BLETCHLEY, England — When “Captain Ridley’s shooting party” gathered here in late August 1938 as weekend guests at Bletchley Park, a Buckinghamshire country house, they were accompanied by one of the finest chefs from the Savoy hotel. But the hunting…

Humanity has an extraordinary talent for causing catastrophes; we are even likely, as many have suggested over the past century — to be responsible for the coming apocalypse. But really, we are second-rate. Take a look at the images of cataclysm at…

LONDON — Within the depths of the Crypt — as the architect Sir John Soane rather whimsically called one region of the extraordinary museum here that was once his home — a cramped passageway is meant to resemble a Roman catacomb crowded with relics.…

“Nation to Nation,” focusing on treaties, indicates a new, more historically serious direction for exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian.

The tea dumped in Boston Harbor’s party came from China. So did George Washington’s china. The Erie Canal was inspired by China’s Grand Canal. And the lure of Chinese trade spurred the building of the transcontinental railroad. (The labor force for…

Some 20 years ago, whenever the self-styled King of Simon Says (a.k.a. Allan Tresser) performed in the Catskills, he would display a pasteboard panel boasting of his television credits: As seen on “The Jack Paar Show”! And “Wonderama”! And ... well,…

WILTSHIRE DOWNS, England — Standing at the center of the Stone Circle of Stonehenge in the moments before dawn, lulled by low-hanging rain clouds, I am, for a while, unable to understand why so many pilgrimages have been made here. Sure, the setting…

LONDON — A moonscape of craters, mud and shattered stumps fills a wall-sized video screen; you can hear shrieking shells and shattering blasts; an enormous British howitzer, meant to pulverize the enemy’s defenses, points toward the fields. The only…

ANNAPOLIS JUNCTION, Md. — Was the National Cryptologic Museum designed using a code of some kind? Something perhaps meant, cryptically, to mask its character and significance? Something that can be deciphered only by those familiar with mysterious…

Could anything be more steeped in the order and orders of the Old World than those 12 little girls leaving an old house covered with vines, in two straight lines, in rain or shine? It has been 75 years since they made their appearance in Ludwig…

AUSTIN, Tex. — In the century since the First World War began, there have been bloodier conflicts and more barbaric ones. There have been wars that seem more pointless and wars that seem less conclusive. But the First World War remains distinctively…

Should this review begin with a warning that it deals with the conventionally unmentionable? Or that it refers to images here unprintable? Maybe it’s enough to know that it deals with a new exhibition at the Museum of Sex (known as MoSex) that opened…

PHILADELPHIA — Clambering upward in dim violet light, stepping from one glass platform to another, you trigger flashes of light and polyps of sound. You climb through protective tubes of metallic mesh as you make your way through a maze of pathways.…

As autographed pictures go, there may be none so damning as the one that David Lloyd George, Britain’s prime minister during the latter part of World War I, inscribed on Dec. 1, 1933: “To Chancellor Hitler, with admiration for his brilliant gift of…

WASHINGTON — What magic do museum artifacts wield? What gives these objects, documents, books, recordings and images such power? They aren’t artworks but are often encased in humidity-controlled vitrines. They aren’t amusements but are often offered…

A woman’s melancholic eyes, heavy-lidded with desire, float in the nocturnal sky over a brashly lit skyline and amusement park. Stark rays shoot down from the heavens, illuminating a solitary house on a bare hill. A face, its features only…

Why do we memorialize Sept. 11? As you descend into the immense subterranean spaces and through the winding, trauma-saturated displays of the National September 11 Memorial Museum, that question will hardly seem as urgent as it does when you leave,…

If you start your sojourn through the New York Botanical Garden’s multipart “Groundbreakers” exhibition as you are meant to — looking at a show about photography in the gallery next to the library — then when you finally reach the conservatory…

At first glance, this exhibition might seem a bit quaint, its subject — textiles and the Civil War — evoking Americana more than American history. But this show, “Homefront & Battlefield: Quilts and Context in the Civil War,” which opened last month…