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 ...
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 ...
Steve Jobs Comes of Age
In making Apple a world-changing success, was Steve Jobs a genius—or simply an expert marketer of a machine whose time had come? And what of his personality? To say he was curmudgeonly would be doing him a great favor. Walter ...
Lincoln Frees the Slaves
In September 1862, some fourteen months into the Civil War and having pondered deeply the freeing of the slaves, Lincoln issued his first Emancipation Proclamation. Lord Charnwood recounts the development and importance of this signal event in American history.
A World War I Dispatch from France
In August 1913, as the Great War began in Europe, Edith Wharton found herself in Paris. Upon the order for General Mobilization, she saw no panic, no tumult, only a sense of political and social unity and a quiet readiness. ...
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.
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.
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.
Turner here lays out his “frontier thesis,” which remains one of the key interpretations of American history. He argued that the circumstances of life on the western frontier were a determining influence on American character and institutions.
In their time, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker attracted much less attention than star criminals like John Dillinger. Steven Biel plots the strange path by which this pair of ne’er-do-wells became the stuff of myth and legend.
