New Books in History

Reading J. E. Lendon's writerly Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins (Basic Books, 2010) took me back to the eventful days of my youth at Price Elementary School, or rather to the large yard on which we had recess. We called it a "playground." But we did not play on it. We did battle...

Most Americans could tell you who George Washington's wife was. (Martha, right?) Most Americans probably couldn't tell you who Thomas Jefferson's wife was. (It was also Martha, but a different one of course). They might be able to tell you, however, who Thomas Jefferson's alleged concubine was, as...

Today everybody wants to be a capitalist, even Chinese communists. It would be easy to think, then, that capitalism is "natural," that there is a little profit-seeker in each one of us just waiting to pop out. There is some truth to this notion: humans are the most cooperative species on earth, and...

The term "totalitarian" is useful as it well describes the aspirations of polities such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (at least under Stalin). Yet it can also be misleading, for it suggests that totalitarian ambitions were in fact achieved. But they were not, as we can see in Catherine Epste...

[caption id="attachment_4479" align="alignleft" width="163" caption="Joyce Salisbury"][/caption]

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I have three cats. They have names (Fatty, Mini, and Koshka). They live in my house. I feed them, take...

[caption id="attachment_3355" align="alignleft" width="139" caption="Nell Irvin Painter"][/caption]

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We in the West tend to classify people by the color of their skin, or what we casually call "race."...

[caption id="attachment_3382" align="alignleft" width="140" caption="Ian Sample"][/caption]

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You've probably read about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It's the largest (17 miles around!), most expen...

[caption id="attachment_4465" align="alignleft" width="126" caption="Ann Fabian"][/caption]

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What should we study? The eighteenth-century luminary and poet Alexander Pope had this to say on the subjec...

[caption id="attachment_4465" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="David Shearer"][/caption]

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The question as to why the leaders of the Soviet Union murdered hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens...

[caption id="attachment_3311" align="alignleft" width="123" caption="Thomas Weber"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_3312" align="alignright" width="120" caption="See at Amazon.com"][/caption]



Here's something interesting. If you search Google Books for "Hitler," you'll get 3,090,000 results. Wha...