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Archive documents, press news and pictorial and photo-graphic portraits allow the reconstruction of the origin and the special history of the set of diamonds and emeralds jewels made by Félix Sam-per in 1862 for the Spanish Queen Isabella II, whose magnificence was praised and rewarded at the time.

On the centennial of the Russian Revolution, the article recounts the remarkable experiences of an American eyewitness to the Revolution: historian Frank A. Golder (1877–1929). Golder is best remembered today as the man responsible for amassing the extraordinary Russia and East European collections housed at the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University. He was in St. Petersburg in 1914 when Russia entered the Great War; he was in Petrograd in 1917 when the February Revolution brought an end to the Romanov dynasty; he was in Soviet Russia in 1921– 1923 as a famine relief worker, a collector of books, periodicals, and manuscripts, and a political observer of Lenin's government; and he was in the Soviet Union for extended visits in 1925 and 1927, recording the changes in Soviet society after Lenin. Golder kept a detailed diary and was a prolific correspondent and thus left behind extensive documentation of his Russian sojourns. These record his personal efforts to reestablish Russian-American cultural ties suspended during Russia's time of troubles, to serve as a link and a lifeline. The article describes Golder's connections to artists and intellectuals in the Russian capitals and focuses on two cultural institutions: the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Rumiantsev Museum Library (today the Russian State Library) in Moscow.