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-A glass dish unearthed from a burial mound here is the first of its kind confirmed to have come to Japan from the Roman Empire, a research team said... The dish and bowl were retrieved together from the No. 126 tumulus of the Niizawa Senzuka cluster of ancient graves, a national historic site. The No. 126 tumulus dates back to the late fifth century... According to the team’s analysis, the chemical composition of the clear dark blue dish is almost identical to glasswork unearthed in the area of the Roman Empire (27 B.C.-A.D. 395). Measuring 14.1 to 14.5 centimeters in...

Forty years ago this summer, firefighters in St. Louis arrived on the scene of what would become an archive catastrophe unparalleled in U.S. history — a disaster that to this day is affecting military veterans and their families. Minutes after an alarm sounded on July 12, 1973, the firefighters reached the National Personnel Records Center, which held millions of official military files spanning the 20th century. They reached the burning sixth floor, but after a couple of hours had to withdraw because of the flames and heat. The inferno burned out of control for 22 hours, and it took two...

The 1940 census will be released online on April 2, 2012. Please bookmark this page: 1940census.archives.gov. This is where you will be able to access the digitized census records starting on April 2. The digital images will be accessible free of charge at NARA facilities nationwide through our public access computers as well as on personal computers via the internet. Part 1: General Information FAQs about the 1940 Census 1940 Census Forms Questions Asked on the 1940 Census Selected List of Codes 1940 Census Lectures by NARA staff nationwide Part 2: How to Start Your 1940 Census Research

I'm writing to offer my resignation from the Richard Nixon Library & Birthplace Docent Guild. While the decision was tough, the reason is simple: The president, who admirably redeemed himself in the sunset of his life from the monstrous shadow of Watergate, is now being enthusiastically dishonored at his own library by a "Manchurian" figure, Dr. Timothy Naftali, director of NARA. Naftali is so driven by his personal ideology that none of his unquestioned brilliance and tireless audacity is now capable of producing an ounce of basic common sense. What is that basic common sense? That presidential libraries are built,...

Library Throws Book at Nixon by Brian Calle Some controversy over the recently revised Watergate exhibit at the Nixon Presidential Library & Museum in Yorba Linda has provoked some questions over presidential libraries, their value, purpose for public consumption and their role in the remembrance of past presidents. One docent at the Nixon library, my Register colleague Will Alexander, opted to resign in protest of the new exhibit after 10 years of volunteer service. And friends and former colleagues of Richard Nixon have been critical of the museum's new director, Timothy Naftali. Some critics have even suggested that the...

Welcome to the Barack Obama Presidential Library and Museum Sometime after 2016, the world will celebrate the opening of the Barack Obama Presidential Library and Visitor Experience. In the best traditions of past presidential libraries, it will probably feature galleries, public experiences, theatrical presentations and more, capturing the leadership, the human drama, the agonizing decisions, the achievements and the legacy of the Obama presidency. This unofficial fan site is dedicated to the celebration of that visitor experience. Here you will find preliminary information and links to news about the coming Obama Presidential Library and Museum Today, we are still early...

The New Watergate By Anne Walker Where I stand depends on where I sit . . . . or in this case . . . . where I used to sit. It is so true. Those of us who lived through the days of what came to be known as “Watergate”, the days of reading about our pals in the Washington Post every day, seeing them accused and vilified, hauled in front of a grand jury for countless hours while their legal bills sky rocketed, go to trial, and be convicted of perjury, not wrongdoing, and end up in...

The War Over Nixon The ghost of our most divisive modern president haunts efforts to make his library tell the truth by Scott Martelle Tim Naftali thought docents at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum should be honest about the Watergate tapes. The docents, though, couldn’t talk about what they didn’t know. “I had docents come to me and say, ‘Is there anything incriminating on the tapes?’ ” says Naftali, the library director. The tapes were so damaging to Richard M. Nixon that they were a reason he resigned as president of the United States. Naftali also thought the docents...

Rarely are currency exchange rates as good for the American dollar as that of Asian countries. In Asia, the American dollar carries a lot of clout and with the recent devaluation of the USD; it is a good thing that these countries offer an excellent trip for so little cost to Americans.

The past haunts Richard Nixon's library/h2> Once privately run, the Yorba Linda presidential museum is making a transition to government operation. And that has turned statues of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai into political footballs. The statues depict two old men relaxing in easy chairs. As others mill about the drawing room, the men engage in conversation, one gesturing at the other to underscore a point. For nearly 20 years the likenesses of China's communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai have sat perfectly still in the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda. Now, they are creating...

THE WHITE HOUSE Office of the Press Secretary For Immediate Release January 21, 2009 EXECUTIVE ORDER 13489 - - - - - - - PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to establish policies and procedures governing the assertion of executive privilege by incumbent and former Presidents in connection with the release of Presidential records by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) pursuant to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, it is hereby ordered as follows: Section 1. Definitions. For purposes...

WASHINGTON - Despite pleges to protect South Vietnam, former US president Richard Nixon privately vowed to "cut off the head" of its leader unless he backed peace with the communist North, tapes released Tuesday showed. The tapes appear to confirm charges by South Vietnam's late president, Nguyen Van Thieu, who tearfully accused the United States of breaking its word to protect Saigon when the southern capital fell in 1975. The National Archives released more than 150 hours of new tapes from Nixon, who notoriously recorded his conversations. Nixon is heard railing against the media and Congress for allegedly undercutting the...

The US National Archives offered a cash reward of up to 50,000 dollars Friday for the recovery of a missing computer hard drive containing sensitive personnel data from the Clinton administration. Described by the archives as a "Western Digital MY BOOK external hard drive" with a 2-terabyte storage capacity, it contained copies of backup tapes from the White House dating back to president Bill Clinton's tenure in the 1990s.

The U.S. National Archives on Wednesday said it is offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of a missing hard drive that contains personal information of former Clinton administration staff and visitors. The small portable hard drive was being kept as a backup, the National Archives explained in a question-and-answer document (PDF) on its Web site. It held copies of about 113 four-millimeter tape cartridges of "snapshots" of hard-drive contents of employees who left the Executive Office of the President. Because the staff maintained White House entry information and electronic address books, the external drive contains personally...

A massive amount of sensitive, national security-related information from the Clinton administration has gone missing from the national archives. The Inspector General of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) told congressional committee staffers Tuesday that a hard drive containing over a terabyte of information -- the equivalent of millions of books--went missing from the NARA facility in College Park, Md., sometime between October 2008 and March 2009. The Department of Justice and the Secret Service are conducting an investigation, but it's so far unclear whether the drive was lost as the result of a crime or an accident. That...

Legal Battles, Technical Difficulties Delay Required Transfer to Archives The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House's electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers. Federal law requires outgoing White House officials to provide the Archives copies of their records, a cache estimated at more than 300 million messages and 25,000 boxes of documents depicting some of the most sensitive policymaking of the past eight years. But archivists are uncertain whether the...

Dick Cheney alone has the authority to determine which records, if any, from his tenure will be handed over to the National Archives when he leaves office, his lawyers say. That claim is in federal court documents asking that a lawsuit over the records be dismissed. Cheney leaves office Jan. 20, potentially taking with him millions of records that might otherwise become public record....

Washington, DC…For most Americans, Election Day marks the end of the presidential selection process. At the National Archives, it is only the beginning. Most Americans know that the National Archives preserves historical documents such as the Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. But a little known function of the National Archives is the administration of the Electoral College by the Office of the Federal Register. After Election Day the staff at the Federal Register ensure the complicated and sometimes confusing steps in the electoral process are followed exactly. In the weeks prior to the election,...

District Court Rules against National Archives in Lawsuit to Obtain Health Care Records from Clinton Presidential LibraryJudicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, announced today that U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman ruled against the National Archives on September 30th, refusing to dismiss Judicial Watch's lawsuit to obtain Hillary Clinton's health care task force records from the Clinton Presidential Library and denying the Archives' separate motion to stay the lawsuit for one year [Judicial Watch, Inc. v U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Civil Action No: 07-1987 (D.D.C.) (PLF)]. The National Archives filed a motion to...

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Thousands of pages of Hillary Rodham Clinton's schedules as first lady are being released to the public after months of pressure and criticism that the Clintons were delaying the disclosure. The National Archives, which operates the former President Clinton's presidential library in Little Rock, announced Tuesday it would release 11,046 pages of Clinton's daily schedules at the Little Rock facility and online Wednesday morning. Clinton has faced criticism from fellow Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Republicans over the number of White House documents from her husband's administration that have not been made public. The...