A certain group of people in the United States tried an experiment. They tried the experiment of making a fortune without working, of making a fortune through the stock exchange. They extended the...

It is an axiom of warfare that a good officer never reinforces failure. To do so simply throws away more lives and a good general will avoid doing that. A commander's task, even in moments of defeat,...

It seems there was a custom in Ireland at this time of showing obeisance to your king by sucking his nipples. No nipples, you could not be a king.

General admission for groundlings - those who stood in the open around the stage - was a penny. Those who wished to sit paid a penny more, and those who desired a cushion paid another penny on top of...

For anyone of a rational disposition, fashion is often nearly impossible to fathom. Throughout many periods of history - perhaps most - it can seem as if the whole impulse of fashion has been to look...

Other people, too, worried about this new gap between the speeds of travel and messaging. An important London banker told Babbage he disapproved: "It will enable our clerks to plunder us, and then be...

Slavery, January understood now as he never had before, made you fear change almost more than anything else.

If you want to see what this nation is all about, I always say, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you'll find the true face of America.' He slapped the wall of the...

This nation shouldn't exist, if there is any justice in the world, for its foundations are murder, theft, and cruelty. Yet here we are.

And America, too, is a delusion, the grandest one of all. The white race believes - - believes with all its heart - - that it is their right to take the land. To kill Indians. Make war. Enslave their...

She didn't feel she had the fortitude for all those Tudors, they were so relentlessly busy – all that bedding and beheading.

What if a king made bad laws; laws so unnatural that a country broke them by declaring its freedom? He threw his arms in the air. Now you are spouting nonsense. Two slaves running away from their...

Do you think I can't write this and get someone - a drunk married to a fool - to swear to it? Do you think I can't set myself up as a historian? As a storyteller? Do you think I can't write a history...

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts a muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd...

Thanks to Washington and Hamilton, the American economy flourished; thanks to Adams, the Quasi - War with France had receded to a memory. Inheriting domestic prosperity and international peace,...

At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion.

elite pedigree on both sides of his family, Jefferson was anything but common. His father, Peter, was a tobacco planter, a judge of the court of chancery, and a member of the Virginia House of...

Machiavelli's The Prince and Plutarch's Lives

While other Americans dreamed of a brand-new society that would expunge all traces of effete European civilization, Hamilton humbly studied those societies for clues to the formation of a new...

Unlike Jefferson, Hamilton never saw the creation of America as a magical leap across a chasm to an entirely new landscape, and he always thought the New World had much to learn from the Old. Probably

When Grant made Edward S. Salomon governor of the Washington Territory, it was the first time an American Jew had occupied a gubernatorial post. When Salomon proved corrupt, Grant handled his case...

Sensing an abandonment of Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass wondered what good abolition had been for the black man if having been freed from the slaveholder's lash, he is to be subject to the...

In the end he required political pull to do so. After years of wandering, Grant had popped up in the right congressional district in the right state. Lincoln had the power to appoint brigadier...

We rationalize, we dissimulate, we pretend: we pretend that modern medicine is a rational science, all facts, no nonsense, and just what it seems. But we have only to tap its glossy veneer for it to...

There are very few starts. Oh, some things seem to be beginnings. The curtain goes up, the first pawn moves, the first shot is fired — but that's not the start. The play, the game, the war is just a...

Emotion clouds the rational, and many perspectives guide the full reality. To view current events as a historian is to account for all perspectives, even those of your enemy. It is to know the past...

When George Washington ran for election to Virginia's local assembly, the House of Burgesses, in 1758, his campaign team handed out twenty-eight gallons of rum, fifty gallons of rum punch, thirty-four...

More often than not, it was the hand of the needy and uncertain that extended the olive branch. History had shown the truth of that over and over again.

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...