National Museum

The drama is clearly the longest running of any that John Wilkes Booth played during his acting career. Was Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, killed by a soldier at a tobacco barn near Port Royal, Va., on April 26, 1865, as history books and government accounts record? Or was someone else shot through the neck and declared to be Booth as a way of putting an end to the national tragedy? Did the president's killer actually escape? Though those questions are settled in the minds of most scholars, they have intrigued and frustrated some historians and Booth family members, including some locally, who hoped to finally find answers.

WASHINGTON - The best thing about the new National Children's Museum? "Frederick," according to my 8-year-old. He ran into an old classmate he hadn't seen in a while and said seeing him was the highlight of his visit to the new $7 million interactive children's museum that's been eight years in the making. And I have to agree with him. Compared with children's museums across the country that we have visited - Baltimore; Boston; New York; Miami; Durham, N.C.; San Francisco; Santa Ana, Calif; and Sausalito, Calif.

Perhaps the stickiest issue of all surrounding the opening of the National Museum of American Jewish History last November was whether it would be open on Saturdays. On the one hand, Saturday is potentially the best-attended day of the week for any such institution. But on the other hand, it is also the Sabbath day for observant Jews; operating Saturday could be perceived as a sign of disrespect. But in Solomon-like fashion, a compromise was conjured: The museum is open Saturday, but because Jewish law prohibits cash transactions on Sabbath, tickets must either be purchased in advance, or with credit cards at the museum (the transactions are posted electronically the next day)

WE LIKE TO picture our rock stars spending their tour off-days engaging in various manifestations of debauchery. But if you're Max Weinberg, you're spending your Tuesday night in Philly in a most un-debauched manner. Tonight, Weinberg's boss, Bruce Springsteen, and his co-workers in the E Street Band are performing in Boston. Wednesday, they open their sold-out, two-night Wells Fargo Center engagement. In between, Weinberg has a date to speak at the National Museum of American Jewish History on Independence Mall.

THE CONFEDERATE States of America and Albert Einstein. The post-World War II migration to the suburbs and the Marx Brothers. Covered wagons and Sandy Koufax. These seemingly random things and names are inter-connected. For they - and countless other people, places and events - are part of the 350-year history of Jews in America. Until last Thanksgiving weekend, museums devoted to aspects of Jews and Judaism tended to be either Holocaust-based or devoted to historical artifacts.

With a $5 million gift from Comcast-Spectacor chairman Edward M. Snider, the National Museum of American Jewish History announced yesterday that it had reached the halfway point of its $100 million campaign to construct a new museum building on Independence Mall. Snider's gift, combined with a $25 million campaign-opening donation from philanthropist Sidney Kimmel and two dozen smaller pledges from museum trustees and others, has enabled the fund drive to achieve half its goal in a little more than a year.

In the 1960s, a popular national ad campaign showed miscellaneous people - a wizened American Indian, a Chinese elder, Buster Keaton, an Irish cop, an angel-faced African American boy - biting into a luscious deli sandwich, with the caption: "You don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's real Jewish rye. " The gist of that message - that the integration of Jews in America has helped shape the culture - is a founding principle of the new National Museum...

More than 1,000 donors and others looked on as the new National Museum of American Jewish History officially became a reality in an opening ceremony along a sun-splashed Independence Mall on Sunday. The ceremony, which lasted little more than an hour, featured Vice President Biden and others, plus 50 shofar blowers, members of the Philadelphia Singers, and a rabbi who affixed a mezuzah - a handwritten prayer sheathed in a decorative casing - to the side of the museum's front doorway.

For more than 150 years, the Smithsonian Institution has been one of the world's great pack rats, collecting items from the mundane to the magnificent. Now the Smithsonian is cleaning out the nation's attic. Like a dowager showering treasures on far-flung relatives, the museum complex is ready to open its storage vaults to worthy recipients. Cities across the country are lining up for a chance to borrow some of the 139 million objects usually kept from public view. In Bethlehem, Pa., the National Museum of Industrial History plans to exhibit an 1876 Jupiter steam locomotive and an 1875 Otis elevator, which had been displayed in the 1876 Philadelphia Exposition, plus other industrial artifacts when it opens its preview center late next year.

"The sight of several stretchers, each with its legless, armless or desperately wounded occupant, entering my ward, admonished me that I was there to work, not to wonder or weep. " The words are those of a Union Army nurse who labored here in this crossroads town at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains in some of the worst days of the Civil War. Her name was Louisa May Alcott, and she is remembered for more literary reasons. But the grimly vivid picture her brief description evokes is one too often overlooked in the way this nation looks upon its costliest military conflict.

The drama is clearly the longest running of any that John Wilkes Booth played during his acting career. Was Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln, killed by a soldier at a tobacco barn near Port Royal, Va., on April 26, 1865, as history books and government accounts record? Or was someone else shot through the neck and declared to be Booth as a way of putting an end to the national tragedy? Did the president's killer actually escape? Though those questions are settled in the minds of most scholars, they have intrigued and frustrated some historians and Booth family members, including some locally, who hoped to finally find answers.

The search for a new chief of the Louvre, the world's most visited museum, may include non-French candidates for the first time in the institution's more than 200-year history. French President Francois Hollande, faced with a shrinking budget, is casting his net wide and including foreigners among people he will consider to run the museum that's home to the Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo , and The Winged Victory of Samothrace, a French government official said. With public spending being reduced this year by $13.4 billion, the French government is putting expertise in international fund-raising high on the list of must- have skills for the person taking charge of the Louvre.

WASHINGTON - The best thing about the new National Children's Museum? "Frederick," according to my 8-year-old. He ran into an old classmate he hadn't seen in a while and said seeing him was the highlight of his visit to the new $7 million interactive children's museum that's been eight years in the making. And I have to agree with him. Compared with children's museums across the country that we have visited - Baltimore; Boston; New York; Miami; Durham, N.C.; San Francisco; Santa Ana, Calif; and Sausalito, Calif.

NEW YORK - The first clue that a new museum here is a bit unusual are the door handles shaped like the Greek letter pi . Then there is the elevator. The ground floor is designated with a zero, and the basement is marked "negative one. " And the projected number of visitors in 2013? "Six times 10 to the fourth," said executive director Glen Whitney, a former hedge fund analyst and assistant math professor. That's 60,000 for those who are a bit rusty on their exponents, but both the rusty and the number-savvy are welcome at the National Museum of Mathematics, said to be the only such museum in North America.

The top spot belonged first to a Bush and then to a Clinton. Now, in a familiar American formula, the National Constitution Center is turning again to a Bush. The center announced Thursday that former Florida Gov. John Ellis "Jeb" Bush had been elected chairman of its board of trustees. Bush, 59, who runs an education foundation and who has been mentioned as a possible 2016 presidential candidate in a theoretical race against Hillary Rodham Clinton, will succeed former President Bill Clinton, who has served as chairman since January 2009.

If you want to fully understand a country, you have to understand its sporting rituals. In the United Kingdom, that means deciphering soccer (or "football," as it's known to 62 million Brits). Refined, popularized, and given rules in leisure-conscious Victorian Britain, the so-called beautiful game enjoys quasi-sacred status in the country of its conception, a worshipful feeling best summed up by the late, great Liverpool coach Bill Shankly. A no-nonsense Scot, he once famously declared: "Football isn't a matter of life or death.

One of the most significant documents in the history of Jews in the New World will go on display Friday at the National Museum of American Jewish History as part of the museum's first special exhibition, To Bigotry No Sanction: George Washington and Religious Freedom.   "What was at the forefront of 18th-century debate," said Josh Perelman, the museum's chief curator and director of exhibitions, "is still relevant today, a time when religion is a topic of wide civic discussion, a time when there is a Mormon presidential candidate.

The years-long campaign to launch a museum in Philadelphia honoring the soldiers of "America's original ‘greatest generation' " reaches another milestone Tuesday. Having secured a prime location two years ago at Third and Chestnut Streets in the city's historic district, the museum planned by the American Revolution Center now has a dignified, red-brick design by renowned architect Robert A.M. Stern that should offer visitors an inviting setting both day and night, given its distinctive, lighted cupola.

H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest, fresh from the successful opening of the Barnes Foundation gallery on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway - where he was a key supporter of the foundation's move from the suburbs to the city - has now focused his financial energy on building a new history museum near Independence Mall. At a news conference Tuesday, the American Revolution Center is expected to unveil New York architect Robert A.M. Stern's design for a new Museum of the American Revolution at Third and Chestnut Streets, and in support of the push for the museum, Lenfest will announce a $40 million challenge grant.