Frank Carlson Library

Describes how a group of Timbuktu librarians enacted a daring plan to smuggle the city's great collection of rare Islamic manuscripts away from the threat of destruction at the hands of Al Qaeda militants to the safety of southern Mali.

In a race against time, a group of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture. Focusing on the period between D-Day and V-E Day, this book follows the Monuments Men on their impossible mission to save the world's great art from the Nazis. These unlikely heroes, mostly middle-aged family men, walked...

Called to Nazi-occupied Italy in 1943, a German photographer and an American stenographer hunt for priceless masterpieces before they are destroyed by Hitler, in this pulse-pounding adventure inspired by the incredible true story of the Monuments Women, the Fifth Army WACs and the looted Florentine art collections during World War II. Summer, 1943. Eva Brunner is taking photographs of Nazi-looted art hidden in the salt mines of the Austrian hinterland....

Opening with the notorious bonfires of "un-German" and Jewish literature in 1933 that offered such a clear signal of Nazi intentions, Burning the Books takes us on a 3000-year journey through the destruction of knowledge and the fight against all the odds to preserve it. Richard Ovenden, director of the world-famous Bodleian Library, explains how attacks on libraries and archives have been a feature of history since ancient times but have increased...

Beyond what most people think about archaeology -- with its cleanly numbered dates, and discoveries--lies a vibrant and controversial realm of scientists, thieves, and contested land claims. Here, naturalist and adventurer Childs explores the field's transgressions against the cultures it tries to preserve, and pauses to ask: To whom does the past belong? Written in his trademark lyrical style, this book carries readers directly into his adventures...

France, 1939. At the dawn of World War II, Anne Guichard, a young archivist employed at the Louvre, arrives home to find her brother missing. While she works to discover his whereabouts, refugees begin flooding into Paris and German artillery fire rattles the city. Once they reach Paris, the Nazis will stop at nothing to get their hands on the Louvre's art collection. Anne is quickly sent to the Castle of Chambord, where the Louvre's most precious...

Since his childhood, Benjamin Franklin Gates has known that he is a descendant of a long line of people whose job it has been to guard a treasure hidden by the Founding Fathers. They hid clues to its whereabouts in the country's currency and on the back of the Declaration of Independence. Now, Ben has learned of a plot to steal the Declaration, and has only one option: he has to steal it himself. Even if he pulls off this monumental task, keeping...

Presents the story of Kennewick Man, one of the oldest and most complete skeletons found in America near the Columbia River in Washington.

This book describes the Palace of Versailles, which was started by King Louis XIV and which took more than one hundred years to build.

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about what he called "Double Consciousness," a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. From an early age, Ailey fights a battle for belonging that's made all the more difficult by a hovering trauma. To come to terms with her own identity, Ailey embarks on a journey through her family's past. In doing so Ailey must learn to embrace her full heritage, a legacy of oppression...