One of the great unanswerable questions of the exuberant exhibition “Campaigning for President: New York and the American Election,” which opened this week at the Museum of the City of New York, concerns a handsome 1888 ceramic chamber pot that sports an elegant monogram intertwining the initials of Grover Cleveland and Allen G. Thurman. If this vessel was ever used, was it out of support for these Democratic Party candidates, or the opposite?

There is less ambiguity about the hollowed-out posteriors of metal pigs, within which pictures of William McKinley were inserted. These souvenirs from the 1896 campaign of William Jennings Bryan alluded not to presidential pork-barrel, but to a vulgar phrase about voting for Bryan’s opponent being as ridiculous and offensive as a pig’s behind.

Vulgarity was part of the point. This exhibition of presidential campaign paraphernalia — which will run through Election Day and should serve as a potent counterpoint to the season...

"The Lost Pyramid" is one of those rare documentaries with a revelation so stunning, it's made headlines before anyone has seen it. The film, debuting next week on the History Channel, follows a team of archeologists as they unearth Egypt's fourth Great Pyramid at Giza, which, as the title says, has been lost for years to the desert sands. Even more amazing, this new pyramid (built by the Fourth-dynasty Pharaoh Djedefre) is actually the highest one of all—27 feet higher than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. "I'm a pyramid man, and what I've seen now has made me change many things," says Zahi Hawass, the head of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. "Every history book in every language is going to be rewritten."

The only problem is that statement—indeed, the entire documentary—is arguably as solid as the crumbling pyramid itself. Egyptologists have known about Djedefre's pyramid for years. It was discovered a century ago—or rediscovered, since...

No one has ever summed up the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s -- and, by extension, the entire history of that decade's anti-Communist witch hunt -- any better than this:

"The blacklist was a time of evil. No one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil. There was bad faith and good, honesty and dishonesty, courage and cowardice, selflessness and opportunism, wisdom and stupidity, good and bad on both sides. It will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils because there were none; there were only victims. Some suffered less than others, some grew or were diminished, but in the final tally we were all victims because almost without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not want to say, to do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive wounds he truly did not want to exchange. That is why none of us -- right, left, or center -- emerged from that long nightmare without sin."

Those...

'Water Lily Pond,' part of a four-work set, nearly doubles the highest price paid at auction for the artist's paintings.

As the encomiums for George Carlin have rolled in from stand-up legends, celebrities and scholars, his death at 71 has also been noted at a diminutive, iconic and iconoclastic radio station in Manhattan, WBAI-FM.

Its broadcast of the comedian’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” became a landmark moment in the history of free speech. In a 1978 milestone in the station’s contentious and unruly history, WBAI lost a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision that to this day has defined the power of the government over broadcast material it calls indecent.

“It’s a bad time here for us because George Carlin was part of the family,” said Anthony Riddle, the station’s general manager. “I think all the producers are dealing with it in their own way,” Mr. Riddle said, some doing commentary and others running archival material, including a bleeped-out version of the “Seven Words” routine.

The 1978 ruling, often termed “the Carlin case,” was actually called...

An inspired collaboration has been taking shape at President Lincoln’s Cottage as part of the lead up to the Lincoln Bicentennial celebration.

Washington developer Robert H. Smith is generously sponsoring a new sculpture memorializing Lincoln’s association with this important site to be completed before the end of 2008.

Mr. Smith’s proposal to place a new Lincoln sculpture at the recently restored summer cottage, that Lincoln occupied between 1862-64, will add great significance to StudioEIS’ historical works and has challenged the studio to find another dimension to the man who sat so formally for Brady’s camera.

In 1862 President Lincoln, heeding the advice of close advisors, made for higher ground - about three miles from the White House, where a slightly cooler summer could be had and he could find retreat from the White House, the heat and the war. Lincoln’s retreat also produced what is considered one of the defining documents of his...

Delving into a 3,000-year-old mystery using astronomical clues in Homer's "The Odyssey," researchers said Monday they have dated one of the most heralded events of Western literature: Odysseus' slaughter of his wife's suitors upon his return from the Trojan War.

According to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the wily hero who devised the Trojan Horse hefted his mighty bow on April 16, 1178 BC, and executed the unruly crowd who had taken over his home and was trying to force his wife into marriage.

The finding leaves many perennial questions unanswered, such as whether the events portrayed actually occurred or whether the blind poet Homer was the author of the tale.

But it casts a new sheen of veracity on a story that has existed in a hazy realm of fantasy and history since it was first composed 400 years after the Trojan War.

Michelangelo hid a secret code in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel made up of mystical Jewish symbols and insults aimed at the pope, according to a new book.

The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which the renaissance artist worked on for four years in the early 16th century, is actually a "bridge" between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish faith, according to The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo's Defiant Masterpiece.

The book, which is already on the New York Times bestseller list, is the work of Rabbi Benjamin Blech, an associate professor of Talmud at Yeshiva University in New York, and Roy Doliner, a tour guide at the Vatican.

Scanning through the arrangement of figures on the vast 14,000 square foot ceiling, the authors have found shapes that correspond to Hebrew letters.

For example, the book states, the figures of David and Goliath form the shape of the letter gimel, which symbolises g'vurah, or...

He relied on a brutal, early version of the secret police. He murdered some of his opponents with his own hands. Yet Tsar Ivan the Terrible also united Russia, opened diplomatic relations with England and wrote music. Now the complex royal character is to come to TV screens in a 16-part series, and its director believes Russian audiences are ready for some serious historical drama.

Violent thrillers and reality shows have replaced Communist propaganda on Russian television and, like western viewers, Russians complain that there is little worth watching on television.

"Unfortunately, Russians don't know their history very well, especially before 1917," said director Andrei Eshpai, who is making Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible) for release in 2009. "History in our cinema was often tendentious and there were few possibilities for doing good historical drama on TV ... Those who don't know their history are doomed to repeat it."

If...