Museum Exhibits

The story of David, the shepherd boy who slew the Philistine Goliath, became the divinely chosen king of the Israelites and seduced Bathsheba, would be compelling in any era. But for medieval Christians, the poet, harpist and warrior assumed immense importance as an exemplar of piety and penitence, an Everyman on whom they could model their own commitment to God.

Flight was always on his mind. As he plowed soybean fields and chopped cotton in his tiny hometown of Heth, Ark., Jerry Hodges passed the time by imagining himself streaking across the sky in the cockpit of a Navy plane. As a teenager growing up in the 1930s, it seemed an impossible dream. There was no such thing as a black fighter pilot and the Navy was not about to accept its first. But on Sunday, a gray-haired Hodges regaled a small audience with tales of flying bombers during World War II.

On a recent weekday, Clemence Dubreuil had no school because her teachers were on strike, so the 9-year-old begged her mother to take her to a museum to see a new exhibit about sex. If that all sounds very French, it is: Strikes are as much a part of the national character as frank talk about sex. But as the exhibit and the mild controversy surrounding it are proving, the cliches need some updating.

On the shores of Normandy where thousands of Americans died in the cataclysm that was D-day, a museum that aims at being more than a collection of rusting relics is preparing to commemorate another day that changed the world: Sept. 11, 2001. More than 120 mementos, including building keys and a smashed-up vehicle, are being shipped from New York to the French city of Caen for the first exhibition outside the United States, and the largest anywhere on the attack, its roots and aftermath.

The museum visitors file past black-and-white photos from the early 20th century showing Tibetan children in filthy rags begging for food on the streets of Lhasa. They click their tongues at a display case with a wooden cage for imprisoning disobedient serfs and wooden blocks used for crushing fingers when the cage wasn't punishment enough.

LONDON -- He led a global superpower, bought popularity with tax cuts and faced a divisive war in Iraq. In many ways, the Roman Emperor Hadrian and his 2,000-year-old world sound familiar. A new exhibition at the British Museum aims to show that Hadrian, best remembered for building a 73-mile wall to separate England and Scotland, is a leader whose achievements and contradictions helped forge our times. "Hadrian is one of the great Roman emperors," exhibition curator Thorsten Opper said.

As a young boy in Poland before World War II, Karol Jozef Wojtyla possessed an uncommon warmth for an often reviled group of outsiders -- Jews. Like most others in his hometown, Wojtyla was Catholic. But he counted Jewish children among his friends -- attending school with them, even playing goalie on their soccer team. Wojtyla was speechless when one of them, a fellow actor in drama club, informed him that she was leaving to escape looming anti-Semitism.

Science historian Dan Lewis opened the green cloth cover of "The Origin of Species," Charles Darwin's classic work on evolutionary biology, and flipped to Page 20. And there, in the 11th line of text, was the telltale typo: "Speceies." That misprint marked the book as one of the 1,250 copies originally published in London in 1859.

A visit to the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History was the last place I expected to be picked up by a stranger. It was a brief relationship. Ultimately, a fly-by-night kind of thing, although it happened at 11 a.m. The scene of the tryst was the ongoing "Butterflies and Plants: Partners in Evolution" exhibition set in the new $3-million Butterfly Pavilion on the museum's second floor.

For most people, the French and Indian War is one of those distant, foggy, inscrutable, eye-crossing wars that seem to exist primarily as fodder for history textbooks written to bore the bejabbers out of sixth-graders. Most of us know only that it happened sometime before the American Revolution and involved the French, and possibly the last of the Mohicans. The very phrase "French and Indian War" is punch line material (e.g., "He hasn't had a hit movie since the French and Indian War").