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The looting of art and antiquities is an ancient practice. However, recent decades have witnessed such a dramatic increase in the magnitude and impact of “time crime” that it is now one of the larger transnational markets in illegal goods. The authors argue that this market can be understood as consisting of three elements: a supply component, primarily in impoverished nations; a demand component, primarily in wealthy Western nations; and a social control component, which permits transfer of goods from the illicit to the licit economy. Changes in each of these three components are responsible for the exponential increase in the size and scope of the market. The authors examine those changes and the roles through which the three components of the market are organized.

Artifacts involving scientific or mathematical concepts, particularly measuring instruments, have received little study in museums. This article is a case study that analyzes the display and interpretation of navigational instruments and related astronomical instruments in history museums. Based on the study, the author offers observations and recommendations on how museums might better intellectually communicate to their visitors about scientific or mathematical instruments. This article suggests that the multidisciplinary perspective of historical archaeology provides a comprehensive, holistic context for exhibiting and interpreting measuring instruments.

Civil War battlefields required the evacuation of large numbers of wounded to Northern cities. As the second most important hospital city in the North after Washington, DC, Philadelphia sheltered about 157,000 injured soldiers. The large number of amputees presented an opportunity to army contract surgeon S. Weir Mitchell, MD (1829–1914), who was already emerging as a physician of note in Philadelphia before the war. Mitchell asked his friend US Army Surgeon General William Hammond to set up a special hospital to treat and study injuries to the nerves. During the last year of the war, Hammond assembled one of the most unusual and important temporary hospitals at Turner’s Lane in Philadelphia. Mitchell and his hand-picked associates, William W. Keen, MD, and George R. Morehouse, MD, collectively known as “the Firm,” found at Turner’s Lane an unparalleled opportunity to study diseases and wounds of the nerves. The team was conscious of the history-making nature of their work: “The opportunity was indeed unique and we knew it . . . it was exciting in its constancy of novel interest.” In addition to seeing patients, Mitchell and his team found time to publish a systematic study of peripheral nerve injuries among injured soldiers, Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of Nerves (1864). The first hospital to treat nerve injuries, Turner’s Lane created a body of work that effectively founded American neurology.