Recollections of My Childhood
Extensive reading and a dream of doing good works spurred Jane Addams to study medicine after college, but she was thwarted by health problems. Travels in Europe and a compassion for the poor then led her to found Hull-House in ...
Vietnam 1965: A Turning Point
In South Vietnam in February 1965, insurgents mounted a major attack on the U.S. base at Pleiku in the Central Highlands. At the time it seemed a turning point, leading to the U.S. decision to bomb North Vietnam and to ...
Steve Jobs Comes of Age
In making Apple a world-changing success, was Steve Jobs a genius—or simply an expert marketer of a machine whose time had come? And what of his personality? To say he was curmudgeonly would be doing him a great favor. Walter ...
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. ...
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.
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.
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.
An insider’s assessment of the precipitous decline of large city papers in the United States, and the newspapers’ response to their problems, by an experienced newspaper executive.
“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.
