A little over a decade ago, archaeologists experienced a collective nightmare--the emergence of eBay, the Internet auction site that, among other things, lets people sell looted artifacts. The black market for antiquities has existed for centuries, of course, with devastating consequences for the world's cultural heritage. But we could at least take some comfort that it was largely confined to either high-end dealers on one end of the economic spectrum or rural flea markets on the other. The sheer physical constraints of transporting and selling illegal artifacts kept the market relatively small. But the rise of online auction sites promised to drastically alter the landscape. And so it did, just not in the dire way we had anticipated.

Back in the pre-eBay days, the cost of acquiring and selling an antiquity was high. The actual looter was usually paid little, but various middlemen down the line added huge costs. During my 25 years of working in the Andes, I have often...

[Stacy Schiff, the author of “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America,” is working on a book about Cleopatra.]

WHAT becomes a legend most? If you’re a woman, the formula is straightforward. Your best bets are the three D’s: delusion (Joan of Arc), disability (Helen Keller), death (Sylvia Plath). You get extra points for the savage, sudden or surprising demise, as Evita, Amelia or Diana attests. At the head of the list of untimely self-destructors comes of course Cleopatra VII, for whose tomb a search begins shortly, on an Egyptian hilltop west of Alexandria.

Cleopatra died 2,039 years ago, at the age of 39. Before she was a slot machine, a video game, a cigarette, a condom, a caricature, a cliché or a synonym for Elizabeth Taylor, before she was reincarnated by Shakespeare, Dryden or Shaw, she was a nonfictional Egyptian queen. She ruled for 21 years, mostly alone, which is to say that she was essentially a female king, an incongruity...

Until a few years ago, travellers into our national past spent little time in the territory closest to us. They set the co-ordinates of their time machines for the glamour and danger of the Tudors, or the high drama of Britain Alone in 1940, whizzing past the social and cultural changes of the post-war years without a second thought. But in the last few years, with the success of books like David Kynaston's Austerity Britain 1945-51, a wonderful evocation of everyday life under the Attlee government, the sections of high-street bookshelves devoted to the recent past have grown steadily longer. And this spring sees the latest edition of what is becoming an annual flurry of contemporary histories: Jenny Diski on the 1960s, Andy Beckett and Francis Wheen on the 1970s, Richard Vinen and Jason Cowley on the 1980s.

What all these writers have in common is something that would once have seemed arbitrary and bizarre but now seems so natural and sensible that we take it for granted...

[Hasia R. Diner is a professor of history and Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. This essay is adapted from her book We Remember With Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962, published this month by New York University Press.]

...In the years following the end of World War II, which witnessed the destruction of one-third of the Jewish people, American Jews found numerous times and places to publicly express their anguish over that horrendous reality. They devoted much of their communal rhetoric and institutional history to contemplating its effect on their lives and thinking about how it might shape them in the years to come. In the decade and a half following the war until the early 1960s, culminating in the capture, trial, and arrest of Adolf Eichmann, the gruesome details of the mass murder of so many Europeans infused every sector of American Jewry. The vast repertoire of projects and texts created by...

The most long lasting of great American works, the structure destined "to convey some knowledge of us to remote posterity," said a New York writer long ago, was "not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge." That was in the spring of 1883, 126 years past, when the completed Brooklyn Bridge opened to the most exuberant public celebration of the era, complete with the president of the United States, Chester A. Arthur, leading the grand parade on foot from New York to Brooklyn over the bridge high above the East River.

"The Great Bridge" was news everywhere. It was the moon shot of its time, a brave, surpassing technical triumph, and more. For it was besides a great work of art and a thrilling overture to the high-rise city in America. Its giant granite towers stood taller by far than anything on the New York skyline, taller indeed than any structure in all of North America then. Over the years it has been photographed more than...

[Humberto Fontova is the author of Exposing the Real Che Guevara and the Useful Idiots Who Idolize Him. Visit www.hfontova.com]

"Freedom is our goal!" roared commander Pepe San Roman to the men assembled before him 48 years ago this week. “Cuba is our cause! God is on our side! On to victory!” Fifteen hundred men crowded before San Roman at their Guatemalan training camps that day. The next day they’d embark for a port in Nicaragua, and the day after that would be bound for a landing site in Cuba named Bahia De Cochinos. We know it as the Bay of Pigs.

Their outfit was Brigada 2506, and at their commander’s address the men (and boys, some as young as 16) erupted. A scene of total bedlam unfolded. Hats flew. Men hugged, sang, cheered, and wept. The hour of liberation was nigh – and these men, all volunteers, were putting their lives on the line to see their dream of a free Cuba fulfilled.

The Brigada...