In a jarring contrast, Israel switched moods Tuesday evening from a somber Memorial Day for fallen soldiers to a joyous Independence Day celebrating 61 years since the Jewish state was created, but the absence of Mideast peace weighed on the festivities.

More than $5.6 million in federal stimulus money will be used to repair and restore the leaky clock tower of Independence Hall, which once housed the Liberty Bell, and for other park improvements, officials said Wednesday.

When John Hancock sent copies of the Declaration of Independence to the colonial states, he told them the document would be of interest to future generations and should be kept in the state archives.

The Virginia Supreme Court says a businessman owns a historically significant copy of the Declaration of Independence, not the state of Maine.

Each dawn through the 1950s and into the 1960s, he would emerge from the house on North Delaware Street and amble through town in suit and Stetson hat, a snowy-haired Midwestern retiree on a morning constitutional to the library where he volunteered.

Retired Secretary of State Dean Acheson would stop by often. Georgia Neese Clark Gray, the country’s first female treasurer, gave impromptu lessons in parallel parking. And former Treasury Secretary John W. Snyder? He apparently had a bit of the “dirty ol

A theft charge over a missing library book has been dismissed against an Iowa woman who was jailed when she failed to return the overdue tome.

Family papers detailing the private life of former first lady Bess Wallace Truman were released Friday, with no apparent bombshells about the wife of President Harry Truman in the more than 24,000 pages.

Cooler weather helped firefighters make gains Friday on a roughly 2,000-acre wildfire in a remote area of the Owens Valley.

A wind-driven wildfire has burned more than 2,000 acres of brush and heavy grassland in California’s Owens Valley.