Theodor Herzl Proposes a Solution to the ‘Jewish Question’
First published in 1896, Theodor Herzl’s pamphlet called “The Jewish State,” proposed an answer to the so-called Jewish Question for the Jews of Europe, who had been ghettoized after centuries of restrictions, hostility, and pogroms. Herzl argued that anti-Semitism could ...
His Findings in the Galapagos Islands Lead Him to the Theory of Evolution
The twenty-two-year-old Charles Darwin’s voyage aboard HMS Beagle to the coastal areas of South America brought him to the Galapagos Islands and an encounter with its myriad species. Here is his account of that visit, which led him toward his ...
The Lure of Paris's Hotel Scribe in World War II
In the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944, the Hotel Scribe in Paris became press headquarters after the liberation of Paris and a clearing house for all the war news as the Allied armies drove into Germany. In its comfortable ...
Lincoln Frees the Slaves
In September 1862, some fourteen months into the Civil War and having pondered deeply the freeing of the slaves, Lincoln issued his first Emancipation Proclamation. Lord Charnwood recounts the development and importance of this signal event in American history.
A World War I Dispatch from France
In August 1913, as the Great War began in Europe, Edith Wharton found herself in Paris. Upon the order for General Mobilization, she saw no panic, no tumult, only a sense of political and social unity and a quiet readiness. ...
The 1849 Gold Rush in California brought to a boiling point the new state’s unruly politics and produced mob rule in the muddy streets of San Francisco. Cecelia Holland’s compelling account of these events reveals a disturbing underside of democratic government in a nation headed for civil war.
In the 1912 presidential election, Woodrow Wilson spoke to Americans at a pivotal moment in the development of the American economy. A world of individual competition and small-scale capitalism was being overtaken by a new reality of labor unions and large-scale corporations. Wilson attacked irresponsible big business and warned that regulating it would not alone solve America's problems. He saw corporate power as a threat to freedom, to be countered only by government intervention in the economy.
American blacks entered World War II in a peculiar position. Could they fight for the freedom of others while their own country denied theirs? And could they fight honorably in a still segregated armed forces? This illuminating perspective on World War II reportage shows how questions of race followed troops to the battlefields and how black correspondents—allowed on the frontlines for the first time—reported it.
Largely under the radar during Kennedy’s White House years was the president’s womanizing. O’Brien details Kennedy’s near-pathological approach to women and sex, then beyond the farthest reaches of the media’s imagination. Here is an astonishing piece of presidential history.
At this crucial moment for his presidential ambitions, Lincoln addressed the consuming issue of federal power to prohibit slavery in the western territories. He also had to face Southern distrust of his Republican party, formed just six years earlier by anti-slavery activists. Finally, he considered the moral question of slavery, which he found intrinsic to any discussion of Southern desires and Northern proposals. His remarks were designed to make clear where he stood—and where he thought the Union should stand.
In their time, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker attracted much less attention than star criminals like John Dillinger. Steven Biel plots the strange path by which this pair of ne’er-do-wells became the stuff of myth and legend.
