Two hundred years of work—and millions of priceless specimens—have been destroyed in a preventable tragedy.

Wikipedia is fighting to preserve the memories of the 20 million artifacts lost in Sunday's Brazilian museum fire. The Museu Nacional in Rio -- one of the largest museums in the Americas -- was consumed by fire and irreplaceable objects like the oldest human fossil found in Brazil and a 5.5-ton meteorite found in 1784 are believed to have been lost.

One of Latin America's largest natural history museums, in Rio de Janeiro, is hit by a huge blaze.

After a catastrophic fire blazed through the National Museum of Brazil on Sunday (Sept. 2), destroying many of the institution's 20 million artifacts, the museum's meteorites were some of the few relics left standing.

How did Civil War surgeons cope with the unbelievable amount of suffering they experienced on a daily basis? There is a familiar figure in Civil War literature: that of the surgeon operating in the immediate aftermath of battle. General Carl Schurz described a familiar nightmarish scene at Gettysburg:

In many ways, Stalin is key to understanding Georgia’s political climate. By Jessica Loudis.

Toward a Concrete Utopia focuses on the period of intense construction in Yugoslavia between 1948 and 1980

How is hawkish fanaticism whipped up at home? One exhibition offers insight. By Bradley Anderson.

The Turda Salt Mine is now a veritable history museum of salt mining. The excellent state of preservation of mining and machinery used to transport salt, together with the cautious work carried out for prepararing the mine to become a tourist attraction, have made history and legend meet harmoniously here.

If museums face an uncertain future, you wouldn't know it from “Henri Matisse: The Cutouts,” which recently drew 664,000 to the Museum of Modern Art. The show was so thronged that MoMA kept its doors open round-the-clock on the closing weekend last month.

On March 18, 1990, robbers stole $500 million in art from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Author Stephen Kurkjian explains why anyone would bother to steal work so priceless it couldn't be sold.

Driving along a nondescript section of Highway 115 a few miles south of Colorado Springs, it's hard not to swerve at the sight of a gigantic Hercules beetle, its horns as tall as a house, standing beside a sign for the May Natural History Museum. But this monstrous beetle isn’t advertising some two-bit roadside attraction...

Architecture is an art form that often involves inordinately large amounts of other people’s enthusiasm, time, and money. If any one of these resources begins to run out, they all do; the creation of architecture is a balancing act that contends not only with physical forces like stress, resilience, and gravity, but also with psychic forces like confidence, inspiration, and, often enough, sheer persistence. By Ingrid D. Rowland.

We sit down with @AfAmHistFail, an anonymous plantation docent who shares the teaching ups and racist downs of her job.

The mother of a little boy who accidentally smashed a historic jug at an Ipswich museum says the family is "thrilled" it has been fixed.

The museum visitor enters the room to find himself at the conductors stand with digital music notes and an orchestra of 13 speakers in front of him. Each speaker represents a different group of instruments. The visitor is given a conductors´ stick, and the concert may begin. On the repertoire are works of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. By browsing the electronic note-pad the visitor freely chooses which work he/she wishes to conduct, and by swinging the conductors stick decides upon the tempo.

Nearly 10 years ago, someone bashed in the window of the Judy Garland Museum and stole the world's most famous shoes.

Like the cathedrals of bygone eras, galleries are now the ultimate buildings of our times – and the way we use them mimics religious rituals, writes Jason Farago. Art critics wear many hats, but lately the most useful one has been a safety helmet. Across the United States, arts institutions are in the middle of a building boom, and globally, outside of Europe’s austerity-choked capitals, the strongholds of art are rising as well.

The newly-released footage was taken almost exactly 24 hours before the heist and shows a security guard letting in an unauthorized visitor

From toasters to opium, learn about the history of strangely specific and obscure topics. You're sure to learn something new from these 6 online museums.

Don't be fooled by museums' strong attendance numbers, says professor Michael Lewis. He argues today's art world is a Potemkin village, whose gleaming facades mask an indifference for the art itself.

The museum closes when dusk falls, and when the darkness strikes, the 'Night Light' fills the hushed spaces. It wanders along vulnerable paintings and awakens the mysterious girl who knows her place in the painting the Night Watch, by the Dutch painter Rembrandt When she steps into the nocturnal world of the museum, the Night Light leads her through the spaces, and she opens doors behind other iconic Dutch masterpieces.

Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced today that more than 400,000 high-resolution digital images of public domain works... (May 16, 2014)

5 places to learn about lighthouses while taking in their beauty.

Lord Montagu, who established the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, England, dies aged 88.

The visitor center at the Auschwitz concentration camp is being criticized by visitors who were shocked to see showers set up outside of the Polish site over the weekend. For some, the cooling stations offered a dark reminder of the camp's horrifying past. As the area suffered from severe heat, the site's managers set up misting showers to keep visitors cool as temperatures soared well into the 90s.

Seul Choix includes a two-story brick keeper's house, a fog signal building, an assistant keeper's house, two oil houses, and other buildings.

As London’s Science Museum salutes Russia’s space race with a new exhibition, we ask the curator to pick eight objects – big and small – that defined it.

Boasting one of most incredibly scenic and diverse landscapes in North America, New Mexico offers endless opportunities for exploration and adventure. With strong influences of both Native American and Hispanic culture, the state offers the visitor a multitude of unique attractions both in large cities like Santa Fe and Albuquerque as well as the smaller hubs of UFO-focused Roswell and the artists' colony of Taos.

Karen Lemmey, American Art's sculpture curator is organizing an installation that will include Hiram Power's Greek Slave, one of the most popular sculptures of the 19th century. As part of her preparation, she is working with Smithsonian X 3D, part of the Institution's Digitization program, to create a 3D model of the Greek Slave.

Plymouth Notch is a very small town nestled in the quiet Vermont countryside and is now a Vermont State Historic Site and the entire settlement is a historic district. Coolidge became president upon the death of Warren G. Harding, who died suddenly in 1923.

Discovered by a Chemist, Prussian Blue Gave Painters the Spontaneity They Were Missing. By John Griswold.

There's a boom going on for dinosaur bones, a veritable gold rush for fossils buried in the badlands of North Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. Today on the show: the T-Rex that started it all.

Miniature mummies carved from wood and carefully wrapped in tiny shrouds overlook a model of a Chimú palace...

Multiple exposures shot inside a museum by photographer Andres Wertheim.