weakening of the Byzantine Empire in the 600s-700s CE.

Britt does not mention that the 600s were the era in which the Orthodox Caliphs of Islam took greater Syria and Egypt away from Byzantium; these lands were later ruled by the Umayyad Empire. Indeed, within the first century after Islam was founded, its adherents spread out with lightning speed to take over the southern third of the old Roman Empire, as well as the entirety of the Sasanid Empire of Iran. The Muslim conquests after 632 CE are rivaled in history for their speed and...

The American press and American public - with the exception of some steadfast loyalists - now have Nixon to kick some more.

And for good reason.

The release of some 200 hours of Nixon White House recordings is going to provide a treasure chest of inside glimpses into the man who helped usher in the politics of polarization and who helped dismember 1950s-early-1960s consensus politics - a trend that many hope will be reversed with the new, presumably more post-partisan Obama administration. Tidbits trickling out now about Nixon as preserved on tape aren't exactly going to bolster Nixon's image among the public - or among historians who'll shape future generations' perceptions.

Journalists are now going through tapes and the parts that have come out so far (within just a few hours) are revealing. NBC offers these:

On July 1, 1971, Nixon instructs Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman to have someone break into the Brookings Institution...

[Chris Patten is a former European Union commissioner for external relations, chairman of the British Conservative Party, and was the last British governor of Hong Kong.]

I recently took part in a public debate with Paul Keating, Australia's former prime minister. He is an interesting man, a genuine intellectual driven by his inner demons both to flay those who pay insufficient credit to his transformational role in Australian politics and to expose what he regards as waffle and myths.

This regularly engulfs him in controversy, but it can serve an educational purpose. Recently, for example, he denounced the idea that Australian sacrifices in the Gallipoli campaign of 1916 during World War I had somehow made and redeemed his nation. For him, Australia came of age later, at Kokoda, often called Australia's Thermopylae, when a small group of young soldiers resisted the advance of Japanese army divisions that seemed set to take Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea and...