WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Abraham Lincoln was mortally wounded by an assassin's bullet more than 144 years ago. Yet standing in front of the long black double-breasted frockcoat he wore to Ford's Theatre that night in April 1865, its plain gray buttons almost within touching distance behind a thick sheet of glass, our 16th president looms larger than life.

At 6 feet 4 inches, Lincoln was quite tall for his times. But it doesn't strike you just how far above his peers he towered until you're nose-to-nose with the life-size mannequin displaying the bloodstained clothes taken off his body as he lay dying in the Peterson House, across the street from the theater. The square-toed goatskin boots that climbed under his trousers to his shins are equally spellbinding, if surprisingly shabby for a president. The size 14 shoes are worn down at the heels.

Lincoln's oversized garments, of course, could be seen as an allegory for his place in history: The man was huge, in more...

Has any pop star had as many nicknames as Sophie Tucker? In a career that spanned seven decades, Tucker was variously billed as “The Empress of Songs,” “The Syncopated Cyclone” and “Our Lady Nicotine”; as “Iron Lungs,” “Muscle Dancer” and “Vaudeville’s Pet”; as “The Ginger Girl,” “The Grizzly Bear Girl” and “The Girl Who Never Disappoints.” During her early years as a vaudeville headliner, when rags were the rage, she was “The Tetrazzini of Ragtime.” When jazz took over, she became “The Queen of Jazzaration.”

Even her “real” name was a nickname. Tucker, who came to the United States from Russia as an infant, was born Sonya Kalish and raised as Sonya Abuza. (The family name was changed at Ellis Island.) She settled on the stage name Sophie Tucker after flirtations with various others, including Ethel Tucker and Sophia Taylor.

She was best known, though, by the tag line that stuck with her from her vaudeville heyday to her death in 1966 at 82: “The Last of the...

The Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery installed a portrait of Sen. Edward Kennedy by Andy Warhol. It went on view when the museum opened to the public at 11:30 a.m. in a first-floor gallery that is designated for remembrance of recently deceased individuals represented in the gallery’s collection.

Warhol’s silkscreened portrait of Kennedy was created in 1980 to raise funds for Kennedy’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. A special feature of the print is Warhol’s use of the colors of the American flag and diamond dust. The Portrait Gallery acquired the portrait in 2000.

Elected to the United States Senate in 1962, Edward Kennedy owed his early success to his close identification with his elder brothers, President John F. Kennedy, whose Senate term he completed, and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Praising their commitment to public service, he acknowledged, "I'm very proud of that association."

Kennedy built...

painting by Pablo Picasso believed to have been stolen during the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait has been found in the possession of an Iraqi man in Babel, south of Baghdad, the Al Sabah newspaper reported Wednesday.

Police launched a sweep in Yebla, an area in Babel province, after intelligence indicated the painting was being kept by someone in the area, the newspaper said, citing unnamed sources.

Officers arrested the man who had Picasso's "La Mujer Desnuda," which is worth an estimated $10 million and bears the seal of the Kuwaiti National Museum.

The suspect, said to have served in the security forces under Saddam Hussein, told police he planned to sell the painting for about $450,000...

Want to know which superstar product-endorser foreign ad agencies love the most? It’s Adolf Hitler. Yes, that Hitler. The one who started the Holocaust. In foreign countries, the fuhrer can be found in posters promoting everything from Hewlett-Packard’s thumb drives to Hut Weber hats. (See gallery of Hitler ads below.) That Hitler smelling a rose at right? He’s advertising Raysana, a brand of “anti-stress” tea in Turkey. It’s a sharp contrast to the U.S. and much of Western Europe, where using Hitler in an ad, even as a joke, is verboten. No matter how much the ad might heap ridicule upon the Nazi architect of World War II, the risk of causing offensive to survivors is too great. In January, for instance, German coffee company Tchibo used the phrase “To Each His Own” to advertise its coffee without realising that the slogan once adorned the gates of Buchenwald. The company retracted the ads following a PR storm. And in April, Grey Group retracted an ad for Doc Morris Pharmacies...

In happier times: The Kennedy family visits Pope Pius XII in Vatican City, 1939. Young Ted stands in front of his father Joseph.

Related article

After Kennedy's Death: Silence from the Pope

#21 of 29:"Crossing guard, 1963"
(WALTER M. MCCARDELL/ BALTIMORE SUN PHOTO / September 5, 1963)

The Museum of Modern Art has unveiled an ambitious new program that celebrates the director as the primary force behind the collaborative creation of film. “An Auteurist History of Film”, a two-year series of films drawn entirely from MoMA’s collection that will explore “the dawn of the cinematic art form.” Intended to serve as “both an exploration of the richness of the Museum’s collection” and as a basic introduction to “the development of cinema as a predominant art form of the 20th century,” the series will begin September 9.

The first three months of the series will explore pre-cinema; the earliest films seen in Europe and America, by the Edison Company and the Lumiere Brothers; pre-D.W. Griffith directors and the early efforts of Griffith at New York’s Biograph Studio; the innovations by Scandinavian filmmakers; and Griffith’s departure from Biograph. Over the course of the two-year series, explicatory and supplementary information will be available on MoMA’s website...

Last month, British wine expert Michael Broadbent filed a libel suit in London against Random House over Benjamin Wallace's best-selling book, The Billionaire's Vinegar. Broadbent, the legendary former head of Christie's wine department, alleges that Wallace defamed him in his gripping whodunit about the so-called Thomas Jefferson bottles—a trove of wines initially said to have belonged to the oenophilic Virginian but now almost universally believed to have been fakes. Three of the bottles, all Bordeaux, were auctioned off by Broadbent in the 1980s, and of the many wine luminaries caught up in this saga, his reputation has suffered the most damage. Broadbent contends that he was falsely depicted in the book as being complicit in a crime. But his suit makes no claims one way or another regarding the authenticity of the wines that he sold, which can be taken as an acknowledgment that the evidence is not in his favor. Broadbent can't undo the fact that he was at the center of what now...