The first three days of July 1863 saw the bloodiest hours of the Civil War, in a battle that spilled across the fields and hills surrounding Gettysburg, Pa. The fighting climaxed in the bright, hot afternoon of the third day, when more than 11,000 Confederate soldiers mounted a disastrous assault on the heart of the Union line. That assault—Pickett's Charge, named for the general who led it—marked the farthest the South would penetrate into Union territory. In a much larger sense, it marked the turning point of the war.

No surprise, then, that the Battle of Gettysburg would become the subject of songs, poems, funeral monuments and, ultimately, some of the biggest paintings ever displayed on this continent. Paul Philippoteaux, famed for his massive 360-degree cyclorama paintings, painted four versions of the battle in the 1880s. Cycloramas were hugely popular in the United States in the last decades of the 19th century, before movies displaced them in the public's affection...

Toward the end of his 1995 epic Braveheart, Mel Gibson, playing the great Scottish hero William Wallace, finds himself in most unpleasant circumstances: having been beaten and tormented by Edward I’s sneering toadies, he’s stretched out on a rack until his joints begin to pop, then slit like a chicken and beheaded.

He had it easy.

In 1305, the real William Wallace was hanged to the point of unconsciousness, revived, tortured, hanged some more, castrated, gutted, and beheaded, with his body dismembered, dipped in tar, and sent off on tour as a warning to anyone who shared his views. As in Gibson’s movie, noisy crowds gathered to watch the bloodletting. In real life, far from being abashed by what they saw, the onlookers enjoyed the spectacle.

“The bad news,” writes literary scholar Harold Schechter in his book Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment, “is that audiences apparently still enjoy watching other people die in horrible...

... The political chronology of Adams's life requires that Part 4 of the series proceed from the end of the Revolution and the peace treaty to his stay in England and then Washington's inauguration. But given the amount of time spent on the Declaration, the Constitution gets rather lost in the story, and it is the latter document that shaped American history. Now while it is true that Adams was in London and had no direct hand in drafting the Constitution, he was at the same time writing volumes to defend its formation as well as those of the state constitutions. Why was this necessary? Because many French philosophers, once they saw what America was up to, accused the colonists of still emulating the parliamentary system of government and dividing power rather than unifying it in a single national assembly. Adams's three-volume A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America and his provocative "Discourse on Davila" make him, I believe, America'...

Britain's National Gallery said Thursday that an Old Master painting in its collection was once owned by Adolf Hitler and was taken from Germany by an American journalist at the end of World War II.

Art historian Birgit Schwartz says she recognized "Cupid Complaining to Venus" by Lucas Cranach the Elder in a photograph of the Nazi leader's private gallery that is held in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

The gallery said it believed Schwartz's identification is correct.

The gallery says the painting was taken from Germany in 1945 by American war correspondent Patricia Lochridge Hartwell, who died in 1998. A relative of Hartwell told the gallery that she had been allowed to take it from a warehouse full of art that was controlled by U.S. forces at the end of the war.

The National Gallery bought the painting in 1963 from a dealer in New York. The dealer said at the time that it was being sold by descendants of a buyer...

Anthropologists have exhumed the graves of Friedrich Schiller's family in an attempt to positively identify the skull of the German dramatist and poet and end a 180-year-old debate.

"The remains of the bodies were in good enough condition for a DNA examination," said Egon Moehler, a spokesman for the German city of Stuttgart, where the bodies of three relatives who died in the 19th century were unearthed.

To obtain DNA samples for testing, the city has opened the final resting place of the dramatist's eldest son, Carl, his grandson Friedrich as well as the wife of his grandson.

The tests aim to show which of two skulls belonged to Schiller, one of Germany's most celebrated men of letters.