Robert Caro tells how he came to write his Pulitzer Prize winning book "The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974)" about "the man who changed the city forever, often at a terrible cost.
The people who believe that the Holocaust did not happen meet regularly, in secret, to exchange theories and research. Are they anti-Semites, or are they just horribly mistaken? The author went to find out. The last thing he expected was to like them.
It may be cold, it may be impossibly vast and empty, but in its first hours of existence, Canada's newborn Inuit territory proves that there's nothing so liberating as home rule.
At the end of May 1990, fifty years after the "miracle" of Dunkirk, thousands of elderly British survivors thronged to the French Channel port for a week of reunions and commemorations.
The collapse of France in the spring of 1940 came with an unexpected suddenness that almost defied explanation--though the explanations over the years have not been wanting.
The invention of fat-burning lamps toward the end of the Ice Age helped to transform European culture. It coincided with several other major technological advances.
The Berlin crisis of 1961 does not loom large in the American memory, but it was an episode that brought the United States and the Soviet Union close to war--nuclear war.
Frederick Douglass called it 'a sacred effort,' and Lincoln himself thought that his Second Inaugural, which offered a theodicy of the Civil War, was better than the Gettysburg Address.
One of the discoverers of fission in 1938, Meitner was at the time overlooked by the Nobel judges. Racial persecution, fear and opportunism combined to obscure her contributions.
Clinton is the youngest ex-President since Teddy Roosevelt--and he is still the most skillful politician in the Democratic Party. What he does with the rest of his life will set a precedent for the growing number of vigorous and long-lived ex-Presidents to come.
One of the first major epidemics of the disease in the U. S., it devastated America's early capital. It also had lasting repercussions for the city and country.
Oppenheimer succeeded brilliantly in assembling a team of world-class physicists in a new base at Los Alamos, New Mexico but was conscience-stricken, regretting the devastation the Manhattan Project had wrought.
The truth is still emerging about the mass murder of more than 100 California-bound emigrants in Utah in 1857, and about the role of leaders of the Mormon Church in the atrocity.