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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
When the CIA first looked into effective methods of torture in the 1950s, it found two major sources of aid. The first was information gleaned by the Nazis during World War II from concentration-camp experiments. The second was the cooperation of professional psychologists, many with leading university positions, who agreed to conduct questionably ethical experiments to show how prisoners might be broken through psychological torture. Alfred McCoy here explores the sordid and often outrageous practices of the CIA and its helpmates.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
