HBO's seven-part miniseries, John Adams, based on David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning book about America's second president, premiered last weekend. The New Republic asked historian John Patrick Diggins and author Steven Waldman to critique the series. Click here to see their discussion of Parts 1 and 2. This week, Kirk Ellis, the series' writer and co-executive producer, will be joining the discussion. Waldman kicked off the discussion with his thoughts on last night's airing of Part 3. Click here to read Diggins's response. Below, Ellis responds to their comments on the first three episodes of the series.

Dear Jack and Steve,

Thank you for insightful comments and questions about the series thus far.

Jack, you mention in your comments on Part 3 of the series that "viewers ought to know that things were going bad militarily in the first years of revolution." Because Adams spent the majority of his congressional and diplomatic years...

The Titanic drawing offices are to be unveiled to the public today, unlocking the secrets of the world's most famous ship.

The former offices in the old main Harland & Wolff building on Queen's Road will give a unique insight into the history of the ill-fated liner.

The building, which was the hub of the H&W empire, is not usually open to the public, but courtesy of Titanic Quarter Ltd, visitors will get the chance to view a real piece of Titanic history never seen before.

The drawing offices gave rise to the inception and creation of the Titanic and many other famous luxury liners.

Coming off a year in which Kansas endured destructive ice storms, killer tornadoes and severe flooding, the state history museum has opened an exhibit on extreme weather.

Organizers say the timing is a coincidence, because they have been working on the exhibit for more than a year. But they also say it's a reminder of why Kansans routinely look to the sky and what outsiders remember most about the state.

The exhibit, "Forces of Nature," opened Friday at the Kansas Museum of History in west Topeka and will run through Jan. 4, 2009.

"Weather is a huge part of our identity," said Rebecca Martin, project manager for the exhibit. "People around the world will forever associate us with a really famous tornado in 'The Wizard of Oz.'"

The Kansas State Historical Society also is hoping to collect Kansans' recollections of memorable storms. The exhibit includes a small booth with a microphone and computer, so that...

In 1966, the Merry Prankster fled to a dead-end town in Mexico to escape a jail term. Four decades later, a journey to that same town becomes a pilgrimage in search of both the man and the myth.

In 1819, 18 years after leaving the White House, John Adams fretted that "Mausoleums, Statues, Monuments will never be erected to me. … Panegyrical romances will never be written, nor flattering orations spoken to transmit me to posterity in brilliant colors."

He was mostly right. Where's the Adams Memorial in Washington, the college named after Adams, the currency bearing Adams's image? The first and third presidents are on Mount Rushmore, but no Adams gazes out between George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

Nevertheless, the past 20 years have witnessed a slowly accelerating Adams revival, fueled mostly by works of scholarly and popular history and sure to gain further momentum from a lavishly produced, well-written, and superbly acted seven-part series on HBO. The series is called John Adams but it could easily be subtitled "A Panegyr-ical Romance." Adams is fast becoming American history's most widely sung unsung hero.

The...

Adolf Hitler's obsession with creating a Nazi super museum to house plundered art is at the heart of The Rape of Europa.

Equally fascinating about the documentary is America's wartime attempt to minimize damage to European public art during bombing raids and to return stolen pieces to their original owners.

Dubbed Monuments Men, these were artists and curators drafted into military service. Many marched along with troops into France, Italy and Germany in the hope of securing important artifacts before they were looted or destroyed.

It's long for a documentary, almost two hours, but it has a big story to tell.

While the Nazi rhetoric was quite high-flown about its appreciation of artistic treasures, its actions were less so. Some of the high party members had an interest in art for aesthetic reasons, others for the prestige that fine art might bring them. They may have little known the value of great art, but they certainly knew its price...

After 22 years of conjecture, the mystery painter of a Victorian portrait donated to Trowbridge Museum may have finally been identified.

The portrait, donated in 1986, shows a young Victorian woman showing off her wedding ring, in a piece museum staff believe is likely to have been painted especially for her husband.

Until now, no-one at the museum has known anything about the origins of the painting, but a member of the public recently enlightened them on the possible identity of the artist - Eden Upton Eddis.

The mystery surrounding the painting started when the image was displayed as part of an exhibition last year.

“I thought it stood out from the rest of the pieces; it’s a lovely picture, with a beautiful frame,” said Clare Lyall, Curator at the museum. “I looked into it and realised we had very little information about it. We knew when we acquired it, but little else.”

It's not as if "instant photography" died in an instant. Once digital cameras became affordable, its days were numbered. And technically (if not technologically), it's not even dead. Fuji still makes instant film. Even so, the announcement last month that Polaroid would stop producing instant film is a landmark in the history of photography.

Cambridge photographer Elsa Dorfman exclusively uses Polaroid film in her celebrated large-format portraits. Her response to the news was no less heartfelt for being so theatrical. "Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!" she wailed in a telephone interview.

"I do love that film," Dorfman said once she'd composed herself. "It is just fabulous film: creamy, wonderful, fabulous film. And digital looks so different."

Of course digital looks different. Everything looks different from Polaroid. Polaroids are thick, tactile, slightly unreal. If Polaroids were a movie, they'd be "The Truman...