The Levantine political idea, which grew naturally among the communities of the eastern Mediterranean, was an original way of dealing with diverse tribal, village, and sectarian identities, and it...

Inés Suárez (1507–1580), a Spanish woman born in Plasencia, journeyed to the New World in 1537 and took part in the conquest of Chile and the founding of Santiago. She wielded great political...

Not until Theodore Roosevelt resigned his prestigious position as assistant secretary of the navy in 1898 to fight with the Rough Riders in the Cuban dirt would there be a rich man as weirdly rabid to...

This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry. I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett's Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3,...

Women struggled to enter the all-male professional schools. Dr. Harriot Hunt, a woman physician who began to practice in 1835, was twice refused admission to Harvard Medical School. But she carried on...

The rural Vietnamese was not regarded simply as a pawn in a power struggle but as the active element in the thrust. He was the thrust.

The hands of Hitler were filthy, but those of the United States were not clean. Our government had accepted, was still accepting, the subordination of black people in what we claimed was a democratic...

By 1850, fifteen Boston families called the "Associates" controlled 20 percent of the cotton spindleage in the United States, 39 percent of insurance capital in Massachusetts, 40 percent of banking...

Revolutionary America may have been a middle-class society, happier and more prosperous than any other in its time, but it contained a large and growing number of fairly poor people, and many of them...

True, fascism was not to be tolerated by decent people. But neither was racism or colonialism or slave labor camps—one or another of which was a characteristic of all of the Allied powers.

After all, in the end all the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads. The moments of change, or the clinamen as the Greeks called it.

At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde,...

In the late 1300s, decades after the expulsion of the Jews from England, Geoffrey Chaucer, one of England's earliest poets, included Hugh's story in his Canterbury Tales. The cathedral in Lincoln...

It has been estimated that at least a thousand Indians were sold into slavery during King Philip's War, with over half the slaves coming from Plymouth Colony alone. By the end of the war, Mount Hope,...

Babbage had most of this system sketched out by 1837, but the first true computer to use this programmable architecture didn't appear for more than a hundred years.

All the cartoonists at heart liked him, and there was seldom or never anything bitter or really unfriendly in their portrayals of him; they were uniformly good-natured. Caricatures even transformed...

"The crimes of the Germans are really the most abominable ever to be recorded in the history of the so-called civilized nations," he wrote the physicist Otto Hahn. "The conduct of the German...

We are the people of Misr, the old woman rasped. Since our Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The young go on that our people shall not die.

Letter writing is a truly anachronistic genre, a sort of tardy inheritance of the eighteenth century; those who lived at that time believed in the pure truth of the written word. And we? Times have...

The Anasazi did manage to construct in stone the largest and tallest buildings erected in North America until the Chicago steel girder skyscrapers of the 1880s.

Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever...

Brave young American men climbed the rugged slopes of Korean mountains and fought in homesickness and desperate weariness for the sake of a people strange to them and for reasons they scarcely...

Certainly, nobody imagined that Mr. Lincoln would order an armed invasion over the affair. When he did exactly that, the entire South exploded with defiance and patriotism, cheering the new...

the past was not dead but alive, and important by virtue of the very invisibility of its influence.

This process, one of trading the state to outside owners in exchange for their now seemingly entirely temporary agreement to enrich us, in other words the pauperization of California, had in fact...

On coming out of the chapel, a well can be seen on the left. There are two in this yard. You ask, Why is there no bucket and no pulley to this one? Because no water is drawn from it now. Why is no...

History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

I dont believe knowing can save us. What isconstant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God-who knows all that can be known-seems powerless to change.

If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden...