August 12, 2020
Alexandra Popoff— Vasily Grossman began Life and Fate, a powerful anti-totalitarian novel, when Stalin was still alive. Back then he had no prospect of publication. But after the dictator’s death,… READ MORE
August 11, 2020
Paul A. Rahe— It is much easier to initiate a great war than to end one. Even when an attempt to do the latter seems, to the unsuspecting glance, to… READ MORE
August 10, 2020
Walter Goffart— Yale’s Elizabethan Club was founded in 1911, a big year not just at Yale. A pandemic in Manchuria was an unpromising start. This pneumonic plague was fully checked… READ MORE
August 6, 2020
Ramsay MacMullen— At Nicaea in AD 325 some 200 bishops assembled. The total is not certain: perhaps a little below that figure, probably a little above it. Not all who… READ MORE
August 5, 2020
Edward L. Greenstein— Determining the time and place of the book’s composition is bound up with the nature of the book’s language. The Hebrew prose of the frame tale, notwithstanding… READ MORE
August 4, 2020
Evan Mawdsley— The SS Athenia was a substantial vessel, but not one of the great liners; a passenger ship of some 13,500 tons, with accommodation for 1,000 passengers, her speed… READ MORE
August 3, 2020
David Carpenter— King Henry III of England, the son of King John, reigned for fifty-six years from 1216 to 1272, one of the longest reigns on record. He was nine… READ MORE
July 31, 2020
Caroline Schaumann— In the Covid-Age, the value of nature runs high. Beaches and mountain trails are overrun with those seeking a respite from lockdowns and social restrictions in the cities,… READ MORE
July 28, 2020
Kenneth Austin— On August 22, 1614, Vincenz Fettmilch, a Calvinist gingerbread-maker, led an attack on Frankfurt’s ghetto, a single street known as the Judengasse (“Jews’ Lane”). When it was first… READ MORE
July 27, 2020
Molly Pucci— News of the trial of the former Hungarian Politburo member László Rajk, staged as a show trial in Budapest between 16 and 24 September 1949, traveled quickly across… READ MORE
From 9/11 to 9/11: The Widening of the Atlantic