Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
United Nations
Why the UN was in trouble from the start
In an exchange of letters, a man who had an immeasurable impact on how the great struggle of our times was waged looks back on how it began.
In 1943, Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Britain’s poorest, most dismal African colony, and what he saw there fired him with a fervor that helped found the United Nations.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not look favorably on European colonialism. Like most Americans, he believed that the self-determination clause of the 1941 Atlantic Charter should apply to all peoples, not just Europeans.
The half-remembered Korean conflict was full of surprises, and nearly all of them were unpleasant
Korea is in the news again, and it’s ugly news. North Korea may or may not have the capability to make nuclear weapons, and North Korea’s aging dictator, Kim Il Sung, is unwilling to let international inspectors find out. The United Nations is talking of sanctions.
Here is the federal government’s own picture history of our times—and it tells us more than you might think
FEW ARE AWARE of a major publishing project that has been sponsored by the federal government and some of our leading citizens over the past eight decades.
The American Experience With Foreign Aid
Imagine a person of great wealth with a habit of giving away vast sums and lending more. In order to understand his character, we should examine how the money is dispensed and why. Who are the recipients? What does the donor expect of them in return?
The behind-the-scenes struggle in 1948 between the President and the State Department
In the nearly thirty years that have passed since President Harry Truman issued the directives to support the partition of Palestine and afterward to recognize the State of Israel, the motivations of the President have been the subject of extensive historical discussion.
“Almost every time a serious disarmament effort got under way, it barely managed to move forward an inch or two before a great world cataclysm intervened”
As spring moved northward over Europe in 1970, a familiar scene was enacted in Vienna, a city where diplomacy is as much a part of the civic tradition as steelmaking in Pittsburgh.
The “conversion” of Arthur Vandenberg, told by a former Secretary of State, his sometime adversary but also his friend
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