Monuments Man Lt. Frank P. Albright, Polish Liaison Officer Maj. Karol Estreicher, Monuments Man Capt. Everett Parker Lesley, and Pfc. Joe D. Espinosa, guard with the 34th Field Artillery Battalion, pose with Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine upon its return to Poland in April 1946. Source: Wikipedia Commons
The Thief’s Gambit—A Patriot’s Heist or a Crook’s Crime?
Vincenzo Peruggia slipped into the Louvre just like everybody else. Except he wasn’t.
It was Friday, August 11, 1911, in the middle of a week-long heat. Only two days before, the temperature in sunbaked Paris hit 100° F. Today, as the work week came to a close, local thermometers would read 36°. That would be Celsius. In Fahrenheit, that would be 96.8°.
The Louvre wasn’t merely one of the world’s most renowned art galleries. On this hot day, it offered a bit of cool shade from the bright yellow disk burning above in the clear blue sky. That wasn’t why Vincenzo entered the building. He had worked there. His job was to build a glass case that would display a particular painting. That painting was Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.
But ol’ Vinny didn’t happen into the museum for work. He calmly ventured in with all the other Continue Reading “Should Stolen Art Be Returned—Even If It Hurts the Innocent?”
How Colonial Charters Continued To Haunt The New Republic
Articles of Confederation via Wikimedia Commons.
The Treaty of Paris may have resolved the conflict between America and Great Britain, but it left unaddressed the conflicts between America’s new states. United in their struggle for independence, they were far less united in determining where one state’s claims ended and another’s began.
King George no longer ruled the former colonies. The legacy of the colonial charters, however, continued to shape the thinking of the individual states. For more than a century, English monarchs had granted overlapping charters across North America, often with only the vaguest understanding of the geography involved. The Treaty of Paris transferred vast stretches of Britain’s former frontier to the United States, but it also revived old questions those charters had never fully answered.
America had overthrown the king. It had not escaped the king’s paperwork.
Nowhere was this more apparent than in Greater Western New York. Although some colonial Continue Reading “How Colonial Charters Continued To Haunt The New Republic”