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.
Vietnam 1965: A Turning Point
In South Vietnam in February 1965, insurgents mounted a major attack on the U.S. base at Pleiku in the Central Highlands. At the time it seemed a turning point, leading to the U.S. decision to bomb North Vietnam and to ...
Recollections of My Childhood
Extensive reading and a dream of doing good works spurred Jane Addams to study medicine after college, but she was thwarted by health problems. Travels in Europe and a compassion for the poor then led her to found Hull-House in ...
The Lure of Paris's Hotel Scribe in World War II
In the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944, the Hotel Scribe in Paris became press headquarters after the liberation of Paris and a clearing house for all the war news as the Allied armies drove into Germany. In its comfortable ...
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 ...
No episode in the Truman years caused a greater uproar than his firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. MacArthur wanted to expand the war; Truman sought a limited conflict. The always candid former president explains what happened.
Among the great manuals of urban politics in America, none is more charming or instructive than the plain talks of George Washington Plunkitt of New York City’s powerful Tammany Hall at the turn of the twentieth century. “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” said Plunkitt while explaining the differences between honest graft and dishonest graft. His office was Graziano’s bootblack stand in New York’s old county courthouse.
From Alan Bullock’s incomparable biography: Hitler’s formative years, from his birth in 1889 to the end of the First World War in 1918. It sets the stage for Hitler’s later strategies and programs by explaining the sources of his ideas and the influences of his early life experiences.
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.
On his Dakota ranch, Theodore Roosevelt learned to ride Western style, rope, and hunt. Already at twenty-seven a serious historian and author, he began writing about the frontier life. His account of confrontations with grizzly bears shows us how unusual was this American president.
An insider’s assessment of the precipitous decline of large city papers in the United States, and the newspapers’ response to their problems, by an experienced newspaper executive.
