Like some of the other reviewers, I'm a lot more familiar with WWII and the Cold War than this time period, and I was looking forward to a meaty history that would elaborate on my "Kaiser is crazy, Franz Ferdinand got assassinated, trench warfare happened" history classes. The War That Ended Piec...
A brief discourse on how history is always changing over time, how it can never achieve the analytical precision of science, and how all nations and many non-national groups can shift and alter history to produce narratives, and change it to their favor. Particularly relevant reading this on the ...
In Nixon and Mao, historian Margaret MacMillan weaves a flowing narrative that recounts the events of one historic week for U.S. foreign relations. In February of 1972, Richard Nixon became the first American President to visit China. While isolationism had been China’s overarching foreign poli...
I think it was Churchill who said that the most fascinating aspects of World War I – from a historical perspective – was its beginning and end. The start: the shocking assassination of an unloved heir of a creaky empire, shot in a Balkan backwater and somehow touching off a world war. The end: th...
The Ethiopian delegates straggled in, tall and handsome in their white robes. The great museums gradually reopened and the children played in the parks. On May Day, the city closed down as the left brought out thousands of demonstrators for the annual socialist rally and the government responded ...
said a member of the White House staff. The images flowed back to the United States, targeted for prime-time evening television: the handshakes, the glasses raised in toasts, the American flag flying in Beijing; Nixon with Mao, Nixon on the Great Wall, at the Forbidden City, and in the Great Hall...