Portrait of the Monster as a Young Man

Hitler’s formative years, 1889 to 1918, which reveal the sources ...


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Now & Then Authors

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Alexis de Tocqueville

Alexis de Tocqueville was just short of twenty-six years old when he arrived in America in May 1831 with Gustave de Beaumont, his traveling companion. These two young, liberal-minded French noblemen had come on an official mission—to study the American prison system for the new French government of Louis Philippe, successor to the Bourbon dynasty which had fallen in the 1830 revolution. De Tocqueville, though, had larger aims in mind. He had in recent years turned from the study of ...

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Read The Influence of Democracy on the Feelings of Americans by Alexis de Tocqueville

Frederick Douglass

“I have no accurate knowledge of my age,” Frederick Douglass wrote. Probably he was born into slavery sometime around 1818 in Maryland. Not long after he escaped from slavery, Douglass was asked to speak of his experiences at an abolitionist meeting in Nantucket, Massachusetts. He made such a powerful impression that he was soon hired as a full-time lecturer by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. He traveled the country, speaking alongside men like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and working ...

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Read Selections From: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

W. E. B. Du Bois

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868, the only child of Mary Burghardt, a woman of Dutch-African stock, and Alfred Du Bois, a French Huguenot. As a member of one of few black families in Great Barrington, he did not experience segregation and the realities of race until he was a student at Fisk University in Nashville. Later at Harvard he earned a B.A. in philosophy and an M.A. in history, then ...

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Read The Color Line by W. E. B. Du Bois

Finley Peter Dunne

Finley Peter Dunne was born in Chicago in 1867 and at age eighteen went to work as a journalist. He wrote for the Chicago Times, the Evening Post, the Times-Herald, and the Journal, the latter of which he edited from 1897 to 1900. “Mr. Dooley” first appeared in the Chicago Times-Herald.  In the early years of the twentieth century, Dunne joinred with Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and others in editing the American Magazine while it was a premier muckraking journal. ...

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Read Mr. Dooley Now and Forever by Finley Peter Dunne

Frederick Engels

Frederick Engels (1820-1895), the son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer, moved in 1842 to England to take a position in a factory near Manchester partially owned by his father. Engels met Karl Marx in 1844 and began a lifelong association with him. The two are considered to be the founders of modern communism.

Read The Plight of the Working Class by Frederick Engels

Henry Ford

Henry Ford was born on a farm near Dearborn, Michigan, on July 30, 1863. Never a promising candidate to be a farmer, as a boy he was fascinated with steam engines and grew to be a mechanical tinkerer. At sixteen he left the farm to take a job as an apprentice in a Detroit machine shop; at night he repaired clocks and watches in a jewelry shop. Later he rose to the position of chief engineer at the Edison power ...

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Read Putting America on Wheels by Henry Ford

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, diplomat, and a Founding Father of the United States. His scientific work with electricity made him a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, and a carriage odometer. He formed both the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania. He began writing ...

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Read The Quintessential American by Benjamin Franklin

Lloyd C. Gardner

Lloyd Gardner is the Charles and Mary Beard Emeritus Professor of History at Rutgers University and author of a dozen important books in American history, including The Long Road to Baghdad, Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam, Spheres of Influence, Approaching Vietnam, and Architects of Illusion. His book The Case That Never Dies is an extended examination of the Lindbergh case. Mr. Gardner grew up in Ohio, studied at Ohio Wesleyan University, and received a Ph.D. ...

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Read The Crime of the Century by Lloyd C. Gardner