Smithsonian Networks, the on-demand cable channel that drew criticism over its exclusive content agreement with Showtime Networks, said yesterday that its first slate of programming would include two programs taking viewers behind the scenes of the Smithsonian’s vast collections of American memorabilia. “Stories from the Vaults,” a series of six 30-minute shows, will look at both the museum’s treasures and the people “who care for and unlock their secrets.” “American Treasures” will focus on a National Museum of American History exhibition of 150 of the most unusual items in the collection, including the hat that Abraham Lincoln wore on the night of his assassination. Other programs will highlight the mystery surrounding the 1933 Double Eagle, one of the world’s rarest and most valuable gold coins; commercial applications of scientific data, like how the hydrodynamics of penguins have influenced car design; and pre-Katrina Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

The time is right to make a little more history.

In about five months, the Museum of Broadcast Communications will host a public celebration of Franklin D. Roosevelt's historic "New Deal" speech at Chicago's 1932 Democratic convention.

On July 2, 75 years to the day after FDR took to the stage at the Chicago Stadium and issued a stirring "call to arms ... to restore America," actor Robert Vaughn ("The Man from U.N.C.L.E.") surrounded by bunting and period signs will re-create that speech to highlight the evening's festivities at the 3,900-seat Auditorium Theatre.

In the thunderous 47-minute address to the delegates and a national radio audience, Roosevelt promised the Depression-weary nation "bold leadership in distress relief" and "a new order of competence and of courage" as part of "a new deal for the American people."

The speech marked his first known use of the expression...

A major new exhibition traces the decline of absolute monarchy and rise of the Enlightenment that swept North America and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, and shows how portraits reflected the revolutionary changes.

Called "Citizens and Kings," the show at London's Royal Academy of Arts gathers works by artists like Goya, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Joshua Reynolds, Jacques-Louis David and Thomas Gainsborough.

The early works feature kings and queens in their pomp and finery, confident in the supreme power they believed was a God-given right.

But war and revolution in the United States and France challenged that assumption, and painters and sculptors came to portray Enlightenment leaders as statesmen weighed down by civic duty and championing reason and scientific progress.

... WNET, in New York, has produced an impressive if occasionally off-target new four-part series for PBS on the court's history. It starts with the great formative years under Chief Justice John Marshall, runs through the struggles leading to the Civil War, examines the court's shifting perspectives on property rights and government regulation during the post-Civil War years of rapid economic expansion, assesses the impact of the New Deal and the civil-rights movement, and finally discusses the court's steady conservative drift during the tenures of Chief Justices Warren E. Burger and William H. Rehnquist. Each segment focuses on the careers of the leading justices whose work and views typified the constitutional crosscurrents of their eras.

The series, directed by Thomas Lennon, produced by Mark Zwonitzer, and narrated by David Strathairn, features interviews with court historians, legal scholars, lawyers, former court clerks, journalists, and even some of the justices...

AMBOY, Calif. -- Before Interstate 40 bypassed them, this town on old Route 66 and its modernist landmark, Roy's Motel and Cafe, thumped with life day and night.

Roy's atomic-age neon sign was a beacon of civilization to weary travelers rocketing along America's Mother Road, a sign of hope to motorists whose cars had croaked in the desert heat.

Amboy was the domain of Buster Burris, a rough-hewn entrepreneur with strong opinions about bikers and men with long hair. Burris and his father-in-law opened Roy's in the 1930s and for decades did brisk business selling tires, malts, and gas.

Today, Amboy and Roy's are the only tourist stops for about 100 miles that didn't disappear after the interstate shut off customers in the 1970s. The town's population is approximately 4, the school closed years ago, birds have turned the church into a feces-caked aviary, and the post office barely survived.

Roy's, shuttered for about two years, is a mess of...

AUGUSTA, Ga., Jan. 24 — More than a month after the death of the legendary soul singer James Brown, his body still has not been laid to rest, a circumstance that has dismayed his friends and bewildered residents here in the town that has honored him as a native son.

“He wrote a song about this,” said Charles A. Reid Jr., a funeral director and a lifelong friend who is holding Mr. Brown’s body while his survivors and the trustees of his estate squabble over control. “ ‘Papa Don’t Take No Mess.’ That’s what he’d be hollering now.”

The six children Mr. Brown acknowledged in his will want his body placed in a mausoleum on his 60-acre property just across the South Carolina state line near the Savannah River, an estate they hope will become a museum and memorial park akin to Graceland, the home of Elvis Presley in Memphis, which has long been a lucrative tourist attraction. But the children are in a financial dispute with the trustees of the Brown estate, and it is...

'Go tell the Spartans, passer-by, That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.'

So reads the epigram carved into a commemorative stone, appropriately spartan, on a Greek hill. The tale behind it thrilled generations of schoolchildren educated in the classics. Hollywood is now praying it can breathe new life into the genre of the ancient historical epic with the help of a British-led cast.

The Battle of Thermopylae is regarded as one of history's pivotal moments, a doomed yet heroic last stand in 480BC with nothing less than Western civilisation at stake. Led by King Leonidas, an elite force of 300 Spartans, backed by around 7,000 Greeks, was vastly outnumbered by King Xerxes' invading Persian army, which has been estimated at between 80,000 and more than a million. For three days the Spartans stood firm at the 'Hot Gates', the main pass into central Greece, and inflicted appalling losses before being outflanked and killed. The sacrifice inspired all of Greece to...

Two Tuscan beauties have given a tantalising clue as to why Tony Blair cannot resist returning to the hospitality of Prince Girolamo Guicciardini Strozzi outside San Gimignano.

The home of the prince, a professor of international law, has a swimming pool and tennis court, and the estate is comfortingly buried in dense woods.

But perhaps what really keeps the Prime Minister coming back are the enigmatic yet strangely familiar smiles radiating from the prince's two charming daughters, Natalia and Irina. Because now an Italian genealogy expert, Domenico Savini, has revealed that the Strozzi family descends directly from Lisa Gherardini, otherwise known as Mona Lisa.

"It's a matter of great emotion and great pride to learn that we are descended from La Gioconda," said Natalia Strozzi, 30, an actress. The subject of Leonardo's most famous painting is known as "La Gioconda" in Italy. "We had a vague knowledge of this family story...

The Nazis ruled Germany for 12 years and inflicted their cruelty on other European nations for around 7. Coming to terms with what Hitler and his followers did has been a much longer project — involving Jews, Germans, other Europeans and just about everyone else in the world — and it is unlikely to end anytime soon. Like many other films and books, “2 or 3 Things I Know About Him,” a new documentary directed by Malte Ludin, examines the impact of Nazism on a single family, in this case the family of a high-ranking member of Hitler’s government. But if it tells, in Mr. Ludin’s words, “a typical German story,” the movie also offers an unusually matter-of-fact picture of the private and public effects of ordinary evil.

The filmmaker’s father, Hanns Ludin, who served as the Third Reich’s ambassador to the Nazi vassal state of Slovakia, and who in that capacity signed deportation orders sending thousands of Jews to Auschwitz, was executed for war crimes in 1947. He left behind...