KANSAS CITY, Mo.--It would have been easy for the new National World War I Museum, which opens here this week, to focus primarily on America's relatively minor role in the first "war to end all wars." Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing, leader of the American Expeditionary Force, and a World War I artillery captain named Harry Truman were both native Missourians. Dwight Eisenhower, raised in neighboring Kansas, also fought in the Great War, as did a cavalryman-turned-tanker named George Patton, who had attended the Mounted School at Fort Riley, Kan.

Much to its credit, the museum chose historical accuracy over this myopic focus. The result is a compelling and comprehensive presentation that leaves visitors with a clear understanding of the forces that led to the war, the barbarism of the world's first mechanized industrial warfare, and the unresolved disputes that sowed the seeds for future conflicts, including some that are in the headlines today....

The oldest representation of the cosmos – the sky disc of Nebra – has gone on show in Basel's history museum. Basel (Swiss) has a special place in the disc's history. It was here that police seized the disc after it was stolen from its place of origin in Germany. The disc, which forms the centrepiece of an exhibition devoted to Bronze Age objects, has been hailed as one of the most important archaeological discoveries of recent times. Made out of bronze with gold embossing, the 3,600-year-old object is an astronomical clock. It connects the sun and the moon calendars together, with the sun giving the day and year and the moon, the month. The moon year is, however, 11 days shorter than the sun year. This was taken into account in ancient times by adding an extra month, leading experts to believe that people in the Bronze Age were already making sophisticated astronomical observations similar to those written about by the Babylonians around 1,000 years later.

The cars, the girls, the martinis, the exotic locales, the eye-popping gadgets - for a generation of fans, James Bond embodied the quintessence of British savoir-faire: the civil servant with a license to kill, the secret agent who saved civilization from a series of nefarious villains while staying in the world's fanciest hotels and romancing a bevy of beauteous babes.

In the entertaining and very funny new book "The Man Who Saved Britain," Simon Winder - publishing director at Penguin - gives us a rollicking tour through Bondland, even as he artfully deconstructs the appeal of Agent 007. His central argument is that Bond arrived to uphold the British ego at the very moment when Britain's planet-spanning empire was breaking up and the once-great power was trying to come to terms with its diminished post-World War II role.

While Britain was coping in the 1950s and '60s with unemployment, inflation, strikes, and demoralization, and making the humbling...

BERLIN, Nov. 23 — It may be a decade or more before this city’s monumental Museum Island finally shakes off the twin legacies of World War II and East Germany’s Communist regime, but with the reopening of the Bode Museum, this cultural park in the former East Berlin has taken another step toward recovering its place as one of the world’s great centers of art.

With the restoration of the Alte Nationalgalerie, or Old National Gallery, in 2001, two of the island’s five museums are now in fine shape. After an eight-year, $209 million refurbishment, the Bode probably has never looked better since its inauguration as the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in 1904.

Occupying a triangular plot overlooking the Spree River on the northern edge of the island, the museum is once again a true palace of art, welcoming visitors into its vast neo-Baroque entrance hall with an equestrian statue and leading them through naturally lighted galleries with marble floors and wood-paneled...

"Joan of Arc" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, though not much of an art show, is a powerful and learned study in renown.

The little Latin books, medieval swords, dinner bells and film stills crowded in its cases aren't what mainly matter. What matters is the girlish, great, utterly improbable person they call forth, and the forces she deploys on her long, triumphant march into your mind.

Joan of Arc (1412-1431), dead while in her teens, didn't have much time. She made the most of what she had. That illiterate, sincere, cross-dressing young woman -- who talked to saints and angels, led an army into battle and helped liberate her land -- got as close to immortality as humans ever get.

Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower. Tomorrow at 8 p.m. on the History Channel. Grade: B

Thanksgiving is often marked by cute school plays that celebrate the relationship between the Pilgrims and American Indians. The History Channel’s new special “Desperate Crossing: The Untold Story of the Mayflower” (tomorrow at 8 p.m.) goes beneath the veneer of the familiar story taught in elementary school.

Told through believable and meticulous re-enactments and interviews with historians, this is a story of struggle for religious freedom, unbearable hardship, heartbreaking losses and utter determination to start a new life in a new country. While the title of the documentary is certainly a play on the show that takes place on Wisteria Lane, this three-hour special defines desperate.

Unwilling to abide by the edicts of the Church of England, a devout group known as Pilgrims flee to the Netherlands in 1607. By 1620, they decide...

Fifteen years ago, Arthur Nash made one of his first purchases of gangland memorabilia when a dealer in rare photographs showed him what he said was the first published picture of the gangster Arnold Rothstein. Before long, Mr. Nash, who was 19 at the time, was searching for photographs of other notorious figures, like Al Capone, Machine Gun Jack McGurn and Abe Reles.

Mr. Nash’s interest in gangland lore broadened, and he eventually assembled a collection of 1,500 items documenting the lives and often brutal times of people involved in organized crime.

Some of the items are linked to murders: for example, a barber chair from the old Park Sheraton Hotel in which the mob boss Albert Anastasia was sitting when he was killed in 1957.

Mr. Nash also owns a fedora that belonged to the man thought by many to have shot Anastasia: Joey Gallo. He was wearing the hat on the night in 1972 that he was fatally shot inside Umberto’s Clam Bar on Mulberry Street....

President Bush won only 24% of the vote in New York City in 2004. Abraham Lincoln did not do much better. In 1860, the president many of us regard as America's greatest won less than 35% of the city's vote. In 1864, he won even less — about 33%. Why most New Yorkers did not care for Lincoln is a question that will be answered to most visitors' satisfaction in "New York Divided: Slavery and the Civil War," a well-designed, richly informative exhibition opening today at the New-York Historical Society.

"New York Divided" follows last year's "Slavery in New York."That exhibition told the story of the slavery that remained legal in New York State until 1827. The current exhibition takes us on a journey from the 1830s to the immediate post–Civil War period. Although slavery had been abolished in New York, the city's economy was as dependent upon slavery as ever. New York City had such close ties to the Southern plantation economy that as Southern...

The current of intellectual energy snapping through “The History Boys,” the ferociously engaging screen adaptation of Alan Bennett’s Tony Award-winning play, set in a boys’ school in northern England in 1983, feels like electrical brain stimulation. As two teachers jockey for the hearts and minds of eight teenage schoolboys preparing to apply to Oxford and Cambridge, their epigrams send up small jolts of pleasure and excitement. How to teach and interpret history is the question.

One view is represented by Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore), a hotshot young tutor and symbol of Thatcher-era go-getter mentality, hired by the school to scrape away the rust of received opinion from the students’ thinking so that their answers to test questions will have more “edge.” On the other side is Hector (Richard Griffiths), the poetry-spouting, eccentric teacher of general studies. An obese, 50-something school fixture (imagine a squishier, teary-eyed Charles Laughton or Peter Ustinov),...