Safeguarding History: Trailblazing Adventures Inside the Worlds of Collecting and Forging History, with foreword by Doris Kearns Goodwin, is the eloquent, captivating, moving, and complex story of the world's most prominent dealer in historical documents, letters, manuscripts, and artifacts.
This is a quintessential American success story. Kenneth Rendell's unconventional methods uncovered Adolf Hitler's forged diaries and evaluated Nixon's Watergate tapes. It is more than an Indiana Jones adventure; it is the story of the real person behind it all. Kenneth Rendell has traveled the world, tracking down, buying, and selling the most significant, iconic historical letters and documents from the Renaissance to the present day.
Safeguarding History chronicles his adventures collecting and dealing in rare coins at age 11, searching for out-of-date coins in the Caribbean as a teenager, and then discovering the world of historical letters and documents―once an insular, reclusive field, which he revolutionized over his 70-year career. Rendell's passionate pursuit of original sources, and his belief in the power of holding history in your hands, brought him to evaluate collections as diverse as Richard Nixon's White House papers and Watergate tapes, the archives of Martin Luther King and of Paramount Studios, and the personal World War II artifacts of General George S. Patton.
Rendell's reputation as a collector and dealer is matched only by his unrivaled expertise in the area of handwriting forgery detection. He unmasked the Hitler Diaries forgeries, debunked the fake Jack the Ripper diary and Elvis Presley music manuscripts, and exposed the Mormon "White Salamander" forgeries, critical to solving the infamous Mormon murders. His excitement for collecting led to Rendell building libraries for notable collectors including Bill and Melinda Gates. His own collection of World War II artifacts, the most comprehensive in the world, led to his founding The International Museum of World War II.
Safeguarding History is a human story. Kenneth Rendell writes with candor about his successes and failures, and what it took to overcome personal tragedy. He shares his passion for nature, extreme helicopter skiing, and windsurfing the big waves in Hawaii―counterbalances to his intense professional life.
Kenneth W. Rendell, founder and director of the Museum of World War II, has been a dealer since 1959 in historical letters and documents dating from the Renaissance to the present time. His business, with offices in Boston and a gallery in New York City, encompasses all areas, including the law, politics, military, art, literature, music, science, and others. He has authored the standard reference books in the field, including History Comes to Life (University of Oklahoma Press). For Rendell, the field of forgeries and journalistic hoaxes is another major interest. He debunked the infamous “Hitler diaries” on behalf of Newsweek Magazine in 1983, and then headed the investigation for Stern Magazine into how the hoax had been perpetrated. For Time Warner he proved the diary of Jack the Ripper was a hoax, and he has been involved in every major forgery case in recent decades. He is the author of Forging History (University of Oklahoma Press), the standard reference work on the subject. As an expert witness, Rendell has appeared in criminal trials where his expertise and testimony would make a difference, including the trial of the Mormon White Salamander murders. He received the Justice Department’s Distinguished Service Award for his work leading to convictions for thefts from the National Archives and the Library of Congress. He also won the only two Tax Court cases deciding the value of archives without compromise: one for the Internal Revenue Service (the Otto Kerner Papers), the other for the taxpayer (the Northern Pacific Railroad). Another major interest of Rendell’s is Western American history. His extensive collection in this field was the basis of his book The Western Pursuit of the American Dream, which the New York Times said “succeeds in giving a sense of the struggle to tame the gorgeous wilderness that stretched beyond the tidy civilizations of the east. . . . It’s worth spending time with.”
