Guest Contribution 
When, in the summer of 1846, Abraham Lincoln stood for election to the U.S. House of Representatives, running as a Whig in the Seventh Congressional District of Illinois, his opponent was the popular and formidable Methodist circuit rider, Peter Cartwright. During the final days of the campaign, Lincoln discovered that the Democrats were slyly circulating …
TO WRITE A HISTORY of colonial America used to be easier,” Alan Taylor’s fine new synthesis begins; “the human cast and the geographic stage were both considered so much smaller.” The past quarter-century of scholarship has enlarged that cast and stage exponentially. Instead of thirteen British colonies hugging the Atlantic seaboard, historians now must consider …
COLD WAR HISTORIOGRAPHY has undergone major changes since the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union. For two years (1992–1993) the principal Soviet archives fell open to scholars, and although some of the richest holdings are now once again closed, new information continues to find its way out. Moreover, critical documentary information has become available from …
Read moreThe Cold War: The Ordinary People who Helped Shaped the Future
Emma Goldman was born in 1869 into a Jewish family in Kovno, Lithuania, then part of the Russian empire. She received some elementary schooling in Koenigsberg, where she learned German, a language in which she became fluent, unlike Yiddish, which she never really felt comfortable with. Her facility with the German language would make her …
The Haitian Revolution represents the most thorough case study of revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the modern world.[1] In ten years of sustained internal and international warfare, a colony populated predominantly by plantation slaves overthrew both its colonial status and its economic system and established a new political state of entirely free individuals—with …
An empire arose in the steppes of Mongolia in the thirteenth century that forever changed the map of the world, opened intercontinental trade, spawned new nations, changed the course of leadership in two religions, and impacted history indirectly in a myriad of other ways. At its height, the Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous empire …
Read moreThe Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan and His Warrior Horde Dynasty