Kim A. Wagner— A traveller alighting at Amritsar railway station in April 1919, after the train came to a jerking halt along the third-of-a-mile-long narrow platform, would have been met by much the same scene as described by Rudyard Kipling: ‘the station filled with clamour and shouting, cries of water
David Denby— Ben Hecht was not religious in any way, and ignored such Jewish organizations as the Anti-Defamation League and political causes in general. He was a nonjoiner, a skeptic, a man indifferent to the world’s suffering. But in 1937 and 1938, as the threats to the European Jews grew
Luca Fezzi— In the creative chaos of the reflections on the first election campaign won by Barack Hussein Obama in 2008, a daring parallel emerged between the newly elected president and the Roman orator and politician Marcus Tullius Cicero, for their status as well-learned politicians and excellent speakers. The article
Charles D. Canham— The northeast is one of the country’s most thoroughly forested regions, with forests covering two-thirds of the nine northeastern states. But that statistic belies the extraordinary wave of logging and clearing of land for agriculture that followed European settlement 400 years ago. In the Mid-Hudson Valley where
Giambattista Vico— Wisdom is the faculty that commands all the disciplines; by these, all the sciences and arts that complete our humanity are apprehended. Plato defines wisdom as that which is the perfecter of man. Man, in the being proper to him as a man, is nothing other than mind and
Tim Mackintosh-Smith— Before sunrise on a winter’s day early in the year 630, a captive in the Arabian town of Yathrib looked on as the men of the place gathered in the courtyard outside his cell. He could make out little between the few splashes of lamplight. But when their
Christophe Guilluy— Amid a fanfare of republican self-congratulation, France has embraced globalization in all its glory. Wherever one looks, from the chronic alternation between traditional parties of the center left and center right to the denial of democracy itself, with the farcical referendum of 2005 on a European constitution, it
Ben S. Bernanke, Timothy F. Geithner, Henry M. Paulson Jr.— The crisis of 2008 was a classic financial panic, a staple of economic history at least since the Dutch tulip crisis of 1637, except this time it was rooted in a mania over dubious mortgages rather than fashionable flowers. As
James Livesey— The history of the self is vitally important, and the contrast between the French and British histories is highly instructive. The self, or at least the version of the self as self-determining individual, is the postulate of every variety of liberalism and its institutions, and it is clear
Karen R. Jones— “I figure if a girl wants to be a legend, she should just go ahead and be one.” This phrase, popularly attributed to Calamity Jane, is strewn across the twenty-first-century internet, emblazoned on T-shirts, striding out across coffee mugs, and hollering provocatively from wall posters. It