David Stafford— Shortly before noon on Wednesday 26 January 1921 an express train bound for Shrewsbury in England was speeding towards the small rural station of Abermule, close to the Severn river in Wales. It was on a single-track line. A safety system used by the Cambrian Railway Company involving
Richard Butterwick— The ancient Roman historian Sallust pronounced, “It is better to live in perilous liberty than in tranquil servitude.” But on May 3, 1791, a path beyond the Sallustian dilemma of perilous liberty or tranquil servitude was offered to old Poland, otherwise known as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Their parliament,
Helen Fry— 11 March 1943. In a cell at Latimer House in Buckinghamshire, two German soldiers, a lower rank infantry officer captured in Tunisia the previous year, and a paratrooper captured in Algeria a few months before, are discussing the interrogations they have undergone. The previous day, British agents had
Michael Hattem– For a few decades, American history has played a prominent role in the most current iteration of culture wars in the United States. We saw this most recently in some of the ways that President Trump motivated his base in the 2020 presidential election. These included holding “the
Sebastian Strangio— In the West, Cambodia is nearly synonymous with the terror and mass murder that engulfed the country in the mid-1970s, when the Khmer Rouge seized power and embarked on a radical experiment in communism. Led by “Brother Number One” Pol Pot, who dreamt of recreating the glories of
John Fabian Witt— While the courts took a middle path, public discourse around contagion remained subject to confusion and hysteria. Sometimes epidemics produced panicked overreach by the state, as in the case of the plague in San Francisco, but at other times stubborn resistance to authority rested on claims of
Owen Bennett-Jones— At around 1 a.m. on 27 December 2007 Benazir Bhutto was told someone would try to kill her that day. The warning came from no lesser a source than the director general of Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Despite the late hour, Lieutenant General Nadeem
George Prochnik— What’s life without glory, blazing love affairs, and apple tarts? That’s to say, what is life without song and true liberation for all? Heinrich Heine at thirteen, diminutive and dashing with wavy chestnut hair and a passion for play, charged into the crowd beneath the linden trees of
William G. Thomas III— The poplars swayed high above Edward Queen and Charles Mahoney on that May morning. The summer heat crawled up from the Patuxent River, summoned from its slack banks and slow bends, drawing its oppressive punch from the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean beyond. To the
Christina of Hane— Although it is somewhat embarrassing to write about how she overcame her enemy and how she kept the treasure of her chastity unstained, it is still a sign of her great love. That is why I cannot possibly ignore it and I have to write something about