Edward Strauss— One hundred years ago, young Americans were fighting alongside the Allies in the trenches and No Man’s Land of northern France. America would not enter World War I until April 1917, and American forces would not fully engage in combat until more than a year later, in 1918.
Matthew S. Hopper— Last month, path-breaking investigative journalism—most prominently Ian Urbina’s “Outlaw Ocean” series in The New York Times—exposed tragic connections between global consumer demand and contemporary slavery. These investigations revealed how men and boys across Southeast Asia have been coerced, captured, or sold into slavery or harsh, slave-like conditions aboard
Margo Anderson— In these dog days of summer 2015, the 2016 presidential election campaign is already in full swing. Twenty-two announced candidates (seventeen Republicans and five Democrats) are already filling the airwaves with their pitches, though the first actual delegate selection event, the Iowa Caucuses, is not for another five
Mark Polizzotti— The Paris of Patrick Modiano’s fictions is a city that no longer exists, and perhaps never did. There is a character and a topology typical of his version of the city, a peculiar atmosphere (even when the sun is blazing, the streets seem shrouded in gray), an architecture,
Janet Polasky— The interconnections of today’s global society are inescapable. So why should we imagine that the founding fathers dreamed of freedom in isolation? The Atlantic World had never been as tightly interconnected as at the end of the eighteenth century. Two centuries before the Arab Spring, without electronic social
Matthew P. Dziennik— Close your eyes and try to conjure an image of an eighteenth-century Highlander. What comes to mind? Barren glens populated by windswept warriors, clad from head to toe in tartan plaids, highly skilled and heavily armed—and equally heavily bearded. Or maybe a diet of Hollywood movies and
Iryna Vushko— In the twenty-first century, the streets of L’viv in Western Ukraine beam with life. The central squares and coffee shops, packed with people into the wee hours of the night, look similar to squares in Poland’s Krakow, which is some six hours away by train, or Hungary’s Budapest
It is commonly believed that the first corporations were English and Dutch trading corporations from the 1600s. But Germain Sicard, in an overlooked 1952 thesis, argued that the first corporations arose much earlier, in mills from the 1300s in Toulouse, France. His landmark research brings these mills to life and
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
Olivia Weisser— As a historian of medicine, I have spent a significant amount of time combing through first-hand accounts of illness. My work focuses on the 1600s and 1700s, so much of these first-hand accounts are recorded in personal writing like diaries and letters. Over the years, I noticed a