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Tanned, rested, and ready for the 21st Century: John Quincy Adams photographed in 1843. The sixth POTUS ---John Quincy Adams--- has signed up ---and not a moment too soon--- on Twitter.  He will be posting daily entries from his diaries. As Jeannie Nuss reports for...

Last week I posted about Inherent Vice, the new novel by Thomas Pynchon set in Los Angeles during the spring and early summer of 1970 - that is, in the second year of the Nixon Administration. Today the book went on sale nationwide, and to promote it Penguin Press,...

Suggesting that conservatives such as Sarah Palin face political doom, a Daily Kos writer observes: When Richard Nixon won the presidency, the silent majority of Americans was white and conservative. The demographics of this country have changed, and that change is...

Howard Fineman presents one of the better comparisons between RN and the departed Alaskan governor.

Two weeks ago I noted the passing of 113-year-old Henry Allingham, who, besides being the oldest man on Earth, was also the last founding member of the Royal Air Force and one of the last five veterans of "the war to end all wars" still living. At that time...

"Get back, you eight-legged freaks" - actor David Arquette's ad-lib that inspired the title of the 2002 film Eight Legged Freaks, which was called Arach Attack in production There was also the 1990 film Arachnophobia with Jeff Daniels. But both of these...

Thomas Pynchon, the mystery man of modern American letters (though not exactly all that mysterious - his voice is, after all, a familiar one to regular viewers of reruns of The Simpsons), has a new novel out in about a week. Its title is Inherent Vice, and it's his...

It is now a little over twenty-four hours since the eminent Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley of the Cambridge (Mass.) Police Department sat down at a white lawn table on the South Lawn of the White House, joined by President Obama (with...

So here I am, having just judged the Daily Show as having jumped the shark by substituting predictable polemic for snarky satire, posting yet another Daily Show clip for your comedy delectation. So what's up with that?  Was I hasty?  Did I jump...the gun? Or was I...

David S. Ferriero has been nominated by President Obama to be the 10th Archivist of the United States.  He is seen above in the Main Reading Room at the 5th Avenue and 42nd Street branch of the New York Public Library.  (Photo by Joyce Dopkeen for The New...