The new Indiana Jones movie released today might make it seem like finding ancient artifacts is a swashbuckling adventure, but that kind of art collecting is a thing of the past, says the director of Duke's art museum.

Museums like the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University collect works of art from many different cultures, including antiquities, to share with a broad public. But looters have ruined it for Indiana Jones-style archeologists, who for decades had worked successfully with foreign governments to distribute some antiquities found through archeological digs to Western museums, says Kimerly Rorschach, director of the Nasher Museum of Art.

"Now the rules have changed. Generally speaking, all exporting is illegal, in an effort to stem the tide of looting. University art museums face the dilemma of wanting to collect antiquities for legitimate educational purposes but not wanting to contribute to illegal looting and smuggling,"...

An animated documentary about a massacre in the Middle East is the current frontrunner to win the coveted Palme d'Or prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Waltz with Bashir is a daring and provocative attempt by director Ari Folman to bear witness to an atrocity committed during his stint in the Israeli army in 1982.
The invasion of Lebanon, codenamed Operation Peace for Galilee, was an attempt to occupy the country as far as the capital Beirut.

It ended in what many think of as the worst atrocity of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict, when at least 800 Palestinian civilians were massacred at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps during Israel's invasion.
They were murdered by Lebanese Christian militiamen allied to Israel while the Israeli forces encircled the camps.

Folman was among them. His film is a personal journey with his own narration accompanied, unusually, by animated images.

The director says he had blanked the massacre...

By the end of the Civil War, most Americans considered either Robert E. Lee or Ulysses S. Grant to be a hero. The reputations of the two generals were molded in part by a sectional bias that would aggrandize the achievements of one often to the detriment of the other. In recent years, Grant has earned a growing reputation for his pioneering use of Federal power for civil rights and post-war reconstruction—a remarkable shift from a presidency that was more often condemned as a bumbling series of scandals and corruption. Similarly in the eyes of today’s viewers, Robert E. Lee’s role as a symbol in American politics may have outstripped his actual feats as a Confederate general. This thought-provoking, interactive historical exhibition and its catalog plunges visitors into the promises and disappointments that Grant, Lee and offers a challenging interpretation of the nation’s history at mid-century to every American who wonders how we became what we are today. The New-York Historical...

In the program "Indiana Jones the Ultimate Quest," the History Channel capitalizes on the Indiana Jones publicity juggernaut with this mixed bag of scientific fact and unsubstantiated new age religious beliefs. Using the Indiana Jones movies as a jumping off point, the show does a wonderful job of showing how real archaeologists work using state of the art technologies like ground-penetrating radar and satellite imaging to locate and explore ancient sites. The two-hour program also does a great job of drawing attention to the problem of looting and the illegal antiquities market. However the show veers repeatedly into pseudo-science by elevating people like Graham Hancock and some so-called experts in the power of crystal skulls and ancient astronauts to the same level as respected scientists like William Saturno of Boston University and Lawrence Conyers of Denver University. The problems don't stop at casting new-age quackery as legitimate science, the narrator heightens...

RALEIGH — The definitive image of the Wright Brothers’ first flight has been a sepia-toned photograph, faded by time, from those scant airborne seconds of Dec. 17, 1903.

There is Orville Wright, supine and centered on the lower wing of the fragile heavier-than-air craft, gliding a few feet above the flat sands near Kill Devil Hill. His brother Wilbur is a few feet from the right wing tip, frozen in chase. It is a famous frame, the inspiration for postage stamps and the silhouette forever in flight above the numbers of North Carolina license plates.

“We in North Carolina pay homage to that famous photograph of that first flight,” said Larry Tise, the Orville and Wilbur Wright distinguished professor of history at East Carolina University.

It was the first picture taken, but not the first published of the aviation pioneers in flight. That distinction belongs to an image captured May 14, 1908 — 100 years ago this past week — by one of America’s first...

A delivery man from Utah has gone to federal court to argue that he is owed a large fortune from the estate of Howard Hughes that he says was promised to him as a reward for rescuing the reclusive billionaire from a bed of dust in the desert more than 40 years ago.

It is a return trip for Melvin Dummar, 63, whose first attempt to lay claim to $156m he said was left to him by Hughes was thrown out by the courts in a lengthy probate trial in 1978. Though he was widely branded a liar at the time, he says he is trying again with a new witness ready to back him up.

His Good Samaritan tale is already well known, not least because it became the inspiration for an Oscar-winning film directed by Jonathan Demme in 1980 named Melvin and Howard.

Mr Dummar still sticks by its every detail. He relates driving from Utah to California in December 1967, stopping at a place called Lida Junction in the middle of Nevada to relieve himself by the side of the road and...

Rising early for a swim in the aquamarine waters in the cove below his idyllic Jamaican retreat, Goldeneye, Fleming tapped away at his Remington portable typewriter with six fingers for three hours in the morning and an hour in the afternoon — 2,000 words a day, a completed novel in two months, all the while keeping up the sybaritic lifestyle that led Noël Coward, a frequent guest at Goldeneye and no puritan himself, to describe the Fleming household as “golden ear, nose and throat.”

Fleming, who saw 40 million copies of his books sold in his lifetime but died before the Bond franchise went stratospheric, had no literary pretensions. He described his first Bond book, “Casino Royale,” as “an oafish opus,” and offered further disparagement in a 1963 BBC radio interview. “If I wait for the genius to come, it just doesn’t arrive,” he said. Asked if Bond had kept him from more serious writing, of the kind achieved by his older brother, Peter, a renowned explorer and travel...

The Smithsonian Institution this week announced an agreement with 20th Century Fox to allow the use of its name and facilities for the filming of "Night at the Museum II: Escape from the Smithsonian." The movie is the sequel to the 2006 film "Night at the Museum" starring Ben Stiller that earned over $250 million at the box office in the U.S., and over $500 million worldwide. This is the first time in its 162-year history that the Smithsonian Institution has allowed its name to be used in the title of a movie produced for theatrical distribution.

A new exhibition debunks the myths surrounding Jack the Ripper and paints a vivid portait of Victorian London. Nigel Richardson reports.

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It is a repulsive and fascinating item and true obsessives will make a beeline for it. “This is the original 'Dear Boss’ letter,” confirmed Julia Hoffbrand, the co-curator of a new exhibition dedicated to Jack the Ripper. The letter marks the point in the Ripper story at which reality turned into myth.

It was sent to the head of a London news agency on September 25, 1888 following the murders of three women in a month in the East End. Written in red ink, it starts “Dear Boss”, gives warning that “I am down on whores and I shunt [sic] quit ripping them till I do get buckled”, and is signed “Yours truly, Jack the Ripper”....