For decades, Brazilian politicians and patriots have concerned themselves with visions of taming the Amazon River basin, an area almost as large as the United States, home to approximately 15 million species of plants and animals, tangled under the largest stretch of dense, daunting tropical forest left on Earth. The Brazilians envisioned bulldozing and burning enormous tracts of the forest, clearing them for cattle ranches and some farms, laying highways across the basin, and fashioning great cities. Most Brazilians knew that some Indians in habited the forest but were not pre pared to find tens of thousands of rubber tappers, relics of the past, still living there as well (Smithsonian. November 1989). As they forged ahead with their schemes, violent conflict became inevitable, a violence at least as terrible as that spawned by the conquest of the American West. Out of that violence came the murder of Chico Mendes, the rumpled. 44-year-old leader of a local tappers' union who had become the unlikely hero of environmental groups throughout the world. The international outcry over his death astounded and unnerved Brazil...

As an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston shows us, the queen of cities was definitely the place to be at the fin de siècle...

East Berlin's Pergamon Museum, home to a rare collection of Hellenistic art and architecture, now welcomes visitors from the Western world...