Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Franklin Roosevelt
FOR SEVEN DECADES OUR EBULLIENT COUSIN INSTRUCTED US ON EVERYTHING: THE BOERS, PROHIBITION, HITLER, CHARLIE CHAPLIN’S FEET, AND THE COMMON CAUSE OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES
As our image of Winston Churchill slides back into history—his hundredth birthday comes next November 30—the fine lines of his portrait begin to fade, and he is remembered by a new generation mainly as the wartime leader who intoned of blood, toil, tears, and sweat and prodded
At 4:30 A.M. on a cold, drizzly day in the spring of 1944, there came a knock on the guarded door of the top-secret White House Map Room.
Vodka at breakfast was only one of the minor problems when Russians entertained Americans
It was 5 P.M. on Sunday, the fourth of February, 1945. After seven months of dispatches and a month of frantic preparation by the Soviets, the Big Three conference at Yalta on the Black Sea was about to commence.
“She is such a funny child, so old-fashioned, that we always call her ‘Granny’ “her mother said. Cousin Franklin felt otherwise
By no strange quirk of fate, no unlikely chance or mysterious destiny, were Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt brought together in casual acquaintanceship.
One of FDR's closest aides remembers "the Boss" and a lifetime in politics.
To begin with, the Presidential libraries do not look like what they are. Each one is, in fact, a miniature Office of Public Records.
In this final installment from our series on General Joseph W. Stilwell, Barbara W. Tuchman recounts the story of the old soldier’s finest hour
“I claim we got a hall of a beating”
Roosevelt, like Lincoln and Wilson, died fighting for his ideals.
The cantankerous Californian’s utterly candid opinions, over thirty years, of the Presidents he knew, the senators with whom he served, and the (to him) alarming changes in the America he loved
During the presidential election of 1912, Theodore Roosevelt and Hiram Johnson, the new Progressive party’s candidates for President and Vice President, stood—as Roosevelt delighted in putting it—at Armageddon and battled for the Lord.
To what extent did greatness inhere in the man, and to what degree was it a product of the situation?
Seldom has an eminent man been more conscious of his place in history than was Franklin D. Roosevelt. He regarded history as an imposing drama and himself as a conspicuous actor.
In a little-known novel President Wilson’s private adviser depicted a benevolent American dictator
Did the President, as he claimed, lose a battle but win a war in his attempt to pack the Supreme Court? Historical perspective suggests another answer
The great struggle between the President and the Supreme Court in 1937 stirred the national emotions to unusual depths because it brought Franklin D. Roosevelt’s crusade against depression into collision with one of our most hallowed traditions. And after a lapse of twenty years it remains high on the list of the most dramatic contests in our constitutional history.
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