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This is the story of two items found in the collections of the Library of Congress. One is a photograph taken by the most famous of Civil War-era portrait-makers; the [...]

McGeorge Bundy, the president's national security adviser, didn't need to see the burned-out barracks in Pleiku to realize it was time to begin the systematic bombing of North Vietnam. Bundy [...]

Wyatt Earp never seems to wear out his welcome. He had a measure of fame in his lifetime, and well after his 1929 death his name rode to the forefront [...]

For as long as I can remember I have studied the Civil War, especially drawn to the war-time history of my native Schuylkill County, in east-central Pennsylvania. My interest has [...]

IN ITS NOVEMBER 1862 report on the disastrous surrender of the U.S. garrison at Harpers Ferry, Va., two days before the Battle of Antietam, the Army commission investigating singled out [...]

THE AFGHANISTAN PAPERS: A Secret History of the War, by Craig Whitlock. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) A reporter for the Washington Post examines how three successive presidents and their military [...]

On Sunday, June 13, 1971, a story by Neil Sheehan appeared on the front page of the New York Times under the headline, Vietnam archive: pentagon study traces 3 decades [...]

The New York Times lifts the lid on a top-secret, 47-volume history of U.S. activities in Southeast Asia commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in 1967. TODAY: The [...]

For Allied and Axis governments producing the propaganda leaflets that targeted civilians and soldiers throughout the war, the challenge was twofold: not only did they have to craft a message [...]

In July 1865, Wisconsin Senator James Rood Doolittle traveled to Denver, Colorado Territory, with a joint congressional committee to investigate the 'condition of the Indian tribes.' Territorial Governor John Evans [...]

Senior officials in the Bush and Obama administrations reportedly misled the public about the purpose and progress of the ongoing War in Afghanistan, according to 2,000 pages of notes and [...]

BANKER, TEACHER, OR FIREMAN one day, leading raw troops into battle the next. That is the dilemma thousands of volunteer commanders faced during the war. To get a crash course [...]

In spring 1865, a Brooklyn, N.Y., mother contacted Clara Barton through her Missing Soldiers Office in Washington, D.C. 'My Son, Serg't Adrian Vale...was captured by an enemy at the battle [...]

Kudos to professor Christian G. Appy for 'Paper Tiger,' an excerpt from American Reckoning (December 2016), in which he reveals the caustic cynicism of both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon [...]

It's a scene out of Plains Indian history: Five mounted Lakota braves drive a herd of buffalo over a cliff in the sacred Black Hills as women and children wait [...]

A detailed chronology of the CIA's hand in the 1953 overthrow of Iranian premier Mohammad Mossadegh appears in declassified documents the agency released in June. Multiple accounts have described the [...]

Photographs and artistic masterworks provide a visual treasure By mien cutsfbnn The late Argentine author and poet Jorge I .uis Borges famously wrote. 'I had always imagined Paradise as a [...]

As buffalo hides disappeared, ledgers became their medium By Jim Winnerman Dn the latter half of the 19th century two developing realities changed how the Plains Indians recorded their history' [...]

John P. Clum, a former Indian agent who acquired the weekly Arizona Citizen in 1877 and added a daily edition two years later, quit his job in 1880 to establish [...]

The Little Saigon Daily News, a weekly paper serving the Vietnamese community in the United States, was ordered to pay $4.5 million in damages to rival Nguoi Viet Daily News [...]

THE PAPERS of civil rights activist Rosa Parks will be available for research at the Library of Congress for the next 10 years under an agreement with Howard Buffett, the [...]

Eleven Southern states seceded to form their own more perfect union, but the first year of fighting exposed fault lines within the Confederacy. Fire-eaters who whole heartedly backed states' rights [...]

Innocent yet sexy, Miss Lace--a creation of cartoonist Milton Caniff--was the heroine of the slyly sensual comic strip Male Call, which ran in more than 3,000 military camp newspapers during [...]

WHEN A GROUP of feudal barons met with King John near London in 1215, they drew up a document that not only limited the king's power but also granted rights [...]

Cambridge University has posted searchable scans of World War I poet Captain Siegfried Sassoon's handwritten personal war journals and diaries [cudl.lib. cam.ac.uk/ collections/ sassoon]. Purchased by the school in 2009 [...]

Sifting through the volumes on volumes of documents at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., can resemble an archaeological dig. But with time and patience comes the occasional find that [...]

WITH THE OFFICIAL government release of the Pentagon Papers in June, LBJ's response if he were alive would be, 'What the hell took so long?' said Harry Middleton, a past [...]

Confederate General John Bell Hood has always been blamed for allowing Union Maj. Gen. John Schofield to slip past Mm at Spring Hill, Tenn., on November 29, 1864, setting the [...]

The United States and Britain correctly suspected that the Soviet Union executed 22,000 Polish prisoners, many of them officers, in Katyn Forest, in April and May 1940--but kept silent to [...]

The Huntington Library [www. huntington.org], in San Marino, Calif., has purchased a hoard of Civil War telegrams and ephemera, adding to its trove of Abraham Lincoln documents, the third-largest such [...]

White Man's Paper Trail: Grand Councils and Treaty-making on the Central Plains, by Stan Hoig, University Press of Colorado, Boulder, 2006, $34.95. Treaty-making between the U.S. government and the Plains [...]

As expected, newspapers geographically removed from the hysteria of South Dakota were more objective in covering Wounded Knee. The Washington Post enjoyed proximity to the country's military headquarters. Dispatches from [...]

A handwritten transcript resurfaced last spring from a coroner's inquest held after the October 1881 Tombstone, Arizona Territory, gunfight near the O.K. Corral. Billy Clanton, Frank McLaury and Tom McLaury [...]

IN JANUARY THE Nixon Library released some 280,000 pages of memos, notes and reports from the Nixon Presidential Materials to the public, including a treasure trove of 5,500 declassified pages [...]

Cambridge University is scrambling to raise $2 million to purchase an unprecedented archive of alumnus Siegfried Sassoon's war journals, poems and letters [oucs.ox.ac.uk/wwllit/collections/Sassoon] on news that an American library had [...]

A move to put freedom fighter Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill has regained impetus. Announced in 2016 by the Obama administration, the change from Andrew Jackson was sidelined under [...]

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Retirement Series Vol. 12 Princeton University Press, 2016, 784 pages, $145 Princeton published the premiere volume of the Jefferson Papers in 1950, and this amazing [...]

Four Hours of Fury James M. Fenelon This revealing history relates, via firsthand accounts from World War II veterans of the U.S. 17th Airborne Division, the neglected story of Operation [...]

A Scrap of Paper Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War By Isabel Hull. 384 pages. Cornell University Press, 2014. $45. Professor Isabel Hull of Cornell is one [...]

1 What is the significance of this bill with 'Hawaii' on it? It belongs to a friend and navy vet, Dick Geppert, an ensign on the USS Colhoun who passed [...]

According to historian Robert K. Krick, Eugene Blackford was part of what could deservedly be called 'the most fertile literary family in the Confederate States.'This first volume of Blackford's selected [...]

MOST BOOKS ON THE WAR in the Western Theater contain some fiction, often based on colorful stories that have seemed too good not to repeat despite a lack of documentation. [...]

* America by Car by Lee Friedlander (DAP). Leading American photographer takes a cross-country spin, frames 190 shots through his car mirrors and windows, often including them along with the [...]

As a housekeeper for the German Embassy in Paris, Marie Bastian had two tasks. She was expected to gather the days paper trash twice a week ... unless she recognized [...]

Riding the bus from his Harlem boardinghouse to his new job in downtown Manhattan on a frigid February day in 1918, Walter White skimmed the morning papers until he came [...]