Books about World War II generally fall into two categories. The first is the hour-by-hour account of individual battles, often told via accounts of individual soldiers. One example is Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa, which was the basis for the HBO mini-series The Pacific. The second type is [...]
Is there anything new we can learn about Adolf Hitler? More than 128,000 books have been written about the dictator, including acclaimed biographies by historians Richard Evans, Alan Bullock and Hugh Trevor-Roper. However, pieces of new information continue to surface (e.g. diaries, archives) and each passing year provides authors with a different historical [...]
In the traditional view of the Pilgrims, one told in many 20th century textbooks, the Pilgrims came to Massachusetts on the Mayflower to make a break with old England and start a unique society. In her new book, The World of the Plymouth Plantation, Dr. Carla Gardina Pestana corrects the “false impression that [...]
The California ballot initiative process, created in 1911 by the progressive movement to control the influence of corporations, has instead been turned upside down by massive corporate spending. Corporate interests now use referenda to defeat popular legislation and grassroots reform efforts. The most glaring example is the current fight over Proposition 22 on [...]
