Oleg V. Khlevniuk; Translated by Nora Seligman Favorov— Over his seventy-four-year life, the Soviet dictator fought through a stormy historical landscape to become an important factor in events not only in Russia, but also the world. Among scholars, there is more agreement than controversy on the historical and ideational antecedents
Tim Grady— Davis Trietsch and Julius Friedrich Lehmann made for an unlikely pair. Trietsch, a well-known German-Jewish statistician, journalist and sometime editor, spent many years living in New York, before returning to Berlin at the turn of the century. He was also an active Zionist, a regular visitor to Palestine
Stephen Long— Memory is a capacity both individual and cultural. Think back to when the recent economic downturn began in 2007 and how frequently it was compared to the Great Depression. Some called it the “great recession” to reinforce the comparison. Because so many individuals could tell firsthand tales about
A look at the history of fishing from ancient civilizations to modern times and the problems caused by overfishing
Richard D. Brown & Richard L. Bushman— A century ago, a grandson and great-grandson of presidents, Henry Adams, observed, “the progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.” Today, considering the succession from Washington to Trump, it appears Darwin has not merely been
Morten Høi Jensen— One day in mid-August 1936, the Danish modernist writer Tom Kristensen, author of the great novel Havoc (1928), stood in line in Politiken’s bookshop in central Copenhagen next to a tall, gaunt man with thick, black eyeglasses inquiring about a book in fluent, if accented, Danish. The
Big ticket items like kidneys, livers, and hearts aren’t the only things that can be extracted from you after death. A look inside the cadaver trade and its shadowy history.
David Wolpe— We wish our heroes to be attractively flawed: brave but heedless, good but confused, wise yet inexplicably sad. A minor crack in character makes the vessel seem that much more precious. Still, while acknowledging the complexity behind the clarity of Lincoln, or the darkness that lurked beneath Churchill’s
Ben H. Shepard— The answer to the question of why the German army fought on as long as it did was an answer that evolved and changed during the war’s final two years. By February 1943, and by the summer of 1943 at the very latest, the great majority of officers and
Early civilizations came about with the domestication of fire, plants, animals, and humans. James C. Scott gives us the history of these early states and the problems they faced.