Big Love, HBO’s fictional take on a Mormon family living in the suburbs of Salt Lake City, has ignited the latest round of polygamy debate. The show paints a benign picture of a Viagra-popping husband happily juggling three wives and seven children. Although the Mormon Church renounced plural marriage in 1890, it’s estimated that nearly 37,000 fundamentalist Mormons still practice polygamy today, most of them living in isolated communities in Utah, Arizona, and Colorado. But is polygamy a viable option for the modern American family or is Big Love just a Hollywood fantasy for men? As this collection of Atlantic writings suggests, polygamy has always played a contentious but alluring role in American life, and one some are still courting for success.

In “Among the Mormons” (April 1864), Fitz-Hugh Ludlow declared Brigham Young’s polygamous community to be “anomalous” and “one of the greatest psychological problems of the nineteenth century.” On meeting a polygamous family for the...

She has one of the world's greatest art collections, an unrivalled set of hundreds of Leonardo drawings, almost 30 Canalettos and paintings by most of western art's greatest figures including Tintoretto, Vermeer, Holbein and Dürer.

Yesterday the Queen acquired her first Caravaggio, worth £50 million or more if she could ever sell it.

The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew, owned by the Royal Family for almost 400 years, has lain unloved and seldom seen in a storeroom at Hampton Court for decades. Misattributed as a copy of a Caravaggio by an unknown hand, it was valued in thousands rather than millions.

The Royal Collection, whose experts have cleaned, restored and studied the picture for six years, declared yesterday that it is authentic and one of only around 50 surviving canvases by the Italian master. "I am convinced it is by Caravaggio," Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, said. "We are extremely excited, it's...

Walt Disney warped my mind. It was the first time I visited a cinema, to see Sleeping Beauty. That forest of thorns enveloping the castle has haunted me ever since; in my dreams for years, a great chasm opened up before the prince, an impossible yawning space full of spikes and twisting briars. Last night, I watched it with my daughter. What will it become in her mind? It felt like passing on a folk tale by the fire, and yet some people are wary of exposing their children to the genius of Disney.

I don't need to labour the vilification of the man, who died 40 years ago this Christmas. No other artist's signature appears on the products of an industry that is the cultural equivalent of Coca-Cola or McDonald's, and to many people, buying a toy Pinocchio is as bad as feeding your child burgers. Marc Eliot's 1993 biography branded Disney an FBI informant union-basher, and hints at worse. In a classic episode of The Simpsons broadcast shortly after Eliot's book came out, Bart...

A year after putting an American museum curator on trial on charges of acquiring antiquities illegally, the Italian government has had some impressive results. Relying on court evidence and aggressive public diplomacy, it has persuaded the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to surrender some of their finest artifacts. And ancient artworks at other museums are now firmly in Italy’s sights.

Yet negotiations have stalled with the very institution that has been Italy’s biggest target: the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, whose former curator, Marion True, is being tried in Rome. (The proceedings resume on Friday.)

Negotiations with the Getty have been “disappointing,” the Italian culture minister, Francesco Rutelli, said in an interview on Wednesday. “I don’t think they understand the gravity of the situation,” he said. “You have a major museum, and it is exhibiting dozens of stolen artifacts.”

At issue are 52 works in...

The Greek capital hardly springs immediately to mind as the home for a shrine to the 19th century Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel. But letters from Victor Hugo, Russian oil field maps and explosives factory share certificates will be among the items going on display next year in Athens in a new museum dedicated to Nobel, the museum's founder announced this week.

Greek historian Giorgos Marcou's family donated the funds for the project, and bought documents and other materials from all five continents, hauled them to Greece, and conceived and built the facility to house them.

[Louis P. Masur is director of the American-studies program at Trinity College, in Connecticut.]

Photographs hold us in their spell. We stare and study and think, So this is what happened. But we know full well that a picture represents only an instant, and that it can misrepresent the event it captures, sometimes even become the event itself. Photographs not only tell stories, but they also have stories. And behind those stories, as Clint Eastwood reminds us in the latest film he has directed, there are other stories. Making and remaking memories is a continuing process.

The story of Joe Rosenthal's picture of six Marines raising the American flag on Mount Suribachi, as the battle for Iwo Jima and World War II raged, has been frequently told, most notably by the scholars Karal Ann Marling and John Wetenhall in Iwo Jima: Monuments, Memories, and the American Hero (Harvard University Press, 1991), the historians Parker Bishop Albee and Keller Cushing Freeman in...

LOS ANGELES — Breakaway bottles used as props in fake saloon fights, posters for grade-B movies, a Hopalong Cassidy board game, Annie Oakley’s pistols, Gary Cooper’s toupee and a diorama of the O.K. Corral shootout: this is what you might expect to find in a museum founded by America’s Favorite Singing Cowboy, Gene Autry.

And here, at the Museum of the American West (formerly the Autry Museum of Western Heritage) in Griffith Park, nostalgic film buffs and aficionados of cowboy culture will find it all, much of it associated with an entertainer whose reputation was made with a guitar and a saddle, but whose greatest hit was a 1949 rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” that sold more than 30 million copies.

That is why it seemed so bizarre when, in 2003, the Autry Museum, with its $100 million endowment, absorbed the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, with its neglected world-class collection of 250,000 objects associated with once-flourishing...

A soldier, all alone, climbs the top of a mountain on Iwo Jima. The summit is wide terrain scarred by battle. The field is deserted. The soldier is bewildered. Then we see the same man years later, now white-haired, waking from a nightmare, comforted by his wife beside him. Thus two elements of this film are fixed at once: the time planes and the haunting.

These are the first minutes of Flags of Our Fathers, Clint Eastwood's new film about the battle of Iwo Jima in 1945. When word came of an Eastwood film on this subject, the blood didn't exactly freeze, but it did become tepid. Did the twenty-first century really need another gung-ho tale of World War II? Eastwood's reply is no. His film is crammed with physical horror and courage in crisis, but the intent is not mere replication of battle. Under the carnage, Eastwood is searching for something deeper than details.

What is collaterally almost as interesting as the film itself is the fact that this...

During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America’s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams.

But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lange have been unearthed in the National Archives....