A new two-volume history of Russia’s turbulent 20th century is being hailed inside and outside the country as a landmark contribution to the swirling debate over Russia’s past and national identity.

Written by 45 historians led by Andrei Zubov, a professor at the institute that serves as university to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the weighty history — almost 1,000 pages per volume — was published this year by AST Publishers and is already in its second printing of 10,000 copies.

Retailing at the rough equivalent of $20 a volume and titled “History of Russia. XX Century,” the books try to rise above ideologically charged clashes over Russia’s historical memory. They are critical both of czarist and Communist Russia, and incorporate the history of Russian emigration and the Russian Orthodox Church into the big picture of a chaotic, violent century. While written from a clearly Christian perspective — one author is a Russian Orthodox priest — the history avoids...

Charlie Chaplin's last home in Switzerland will be turned into a permanent place of pilgrimage for fans of the actor who immortalized the "Little Tramp," one of his sons said Monday.

The mansion at Corsier-sur-Vevey by the shores of Lake Geneva was chosen over Los Angeles and London as the site of the first museum dedicated to the screen legend, said Michael Chaplin.

The museum has been a decade in the planning and will be finished within two years, he said. It will feature objects from Chaplin's life and displays chronicling his rise from the music halls of his native London to stardom in Hollywood's silent movie era and beyond.

"He was very happy here because he had a family life," Michael Chaplin said of the vintner's chateau where his father lived for more than 20 years and raised eight children until his death in 1977.

The actor whose film classics include "The Immigrant," ''City Lights" and...

More than seven years after Congress directed the National Park Service "to appropriately commemorate" the presidential home in Philadelphia - where at least nine of George Washington's slaves toiled - no workable interpretive program explaining the site and its significance is ready for public discussion, project managers say.

Mayor Nutter has seen no text, images, or panels, and the design team developing the descriptive historical material has been told to rework it at least twice, according to numerous officials.

Should the President's House memorial highlight the worlds of Washington and John Adams and the formation of the nation and presidency? Should it focus on the world of Washington's slaves? What was slavery's role in early Philadelphia? How should such contradictory, clashing themes be balanced? How can the nine slaves best be memorialized? Such questions, there at the project's onset, are still unresolved, though passionately debated....

KALAMAZOO, Mich. - A new film blends song and comedy to examine more than a century of pollution in the Kalamazoo River.

The movie titled "Kalamazoo, River: US" made its premiere last month. Other screenings are planned and DVDs are being sold.

The movie is a mix of musical dramatization, comedic recreation and documentary-style filmmaking. It looks at the relationship between the waterway and the city of Kalamazoo, as well a the relationship between industry and nature.

RICHARD LINKLATER is keen to point out that his new film, “Me and Orson Welles,” is not a biopic. For starters, he said in a recent phone interview: “Biopics are the lamest genre. No one should attempt them anymore.”

What’s more, when it comes to a figure as protean and elusive as Welles, there are obvious complicating factors. Welles was not only a habitual fabulist — “the most unreliable narrator of his own life,” Mr. Linklater said — but also an outsize subject for the projections of others. (“I drag my myth around with me,” he told Kenneth Tynan.) His early masterpiece, “Citizen Kane” (1941), which for many came to define and haunt him, is a fittingly prismatic take on the perils of biography, one that leads its reporter character to conclude, “I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.”

Based on a young-adult novel by Robert Kaplow, “Me and Orson Welles,” which opens on Wednesday, attempts nothing so lofty as an explanation of a life. It restricts...

[Frank Gannon won a White House Fellowship and served in the Nixon White House 1971-4. He accompanied RN to San Clemente aboard Air Force One on August 9th and organized the researching and writing of the President’s memoirs, RN.]

Groundbreaking for the George W. Bush Presidential Center —the latest addition to the National Archives’ system of Presidential Libraries— will begin a year from now. The designs of architect Robert A. M. Stern were unveiled in Dallas on Wednesday. Several drawings were released, and the general impression was described in today’s Washington Post by architectural writer and critic Philip Kennicott:

Architect Robert A.M. Stern’s plans for the George W. Bush Presidential Center call for a low-slung building of brick and limestone, following traditional lines and hugging the Texas landscape with a calm reserve. It’s almost as if Bush has chosen to retreat into the patrician reticence of his blue-blooded, Connecticut forebears...

At one point in the Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s beautiful and eccentric movie “The Sun,” the emperor Hirohito begins enthusing about a preserved hermit crab, the sounds of war planes having subsided. “What a miracle!” Hirohito (Issey Ogata) marvels, staring at the pale, pickled, seemingly unremarkable crustacean as an assistant transcribes the emperor’s comments. “What heavenly beauty!” As Hirohito gazes at the crab, you sense that he is acknowledging a fellow specimen, a communion accentuated by the smudged visuals and murky palette that suggest that all this is taking place inside a dirty aquarium.

Much of “The Sun” in fact unfolds inside the contaminated confines of Hirohito’s palace in the period leading up to and following Japan’s surrender to the United States in 1945. An act of historical imagination, the film is the third in Mr. Sokurov’s trilogy about dictators, which began with “Moloch” (1999), featuring Hitler and Eva Braun at home in the Bavarian Alps...

An interactive exhibit featuring life-size models of Leonardo da Vinci's 500-year-old inventions and machines is opening in New York City's Times Square.

Although best known for painting the masterpiece "Mona Lisa," da Vinci also designed a fantastical array of futuristic flying machines, robots, weapons and mechanical devices.

Highlights of the exhibit opening Friday include the "Great Kite" flying machine, a working prototype of his "Self-Propelled Cart, and physical models of his mechanical bat and lion...

Two centuries before our era, the region of Campania became the favorite place of Roman emperors-from Julius Caesar to Nero- and aristocrats to relax, due to the beauty of the Bay of Naples. Pompeii, Herculaneum and nearby villages represented leisure for some and work for others, like artists.

A hundred pieces, which reveal the luxury and sophistication that this Mediterranean zone reached before the Vesuvius erupted in 79 of the Common Era, arrive to Mexico as part of the exhibition "Pompeya y una Villa Romana: Arte y Cultura alrededor de la Bahia de Napoles" (Pompeii and the Roman Villa. Art and Culture around the Bay of Naples), to be opened at the National Museum of Anthropology in November 2009.

As part of the cultural exchange program between Mexico and Italy, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) sponsors this international exhibition within its cycle “Great Civilizations”. In return, “Teotihuacan, City of Gods” will be...