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. ...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
“European Discovery Tour” was the title on the travel brochure. But as Ann Birstein knew, the journey that she signed up for included a discovery of the most unhappy places on the continent. Her little tour group, most all of them Jewish, was shepherded not only to some of Eastern Europe’s grandest locales but also to its most terrible, including the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto, Auschwitz, and other grim reminders of the Holocaust and the lost Jews of Europe. Along the way in what became a search for her own soul, Ms. Birstein offers a moving perspective on a tragic people trapped by history.
From Alan Bullock’s incomparable biography: Hitler’s formative years, from his birth in 1889 to the end of the First World War in 1918. It sets the stage for Hitler’s later strategies and programs by explaining the sources of his ideas and the influences of his early life experiences.
On his Dakota ranch, Theodore Roosevelt learned to ride Western style, rope, and hunt. Already at twenty-seven a serious historian and author, he began writing about the frontier life. His account of confrontations with grizzly bears shows us how unusual was this American president.
The most celebrated accomplishment in the hunt for Nazi war criminals was the capture, trial, and execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1960—1962. As the Nazi officer overseeing the logistics of the Final Solution, Eichmann had been responsible for sending millions of Jews to their extermination in the death camps of Europe. After World War II he had been living incognito in Argentina when the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, learned of his possible whereabouts. Here is the behind-the-scenes story of Eichmann’s capture.
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, has become one of the more popular psychological conditions of our time. First used to describe the symptoms related to combat experiences in war, today a diagnosis of PTSD has been expanded to include some of the most common everyday situations. How it got that way is the subject of Stewart Justman’s fascinating exploration of the rise of PTSD—a story of a questionable diagnosis and of medicine gone astray.
Turner here lays out his “frontier thesis,” which remains one of the key interpretations of American history. He argued that the circumstances of life on the western frontier were a determining influence on American character and institutions.
