[Jonathan Tremblay is a historian and is currently an intern for the History News Network]

Alessandra Mussolini, granddaughter of the Italian dictator and “former showgirl turned MP” as the BBC describes her, has claimed that some blood and parts of her grandfather’s brain have been stolen to be sold over the Internet. It was allegedly heisted from Milan’s Policlinico Hospital where Mussolini was autopsied 65 years ago. Somewhat out of outrage but mostly out of violent curiosity, worldwide media have taken up the story about the evil man’s organ. What is the importance of this mushy reminder and how legitimate are its origins? It is probably as significant as a number of other “famous body parts” that have angered and fascinated over the centuries.

Technically, the term “relic” is a strictly ecclesiastic concept that may pertain to preserved body parts of Catholic saints and that may or may not have healing powers. The mystical properties aside, the term...

[Randall Stephens is an associate professor and department chair of History at the James R. Cameron center for History, Law and Government in Massachusettes]

As Americans prepare to stuff their faces with turkey, pie, turkey pie, and all manner of bread-related foods, and clock in millions of hours of TV football viewing, it’s worth considering the Pilgrims, originators of America's holiday. (I was just thinking that a Martian would have a very hard time understanding how football and overeating are linked to an otherworldly religious sect.) How do Pilgrims fit into American history and religious history in general?

How low the founders of our national myth have fallen. Nineteenth-century Protestants celebrated the Pilgrims as hearty, pure-of-heart forbearers. Yet even in the 19th century Pilgrims had their share of detractors. Eli Thayer, the Kansas prophet, and the Unitarian minister Edward Everett Hale fussed about the place of Pilgrims in American history....

Is it conceivable that Franklin D. Roosevelt's doctors knew he had widespread cancer in 1944 and still let him run for his fourth term as president? New research makes this astounding argument—and claims that the physician who supposedly told the truth about Roosevelt's death in 1970 was in fact continuing the deception he had helped create.

FDR may have died more than 60 years ago, but these questions still matter. Not only does presidential health—and the public's right to know about it—remain a controversial issue, but in Roosevelt's case, the lies in question, if true, changed history. As neurologist Steven Lomazow and journalist Eric Fettman point out in a book coming out this January, FDR's Deadly Secret, widespread knowledge of Roosevelt's cancer would have prevented him from running in 1944 and thus likely altered the shaping of postwar Europe.

Roosevelt was in the business of concealing his medical afflictions. After a bout with polio in 1921, he never...

[Jessica B. Harris, an English professor at Queens College and a contributing writer for the Web site Zester Daily, is the author of the forthcoming “High on the Hog: A Culinary Journey From Africa to America.”]

ON Oct. 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln declared the final Thursday of November to be a national holiday of Thanksgiving. That came just over a year after Lincoln made another more historic proclamation, one that directly concerned my family and their future: the Emancipation Proclamation, which had freed the enslaved in any territory “in rebellion.”

These two proclamations are visually conjoined in a stereograph made about the same time that is familiar to students of the American South. Taken by Henry P. Moore, it shows African-Americans at work on a plantation on Edisto Island, off South Carolina. They are captured in attitudes of deep concentration, posed with hoes in hands or seated around a large basket, preparing to plant. They are described...

[ The writer is completing a nonfiction book about using genealogy and DNA to find and confirm specific ancestors in the American Colonies, medieval Europe and medieval Africa. She is also finishing a novel about ancestors in the Indies.]

We are fascinated by narratives that aid in understanding who we are. From literary works such as Charles Frazier’s “Cold Mountain” inspired by his ancestor who walked home from the Civil War, to popular genres and entertainments by such as Ann Rice’s and other writers’ fascination -- obsession -- with criminals, myths, vampires, adventures, we wonder how writers choose characters and subjects for their stories. More writers are writing fiction, inspired by their family’s genealogy.

Recently, a pirates-treasure-revenge-adventure novel, “Pirate Latitudes” was published posthumously by Michael Crichton. Reviewers asked why this author of landmark futuristic, apocalyptic sci-fi...

[David R. Stokes is a minister, columnist, author, and broadcaster. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia.]

Ever hear of Gershom Mendes Seixas? Well, he might just be the forgotten hero of Thanksgiving.

Our national Thanksgiving narrative is rich with stories about proclamations, gatherings, meals, traditions, football, and of course, the obligatory pardoning of a turkey by the president of the United States. Schoolchildren rehearse that day long ago when the Plymouth pilgrims broke bread. We note things Lincoln said.

And doubtless you have heard about what our first president, George Washington, declared while proclaiming the first official national day of Thanksgiving in 1789:

I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 26th day of November next, to be devoted by the people of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be; that we may then all unite...

[Jeffrey Herf is a professor of modern European and German history at the University of Maryland at College Park and author of The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust (Harvard University Press, 2006). His latest book is Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, published this month by Yale University Press.]

Between 1939 and 1945, shortwave radio transmitters near Berlin broadcast Nazi propaganda in many languages around the world, including Arabic throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and Persian programs in Iran. English-language transcripts of the Arabic broadcasts shed light on a particularly dark chapter in the globalization of pernicious ideas. The transcripts' significance, however, is not purely historical. Since September 11, 2001, scholars have debated the lineages, similarities, and differences between Nazi anti-Semitism and the anti-Semitism of Islamic extremists. These radio broadcasts suggest that Nazi Arabic-language...

[Michael Hiltzik's column appears in the paper on Mondays and Thursdays.]

Great crises have a way of reminding us that acting as though we know perfectly well what the future holds almost always leads to disaster.

That's especially true in economics, which tends to underscore the murkiness of the real world by dealing out surprises one after another -- booms, crashes, bubbles, you name it.

It's fitting, therefore, that the recent economic meltdown has begun to restore that great apostle of uncertainty, John Maynard Keynes, to his rightful position of influence in economic thought.

"Keynes asked why financial markets are inherently unstable," Robert Skidelsky told me the other day. "His answer was that we don't know what the future will bring. He talked about the inherent precariousness of knowledge, that when we estimate the future we're only disguising our ignorance."

If that sounds obvious, keep in...

[The writer is an FT contributing editor]

Finding something American to sell to the Chinese, whether democracy or widgets, has always been a problem. The first merchant vessel to sail from New York to Canton in 1784 was on a tea-buying voyage, but the cargo it had to exchange was ginseng. American ginseng was consumed by the Chinese for its yin: the female properties of cool, while the native product was thought more yang-heavy. A population explosion may have made it difficult for domestic production to keep up with demand, hence the opening for American ginseng merchants who made a nifty profit.

Thus was born a trading connection in which, for long stretches, the Chinese assumed they had the upper hand. They required silver in return for tea, without which, some believed, western barbarians would go blind and develop intestinal tumours.

As barbarians went, the Americans seemed a milder version of the British pest. It helped that British merchants...