The first movie to imagine a black president of the United States at any length was Joseph Sargent's satirical drama The Man in 1972. There, Douglass Dilman, president pro tempore of the Senate, happens into the Oval Office after the president and the speaker of the House die in a ceiling collapse. Unavailable on DVD, The Man is now a rarity, and yet it clearly forecasts the screen existences of subsequent black presidents.

James Earl Jones uses his commanding, paternal, universally presentable voice in the title role—a harbinger of baritones to come. Notably, the job of adapting Irving Wallace's novel went to Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling. Black presidents have most often existed in science-fiction scenarios, lending a futuristic tint to the proceedings. Next summer, Danny Glover will play one President Wilson in 2012, Roland Emmerich's forthcoming special-effects spectacular.

What might any of this mean for Barack Obama? Beats me. But the next two weeks...

The name Ansel Adams has become justifiably synonymous with photographic excellence, and his work is recognized and admired throughout the world. Most of us probably associate him most closely with Yosemite National Park, but he practiced his gift with lens and film in other areas as well.

A new exhibit opening this weekend at Carlsbad Caverns National Park will give the public its first look at a different part of the natural world through the eyes of Ansel Adams, along with work by other talented photographers and artists.

It's fitting that this exhibit will be located at Carlsbad, because the underground wonders of this park are to caves what the National Gallery is to art. The park celebrates its 85th anniversary on October 25, 2008, with a full day of special events. This is a birthday where the gifts will last long after the candles have been blown out—and the public is the recipient of thesepresents.

Norman Foster, the eminent British architect who has made something of a specialty out of inserting contemporary designs into historic buildings, has been selected for a major renovation of the New York Public Library's landmark 1911 main building, on Fifth Avenue between 40th and 42nd Streets.

Foster and his London firm, Foster & Partners, are to create a new circulation library in a space below the library's Rose Reading Room and overlooking Bryant Park that now houses seven levels of stacks and a basement.

"It's the greatest project ever," Foster said in a telephone interview on Wednesday.

The area, which now measures 1.25 million cubic feet, will be completely reconfigured, with new rooms for children and teenagers and numerous computer work stations. The stacks are to move to an existing three-acre storage area beneath Bryant Park that is also to be renovated. Work is expected to be completed by 2013.

Sat next to me as the projector starts up is the man who found this piece of cinematic history, Professor Ian Christie.

The historian stumbled on the footage, 104 years after it was filmed, while doing a routine search in the Australian National Film Archive.

He was not expecting to find anything of merit.

"You go along to an archive and you say: 'Show me your rubbish, show me the stuff you've never identified'," he tells me as the film plays on the screen in front of us.

"Often it is just rubbish, or it's parts, bits and pieces of things that you can't really make sense of. It's very rare to find something no one has really identified before.

"Maybe once or twice in a lifetime."

The 12-minute silent documentary, called Living London, was made by American film pioneer Charles Urban.

In it we see famous landmarks like Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace surrounded by horse-...

Titian's Renaissance masterpiece Diana and Actaeon has gone on show at the National Gallery in London to help accelerate a campaign to keep it in Britain.

The London public has just four weeks to view the painting, which is on loan from the National Gallery of Scotland.

The galleries need to raise £50 million by New Year's Eve to buy the mid-16th century work from the Duke of Sutherland to prevent it being sold abroad. That is one third of its estimated value on the open market.

But to date only £1 million has been publicly pledged, from the charity the Art Fund. The galleries have decided to keep the true state of fundraising to themselves...

[Michael J. Socolow is an assistant professor in the department of communication and journalism at the University of Maine at Orono. He is completing a manuscript on regulation and competition in the first two decades of American network radio.]

Frank Stanton sensed trouble. Sitting in his living room on the night of October 30, 1938, the young CBS executive tuned in to catch Orson Welles's adaptation of H.G. Wells's War of the Worlds. The program sounded crisp and engaging — but a bit too realistic. Stanton grabbed his coat and headed back to CBS' headquarters on Madison Avenue. Pushing his way through chaotic hallways jammed with reporters, police, and network employees, he reached his desk and telephoned his friend Paul Lazarsfeld.

Stanton and the sociologist Lazarsfeld set out to measure the panic as quickly and accurately as possible before it subsided. Their basic results would spur a remarkable conversation that reverberates 70 years later in social...

Stalin may be enjoying a sinister revival in Putin's Russia, but not everyone associated with the former Soviet Union is amused. This pungently anti-communist documentary from the wonderfully named Latvian historian and filmmaker Edvins Snore is much more than a catalog of Stalin's Terror, which, among other iniquities, carried out ethnic-cleansing policies that starved seven million Ukrainians to death between 1932 and 1933. Drafting little-seen footage of Soviet mass killings that closely resemble oft-seen footage from Nazi concentration camps, Snore, along with prominent historians from Russia and Western Europe, argues that Nazism and Stalinism were equivalent forms of fascism. He then goes further to show that before and during World War II, the two powers openly and secretly collaborated to massacre Jews, Poles, and countless Soviet citizens. Fair enough, but it's not just Holocaust exceptionalists and Putin admirers who'll have their noses put out of joint. Snore's worrying...

Adolf Hitler was on the verge of creating an Orwellian-style cable TV system to broadcast Nazi propaganda around Germany.

Screens would have been set up in public places, including in laundries so housewives could tune in, according to a documentary based on papers and tapes found in his bunker.

When the Allies overran Germany, engineers were on the point of a technological breakthrough to allow TV pictures to be transmitted to screens and sound to radio receivers.

They had also recorded programmes on news, sport and education.

Prototype programmes included Family Chronicles: An Evening With Hans And Gelli, an early reality TV show depicting the wholesome Aryan life of a young German couple for the rest of the population to model themselves on.

Another plan was to show footage of executions of traitors to the Nazis.

The plans first came to light in 1945, when boxes with tapes were found in the ruins of...

The exhibit would be haunting: the famous bloodstained overcoat President Abraham Lincoln was wearing at Ford's Theatre the night he was assassinated, placed on display under protective glass in the lobby of the renovated theater for the world to see.

Visitors could view it up close. Passersby could glimpse it from the street 24 hours a day. And the coat, its lining embroidered with the phrase "One Country, One Destiny," would be a moving symbol of the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth next year.

But now some textile conservators are worried that the hallowed garment might be too fragile to return to full-time display when the theater reopens in February, and instead ought to be sheltered for the good of posterity.

Light and gravity can doom historic clothing, they say. And the Brooks Brothers coat, like other Lincoln garments, had been on almost continuous display from the time they were acquired in 1968 until Ford's was closed for...