Pierre Birnbaum— On June 21st, 1936, following the June 7th signing of the Matignon Agreements, the Popular Front government voted in the forty-hour workweek. They were led by Léon Blum, who had triumphed in the May 1936 elections. The law was a real revolution, a reconsideration of labor conditions for
Bill Vaughn— In “Hawthorn Blossom,” the Brothers Grimm rewriting of the folk story Sleeping Beauty, a queen is informed by a frog that the royal couple finally will have a child. Among the guests at the celebration of the princess’s birth are twelve “wise women” (the sort of traditional village
Robin Prior— I want to highlight the dangers to Western civilization if Britain had succumbed to Nazi Germany in 1940. But to do this, first I’ll make the point, illustrated over the course of history, that the side that wins the war does not necessarily represent all that is best
Jonathan Rose— More than most politicians, Winston Churchill was an insatiable reader. He loved to schmooze with authors, and what he read profoundly shaped his political worldview. He never actually published a “Top Ten” list of his favorite books—but if he had, it might have been something like this: The
Rory Muir— The Duke of Wellington felt far from triumphant after defeating Napoleon at Waterloo, famously remarking that “I don’t know what it is to lose a battle, but certainly nothing can be more painful than to gain one with the loss of so many of one’s friends.” A few
Kevin Madigan— Tradition holds that on February 23, 1455, the Gutenberg Bible, the first complete book published in the West, was published in Mainz, Germany. The Bible Gutenberg produced was the Vulgate Latin version, translated beginning in the fourth century by the church father Jerome (c. 347-420), and by Gutenberg’s
Stephen Alford— On Wednesday 8 February 1587, Bull the public executioner cleaved the head from the body of Mary Queen of Scots in the hall of Fotheringhay Castle. It was the most dramatic, as well as the most dangerous, moment of the reign of Elizabeth I. Its international repercussions were
Sharon Bertsch McGrayne— The Imitation Game is a good yarn about Alan Turing and cracking the German naval Enigma code during World War II. But that’s what it is: a good yarn. It claims to be based on Andrew Hodges’s 1983 classic biography of Turing, but it would be more
In the harsh winter of 1944-45, the month-long battle for Bastogne, a town with a peacetime population of 4,000 and seven roads, claimed 23,000 American and 25,000 German lives. To commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the siege, which was part of the larger Battle of the Bulge, historian Peter Schrijvers, author of
Lee Jackson, author of Dirty Old London: The Victorian Fight Against Filth, wrote a series of posts for the Yale University Press London Blog to explain how the inventors of ‘sanitary science’ nevertheless lived in what remained a notoriously filthy city. The book has just come out in the United States,