ON EASTER SUNDAY, April 9, 1939, Marian Anderson stepped up to a battery of microphones in front of Washington, D.C.'s, Lincoln Memorial, sang "America," and altered American history.

Wearing a mink coat and an orange-and-yellow scarf on that chilly afternoon, she changed the final phrase from "Of thee I sing" to "TO thee WE sing."

This modest African-American contralto had taken the train from her South Philadelphia rowhouse that day with her mother and sisters. Forbidden to stay at any Washington hotel due to segregation, they'd been promised lodging with former Pennsylvania Gov. Gifford Pinchot.

The outdoor venue had been arranged by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, a Quaker, after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow an African-American to sing in their Constitution Hall.

As a result, Roosevelt resigned from the organization, though political...

SAN SIMEON, Calif. -- Three 16th century oil paintings that have been hanging in William Randolph Hearst's famous castle at San Simeon belonged to a Jewish couple who were forced to give them up during the Nazi reign in Germany, authorities said Tuesday.

Two of the three paintings, visible to guests and millions of tourists at Hearst Castle since 1935, will be returned Friday to the heirs of the rightful owners, both of whom died during the war, one in the death camp at Auschwitz.

The shocking discovery, made after a lawyer for the heirs filed a claim with the California State Parks, is yet another reminder of the scope of Jewish persecution during World War II.

"Never in a million years did I think anything like this would cross my desk," said Brad Torgan, the former general counsel for the state parks who led the investigation. "It is one of the most interesting things I've ever worked on and, given the outcome, one of the most...

Were one to measure the extent of controversy aroused by a piece of theatre against the time taken to perform it, Caryl Churchill's recent 10-minute offering at London's Royal Court must have set some kind of record. Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza was staged as the Israeli military assault on the Gaza Strip was still going on, and one review read more like a rebuttal drawn up by the Israeli information ministry than a serious attempt at theatrical criticism.

But whatever its merits, the Churchill play was confirmation that political theatre, often as up to date as the headlines on the evening news, is making inroads in London. The uproar caused by Richard Bean's England People Very Nice at the National – is it an uproarious satire on immigration, or simply racist? – is still reverberating. And at the same venue, David Hare has only just finished dismantling New Labour every night in Gethsemane. But the veteran in this genre is Nicolas Kent, artistic director of the...

Experts today spoke of "incalculable" damage to Italy's cultural heritage as the scale of the impact of the L'Aquila earthquake on the area's historic buildings became apparent.

Many Romanesque, Gothic, Baroque and Renaissance buildings in the 13th-century city were badly damaged in Monday's tremor.

"The damage is more serious than we can imagine," said Giuseppe Proietti, a culture ministry official. "The historic center of L'Aquila has been devastated."

The transept of the early medieval basilica of Santa Maria di Collemaggio, scene of the coronation of Pope Celestine in 1294 and renowned for its intricate pink and white stone facade, collapsed.

The cupola of another church, the Santa Maria del Suffragio, cracked open, revealing the stucco patterns inside its dome. Stones also fell from the city's cathedral, which was rebuilt in 1703 after an earthquake.

Proietti said the city's own cultural...

The resurrection of one of the most important art works in Christendom can be celebrated this Easter. The magnificent mosaic of the Transfiguration in the church of St Catherine, in Sinai, has been brought back to new life. Now, as a long and extremely delicate conservation project reaches its conclusion, The Times can show the first pictures from the freshly restored apse that for some 1500 years has glimmered in the imagination of religious pilgrim and cultural traveller alike.

St Catherine's Monastery, built in the 6th century by the Emperor Justinian, once lay at the heart of the Holy Empire of Byzantium. It might seem a bleak outpost to the contemporary visitor - only a few drifting Beduin inhabit the desolate landscapes of the Sinai peninsular and the desert heaves ridges of barren granite against a hard sky. And yet St Catherine's, built around the site where God spoke from the burning bush to Moses and at the foot of the mountain that he climbed to collect the Ten...

Almost 500 years after European adventurers dressed him up as a collaborator and stole his throne, the British Museum is preparing to rehabilitate one of history’s great rulers.

Moctezuma II, or Montezuma as he is often called today, was the last elected Aztec emperor and ruled over an empire that stretched from the shores of the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico. However, posterity knows him as the man with the misfortune to be in charge when Hernán Cortés’s conquistadores arrived in Mexico in 1519, giving up his people’s independence voluntarily and paving the way for centuries of Spanish rule...

A video game based on one of the bloodiest battles during the Iraq conflict has been branded 'crass and insensitive' by those affected by the fighting.

Six Days In Fallujah, published by Japanese games giant Konami, is described as a 'survival horror' title for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles.

Developed in collaboration with a handful of Iraq veteran US Marines - who have lent their videos, photos and diaries to the designers - the controversial action game is due for release next year.

There were the Dukes and the Scorpions, the Hellbenders, Baby Beacons, Baldies and Green Lanterns. Among the most notorious were the Egyptian Kings. In El Barrio, in northern Manhattan, the Dragons and the Viceroys reigned.

It was post-World War II New York and the children of Latino immigrants were flooding into neighborhoods that whites and African-Americans had long fought over. In this ethnic Petri dish, teenagers formed ranks, wearing exclusive clothing, marking their area with graffiti and making alliances for protection, camaraderie or just to sip cheap wine, play stickball or meet at dances.

They chose colorful names. Their doings have been recorded in music and books, presented in musicals like “West Side Story” and “The Capeman,” even as the violence they committed has been retold in five decades of city history.

A 3m (10ft) bronze replica of the Statue of Liberty is taken down from its permanent place in a park in Paris for a journey to an exhibition on the outskirts of the city. The two-tonne figure is the work of the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who, along with the engineer Gustave Eiffel, was responsible for the original 93m (305ft) Statue of Liberty, which was given to America by the French in 1886.