How common is it to misplace classified documents?

Plus: the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade and LBJ's death |

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By Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Recently, there has been a wave of news stories about classified documents being found in the personal residences of President Trump and his Vice President Mike Pence and current President Biden (from his time as Vice President). In light of these incidents, I called up the former head of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives, J. William Leonard, who served from 2002-2008 during the Bush/Cheney administration, to see how common this problem is and how he handled such cases when they came up during his tenure. “If you go to any presidential library, I’m certain that this has happened before,” he told me. Click here to read the full story.

HISTORY ON TIME.COM Column: My Mother's Fight For Abortion Access Can Teach Us About Reproductive Justice Today By Felicia Kornbluh "It is vital for us to learn the lessons of Roe's past and repeat what our predecessors got right." Read More » Column: What We Can Learn From Medieval Women in the Workforce By Eleanor Janega Women in the workforce is nothing new. Medieval history proves it, writes Eleanor Janega. Read More » President LBJ Wrestled With Social Justice, War, and Unrest. His Legacy Is Still Relevant By Olivia B. Waxman President Lyndon B. Johnson wrestled with social justice, war, and unrest. Here's how his legacy is still relevant to America today. Read More » A New Docuseries Reveals How Much More the Embattled 1619 Project Has Left to Say By Judy Berman Even the least controversial revisionist histories rarely gain a foothold without repetition—and in this case, stories new and old transcend partisan polemic when viewers get to see the faces behind them. Read More » Rock Star David Crosby Reportedly Dies at 81 By Robert Jablon / AP While he only wrote a handful of widely known songs, the witty and ever opinionated Crosby was on the front lines of the cultural revolution of the '60s and '70s. Read More »

FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1940: Opera singer Lauritz Melchior “After dinner on Wagner nights he calls for his roomy Cadillac and is driven with his wife, Kleinchen (Little One), to the stage door of Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House…In exactly 20 minutes he is dressed as the young Siegfried, his noble paunch encased in a deer skin, his stubby grey hair covered with a luxuriant blond wig. Thus accoutred, he lights a big black cigar and trundles down to the wings, where the waiting Kleinchen inspects him from top to toe, sees that his massive legs are properly powdered and that his hunting horn is in place. At the murmuring strains of Wagner's prelude, Melchior throws away his cigar and clears his throat. Kleinchen smiles and murmurs her parting salute: ‘Hals—und Beinbruch’ (an old German good-luck greeting meaning ‘May you break your neck and your legs’), and the great Lauritz Melchior bounds youthfully on to the Metropolitan's aged stage.” (Jan. 22, 1940) Read More » This week in 1973: Actor Marlon Brando “What little is known of his true nature comes from a handful of his friends and associates. By their testimony, he is intelligent, warm, charming, compassionate, humorous and unpretentious, as well as undisciplined, boorish, gloomy, supercilious, cruel and downright bent. About the only thing everybody can agree on is that he is a prankster. He delights in disguising his voice in his frequent phone calls to friends, assuming such identities as a job applicant, a woman, or a doctor reporting a comically grotesque diagnosis of some third party. He is also devastatingly adept at mimicry, something he does not only for laughs. ‘Actors have to observe,’ he says. ‘They have to know how much spit you’ve got in your mouth and where the weight of your elbows is. I could sit all day in the Optimo Cigar Store telephone booth and just watch the people pass by.’” (Jan. 22, 1973) Read More » This week in 1994: Figure skaters Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan “The Jan. 6 attack on skater Nancy Kerrigan was shocking and chilling enough. But when the rumblings began that Harding or her entourage might somehow be involved, a grimly familiar tale of random violence turned into something far more gothic. Even people without the faintest interest in the crystalline world of figure skating could not help marveling at the spectacle. Did the scrappy girl from the trailer parks, who has climbed so high and suffered so much, possibly plot to destroy her rival? Or did her violently jealous husband assemble a gang of goons to act without her knowledge but on her behalf? If so, was the motive love or money? If not, why are others smearing his name with dirt? And if Tonya Harding turns out to be innocent, how searing must it be that more than a few people could imagine her guilt?” (Jan. 24, 1994) Read More »

HIGHLIGHTS FROM AROUND THE WEB World War II: History News Network’s James Thornton Harris looks at new research on Pope Pius XII and whether he could have done more to save the Jews from the Holocaust. Reference: Abriana Herron of the Indianapolis Recorder, digs into a new timeline of the history of African Americans in Indiana, from 1746 to the present. Historic places: BBC News’ Madeline Halpert reports on the effort to remove the racist slurs in Native American history site designations and the new names selected. Women’s history: For Morning Edition, Phillip Martin explores a lesser-known side of Martin Luther King Jr’s wife, the activist Coretta Scott King, focusing on the time she spent at the New England Conservatory of Music. Politics: As the controversy about Congressman George Santos continues—and questions about his ability to do his job mount—historian Julian Zelizer’s CNN op-ed looks at how some of the most embattled members of Congress fared through history, going as far back as 1832.

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