National Archives

The modest-looking document travels with a team of security guards and a historian and sits behind bullet-proof glass in a climate-controlled and light-protected environment. One of only 26 known original copies of the Declaration of Independence, it was on hand Monday at the University of Maryland, College Park to help launch a National History Day celebration. The event showcases the history projects of middle and high school students from across the country, who spoke of their awe at seeing the famous document.

The peculiar red orb hung motionless in the summer sky near Frederick. A boy at the time, Keith Chester vividly recalls that day in 1966. It was about 6:30 p.m., and Chester was on his way to a friend's house. As he walked, he noticed a shiny red ball in the sky near the Catoctin Mountains. "The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up," Chester said. "I was so scared that I ran into my neighbor's house. I still think it was a UFO." To this day, the 50-year-old Bel Air resident has not been able find an explanation for the object, but the incident sparked an interest in unidentified flying objects.

The query was one of the most obscure that archivist Timothy Mulligan had ever received. A Reston, Va., woman wanted to know whether her father knew of her birth before he died at the helm of a German U-Boat in the spring of 1943. Carrying only the captain's name and boat number on a sheet of paper, Mulligan was able to find a paragraph-long U.S. naval intelligence intercept of her birth announcement amid 530 miles of shelves at the National Archives' behemoth records center in College Park.

WASHINGTON -- As the Bush administration has drastically accelerated the classification of information as "top secret" or "confidential," one office is refusing to report on its annual activity in classifying documents: the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. A standing executive order, strengthened by President Bush in 2003, requires all agencies and "any other entity within the executive branch" to provide an annual accounting of their classification of documents. More than 80 agencies have collectively reported to the National Archives that they made 15.6 million decisions in 2004 to classify information, nearly double the number in 2001, but Cheney continues to insist that he is exempt.

Federal agencies have been whiting-out history for at least the past six years, but it's all hush-hush. The reclassification of 55,000 documents that had long been available to public view didn't involve much big stuff, such as nuclear stockpiles. Most of it was just embarrassing, such as accounts of the many times world developments caught U.S. intelligence experts by surprise or of a goofy Cold War scheme to leaflet Eastern Europe by hot-air balloon. Much had been published and is widely available.

So deeply is this nation in debt to George Washington that most Americans aren't even aware of the full extent of his contributions. Victorious commander in the Revolutionary War, first president, father of the country - that's the most obvious stuff. His subtler and more fundamental gift to the fledging nation was to establish the principle that the democratically chosen civilian government was paramount; the military would never be more than its servant, and sovereigns had no place in government at all. Today, in honor of the founding father's 274th birthday, historians are celebrating one of those extraordinary occasions on which such standards were set, when General Washington appeared before the Continental Congress in Annapolis at the end of the war, just before Christmas 1783, to resign his military commission and "take my leave of all the employments of public life."

WASHINGTON -- In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have removed from public access thousands of historical documents that had been available for years, including some that have been published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians. The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the CIA and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton.

WASHINGTON - Finding ways to preserve and use old records - fading photographs, books with pages turning to dust, or even not-so-ancient reel-to-reel and eight-track recordings - is an understandable challenge. But now archivists and librarians find themselves dealing with something far more surprising - the digital formats currently being used to preserve much of America's fragile history are themselves proving to be dangerously vulnerable. "Much of the information of the 21st century and the late 20th century will be lost if we don't do something," said L. Reynolds Cahoon, an assistant archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration.

WASHINGTON - Samuel R. Berger, a former Clinton national security adviser, quit as an adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign yesterday after he was revealed to be the subject of a criminal investigation for mishandling classified documents. Berger acknowledged he removed classified documents from the National Archives while reviewing them for submission to the panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. One former government official who reviewed the documents said they were marked "code-word secret" because they contained intercepts from the National Security Agency about possible terrorist threats in Jordan.

WASHINGTON - The original 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence is badly faded now. "When in the course of human events ... " the clarion call of Thomas Jefferson that severed the United States from Great Britain, dims into a brown autumnal haze on the old parchment. The bold signature of John Hancock has softened, become lighter, aged. The names of the Maryland signers just below Hancock's are all but illegible. But in its new encasement at the National Archives, the old document still inspires awe. It's a physical link to the Founding Fathers, the generation that made the United States.