Biographer John Milton Cooper tells the story that just after winning the presidential election of 1912, Woodrow Wilson returned triumphantly to his boyhood home.
This was the standard American local-boy-makes-good tour that traditionally (...)
Americans have always believed that democracy would be that one great gift they would give the world, a treasure that we would nurture and then (hands a-trembling), pass on to others. That it was purchased, Golgotha-like, by rag-clad and starving (...)
The late historian Barbara Tuchman was an accomplished writer, but her reputation rests more properly on her insights. Her seminal work, August 1914 , was so filled with them that few historians can write of the war to end all wars without (...)
The prime minister of His Majesty s Government, the rotund Lord North--reputed (falsely) to be the bastard son of George III - once sniffed to his cabinet that if it were not for the interference of France, the American colonists would surely return (...)
While it may be difficult to remember, George W. Bush was once considered a debater who could match wits with the likes of Al Gore and John Kerry. This judgment was the result, at least in part, of Bush's uncanny ability to transform claims that he (...)
Good fences make good neighbors, the American poet Robert Frost once wrote, and he oughta know. The failed farmer-turned-schoolteacher was a professional Puritan who spent his lifetime not hugging people, though he is now described as one of America (...)
In 1919, the world humbly bore the loss of one of its most imaginative diplomats, when 39-year-old Mark Sykes succumbed to the Spanish flu in his well-appointed Paris hotel room. Sykes died a happy man, having created (with his boon buddy Francois (...)