Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Patriotism
Tears ran down the cheeks of Abraham Lincoln when he heard the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” sung in Congress in 1864 by a chaplain who had survived a Confederate prison. It would become the most famous literary production of the Civil War.
The Trump Administration has proposed massive cuts to history programs whose mission is to teach Americans what made their country great
During the Obama Administration, it seemed that one of the few things that Congressional Republicans and the White House could agree upon was cutting history programs.
A few years ago Bill Mauldin drew a cartoon to commemorate an unsung hero: a gardener at Hyde Park who had firmly resisted the temptation to write his memoirs of President Roosevelt.
Compromise upon compromise whittled FDR’s dreams down considerably, but enabled him to pass the Social Security Act, perhaps the most sweeping social reform of the 20th century.
Not long after Franklin D.
How a debt-ridden banana republic became the greatest economic engine the world has ever known
A cameraman at Yalta tells what it was like to spend a few days in claustrophobic luxury with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. and to be offered a job by Joseph Stalin.
Few periods in the history of this country can match the impact of the years between 1917 and 1941. In less than a generation, America experienced the first large-scale dispatch of U.S.
For a few weeks, Hitler came close to winning World War II. Then came a train of events that doomed him. An eloquent historian reminds us that,however unsatisfactory our world may be today, it almost was unimaginably worse.
In the summer of 1940, Adolf Hitler could have won the Second World War. He came close to that. Had he won, we would be living in a world so different as to be hardly imaginable. So, let us contemplate that dangerous summer.
The furious speaker was Field Marshal Kesselring. The time was 1944. And the “shadow” was cast by Italian partisans and a handful of brave Americans from General Bill Donovan’s O.S.S.
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