Kenneth William Rendell (born May 12, 1943) is the founder of The International Museum of World War II in Boston, and an American dealer and expert in historical documents.
As a teen he expanded into several numismatic specialties: he became one of just two specialists in early American coinage in the colonies, political campaign memorabilia, and alternative currencies created during difficult financial times.
[3] He served as an expert witness for the Internal Revenue Service in the 1973 tax court trial of former Illinois governor Otto Kerner, Jr..[4] By the turn of the century, Rendell's reputation as a collector had made him a leading voice in a business that, due to technological innovation, was rapidly changing.
[5] In 1995 the University of Oklahoma Press published Rendell's book History Comes to Life: Collecting Historical Letters and Documents, considered the standard collector's guide covering all aspects of the field.
[6] By 1987, Rendell had founded a course on forgery detection at Columbia University that included the use of ultraviolet light and microscopes in the analysis of ink, paper, and minute details of handwriting.
In 2004-5 the Museum of Our National Heritage in Lexington, Massachusetts, mounted an exhibition called "The Western Pursuit of the American Dream: Selections From the Collection of Kenneth W. Rendell," comprising letters, diaries, artifacts, and art that he had acquired over decades.
"[17] In 2004 the University of Oklahoma Press published The Western Pursuit of the American Dream: Selections From the Collection of Kenneth W. Rendell, a book of some 500 illustrations that built upon the original exhibition.
Centered on additional artifacts from the author's collections, the book traced the migration of settlers spurred west by "the hope that a better life awaits your initiative, your perseverance, your cleverness, your hard work.
He eventually established The International Museum of World War II in a 10,000-square-foot building near Boston, a place, declared Architectural Digest, where "More than 6,000 Artifacts Put History into Unforgettable Perspective.
In her foreword Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote: "Through this unparalleled collection of original letters and artifacts, we follow the story of the war, not as historians after the fact, but by the side of the leaders and the people who lived and died during those dramatic years.
On April 12, 2016, The Power of Anti-Semitism: The March to the Holocaust, 1919-1939, an exhibition developed by Rendell from the museum's collections, debuted at the New-York Historical Society and ran through July 31.
"[25] The museum's special exhibitions, based wholly on its own artifacts and documents, included Most Secret: Rudolph Hess's Own Archive, The Reality of the Resistance, Enigma Code Machines and the Imitation Game, and Hitler Attacks, Churchill Rises From the Ashes of Appeasement.
[26] On October 25, 2016, National Geographic Books released The Secret History of World War II: Spies, Code Breakers, and Covert Operations, by Neil Kagan and Stephen G. Hyslop.
In 2018 National Geographic Books published Atlas of World War II: History's Greatest Conflict Revealed Through Rare Wartime Maps and New Cartography, again by Neil Kagan and Stephen Hyslop in conjunction with Kenneth Rendell, who wrote the foreword.
In Hawaii, where Rendell maintains a home, he has likewise supported the Paia Youth Cultural Center in helping young people develop in a positive way, and two organizations that offer care and hope to the homeless.
In 2018 Rendell formulized an idea to help students in the community he grew up in, Somerville, Massachusetts, next to Boston, who were excelling in school but whose economic and social constraints were limiting their potential.