A US presidential historian has admitted stealing dozens of historical documents including letters signed by George Washington, Sir Isaac Newton and Marie Antoinette. Barry Landau, 63, admitted he and an assistant, 24-year-old assistant Jason Savedoff, swiped items from museums across the US, and sold selected documents for profit.The pair face up to five years in prison for their conspiracy and 10 years for the theft. In Landau's New York apartment, authorities uncovered over 4,000 items traced as being stolen from libraries and museums Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut.
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The site of a Maryland plantation which is renowned by local historians for its connection to Black history and to the Civil War has lost its historical designation and is on its way to becoming an 85-store outlet mall, after an early January vote by the Prince George’s County Historic Preservation Commission.
A copy of the Magna Carta, the English royal manuscript setting out the rights of man, is to be displayed at the US National Archives in Washington from February 17, after a year of restoration work.
Germany’s “puzzle people” will soon be able to count on a new tool in their Herculean task of re-piecing together thousands of ripped-up former Stasi secret police files.
A long-lost version of an Air Force One recording made right after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination can now be heard by the general public.
It has sometimes been claimed that, like human rights and democracy, the protection of Egypt's cultural heritage cannot be left to the Egyptians. Corruption, poverty and ignorance, Egypt's critics maintain, pose a serious threat to the preservation of artefacts of "global importance".
A fishing boat stolen for a dramatic escape during World War II is to be returned to Norway from Scotland. Four Norwegians desperate to escape the Nazi occupation took the boat and crossed the North Sea to the Aberdeenshire coast in 1941.
A long-unknown, 150-year-old trove of handwritten ledgers and calfskin-covered code books that give a potentially revelatory glimpse into both the dawn of electronic battlefield communications and the day-to-day exchanges between Abraham Lincoln and his generals as they fought the Civil War now belongs to the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.
As the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I approaches, historians and genealogists will soon be able to use a rare series of books at the Kenton County Public Library system’s Covington branch.
Adam Rabinowitz, now the assistant director at the Institute of Classical Archaeology at the University of Texas at Austin, is still travelling around the world getting dirt under his nails. And though much remains the same about archaeology since he first picked up a trowel, a lot has changed.
In an interview this week with Egypt’s official Middle East News Agency, Zein Abdel-Hadi, recently appointed head of the Egyptian National Library and Archives, laid out an ambitious plan to revamp Egypt’s National Library, restructure the country’s library system, and push for a long-awaited archives law.
Before the Nazis fled Auschwitz in January 1945, they destroyed most of the incriminating documents relating to their operation of the death camp, in which over a million people perished.
Campaigners in Dorset are warning that nine of the county's libraries could close unless sufficient numbers of volunteers can be found to run them. In July, the county council voted to withdraw funding from the libraries to save £800,000 a year by 2012.
A controversy has now erupted after Jaipur's 213-year-old iconic monument Hawa Mahal was washed for the first time two days ago.
After 94 years, Infantryman Kent Potter’s World War I dog tag has returned home to Chase County, Kansas.
Amazing hand-written love notes in the margin of a prayer book between a lovesick Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, as he wooed her, are to be revealed in a new BBC television series. The scribbled messages, his one written in French, reveal the intensity of the king’s passion for his future wife, as he expressed his ardour with a note in her Book of Hours.
Baltimore was in danger of losing many of its most precious documents several years ago. A rented building near Druid Hill Park that was used to house the city's historic archives failed to meet even minimal standards for proper records storage. It was damp and moldy.
A fire that erupted on Saturday in Egypt’s Institute for the Advancement of Scientific Research has resulted in the loss of several precious manuscripts, according to Zein Abdel-Hadi, head of Egypt’s Libraries and Archives Department, which has taken possession of many of the books rescued from the fire.
Hundreds of rare files - including secret plans for nuclear weapons and personal files of prime ministers - have gone missing from the library responsible for preserving Australia's history.
Almost a century after Captain Scott and his team perished on a polar expedition, new details of their ill-fated adventure described in letters and journals are to be displayed for he first time.