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The Duchess of Windsor. Attributed to Angela Laviosa. Courtesy of Wikipedia. In Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties, and the Making of Wallis Simpson, New York Times bestselling author Paul French examines a controversial and revealing period in the early life of the legendary Wallis, Duchess of Windsor–her one year in China. Read on […]
Illustration of Socrates, in a basket, based on Aristophanes’s The Clouds. Was Socrates a real person? is one of the most googled questions about perhaps the most important philosopher in history. Socrates’s existence as a historical figure is, however, universally accepted by scholars. He was executed in 399 BCE, aged over seventy, so it’s estimated […]
Commander Winfield Scott Schley (4th from left) and men who rescued Greely Expedition survivors (Public domain, Wikimedia Images) In 1881, Cdr. Winfield Scott Schley was at the Charlestown Navy Yard reading a newspaper article about the US Army Signal Corps’ ambitious Lady Franklin Bay Expedition. He considered it unusual— even foolhardy—that the US Navy wasn’t […]
William A. Pinkerton with railroad special agents Pat Connell (left) and Sam Finley (right) from the Library of Congress. Even if you’ve only watched a handful of “Wild West” films or TV shows, you’ve probably encountered the Pinkertons. These hired guns are often mistaken for police, but they rarely carry official badges. Instead, Pinkerton detectives […]
Exclusive picture of President Jimmy Carter in Stuart E. Eizenstat’s biography, President Carter. Far more complex, both politically and technically, was a divisive debate over whether to build the B-1 bomber, which presents a good lesson in how difficult it is, even for a president with a military background like Carter’s, to balance the appetites […]
Florence Kelley’s father, William, taught his daughter to read in 1866 using books that chronicled child labor. When she was seven, he had her studying “a terrible little book with woodcuts of children no older than myself, balancing with their arms heavy loads of wet clay on their heads, in brickyards.” And she didn’t just […]
Kid Curry, born as Harvey Logan. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. It might be hard for some of you to believe that the film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, with Paul Newman and Robert Redford in the title roles, premiered 55 years ago this week. I bring this up because my book Bandit Heaven — […]
As spring came to Washington in 1972, there was little rest for First Lady Pat Nixon. Her recent solo diplomatic successes in Peru and Africa were now imprinted in the public consciousness. President Nixon wanted his wife as part of his diplomatic team on yet another critically important trip. Secret negotiations had gone on for […]