Prologue: Pieces of History

Brad Meltzer’s new mystery novel—The Inner Circle, the no. 1 bestseller on the most recent New York Times list—is all about the National Archives. “I came to visit and I fell in love. Truly,” Meltzer says in an interview about the book in the forthcoming issue of Prologue, the quarterly magazine of the National Archives. [...]

In November of 1963, to seek support for New Frontier policies and with an eye on the 1964 elections, President John F. Kennedy set out on what was planned as a two-day, five-city tour of Texas. Well before the President departed for Texas, advance men were dispatched from Washington to make on-the-scene preparations. Among them [...]

Ilaria Dagnini Brey is the author of The Venus Fixers, an account of the Monuments Officers, who were assigned by the Allies to preserve and protect the artwork and monuments of Europe from looting and destruction. She is the featured Author on the Record for the Fall 2010 issue of Prologue. We invited her to do [...]

It was 1906 when Upton Sinclair made the world vegetarian, at least for a little while. Sinclair’s novel riled the United States and its President, Teddy Roosevelt, by revealing the unsanitary conditions under which food was made. Since 1879, over 100 bills had been introduced to regulate the food and drug industry. It only took [...]

The New York Times called it “engrossing and eminently fascinating.” The Richmond Times Dispatch said “Discovering the Civil War” “isn’t your typical Civil War retrospective.” And the Neue Zurcher Zeitung called the National Archives’ newest exhibit, “einer grandiosen Ausstellung in Washington.” Wait . . . was that German? Yes, DCTW isn’t just making a splash [...]