Anne Bartlett
Content by Anne Bartlett
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The grand Western Alliance that won the Cold War now seems inevitable, but it was a chancy thing indeed in the early days after World War II. As diplomatic historian Robert L.
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When Miranda Kennedy, an American public radio correspondent in India, first made friends with the Delhi neighbor whom she calls “Geeta,” the young woman seemed to personify the new urb
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The sizeable townhouse where Alice Roosevelt Longworth lived and hosted her political salon for decades still stands square and formidable, just off lively Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C.
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Little-known fact: the White House is one chilly mansion. Abigail Adams burned cords of wood in numerous fireplaces, to little avail. The Trumans used electric heaters.
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The title of James Carroll’s latest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the compelling follow-up to his best-selling Constantine’s Sword, refers in part to Jesus&rsquo
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Of course, we remember the Big Things: the first kiss, the first real love, the first job, the first child.
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Environmental author Rick Bass is basically a grizzly bear guy. Well, grizzlies and wolves.
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During the years they were held hostage by leftist guerrillas in the Colombian jungle, American military contractors Marc Gonsalves, Thomas Howes and Keith Stansell would talk about selling the rig
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Some passions die hard.
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On the morning of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we all immediately thought of the thousands of victims and their survivors, and in the months that followed, journalists did reams of stories about the s
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Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama had the same goal: a sea route to “the Indies.” Despite our October holiday, it’s abundantly clear who succeeded.
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It’s one of the great lingering conundrums of American history: How is it that the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence was a lifelong owner of slaves?
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Of all the tough jobs that Gabriel Thompson did while he was researching his book on immigrant labor, the toughest was not the most physically demanding.
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When Irish people get old, writer Nuala O'Faolain tells us, the government waives the fee for their required television licenses.
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Writer Ann Patchett always knew in an intellectual sense what a hard time her friend Lucy Grealy had confronting the world with a face disfigured by cancer and the horrific treatments that followed
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The swift, worldwide spread of SARS in recent months provides a small reminder of what life was like before modern medicine largely conquered the most lethal epidemic diseases.
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Sixteen years after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, the president of the United States still strolled around Washington on foot, unaccompanied by security.
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We live in a traveling culture heavily defined by McDonald’s, Marriott, Holiday Inn, Starbucks and the like—successfully branded, distinctive national hospitality chains.
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Cleopatra was queen of a large, rich, highly sophisticated country for more than 20 years, yet almost everything we know about her comes from a legend created by her most deadly enemy, the Roman em
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Ever hear of Newton D. Baker? Unless you're a close student of early 20th century history, probably not.
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When journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault was growing up in then-segregated Georgia, the movies she saw at the Saturday matinees always depicted Africans as hapless or even demonic.
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Children think their world is the only world. As they try to fit in, they look to their parents for guidance - or for examples of what not to do.
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Benjamin Franklin famously mused that the turkey might be a good symbol for the United States; we opted for the eagle instead. But a compelling case could be made for the beaver.
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T.E. Lawrence had conflicting feelings about his own fame.
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<b>FDR's Christmas visitor</b> Given their educations, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill would doubtless have been intimately familiar with the proverbial loss of a kingdom for w
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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at least in part a tragedy of unacknowledged similarities.
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The recent “Station Fire” in California’s Angeles National Forest, the worst in Los Angeles County history, burned more than 160,000 acres and killed two firefighters.
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After 10 years as a newspaper journalist, Philip Delves Broughton was tired of his colleagues' cynicism and anxious about what seemed to be his industry's inexorable decline.
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Benson Deng's early years were lived in a Dinka village in Sudan as close to tribal tradition as is possible in the contemporary world. His father, a respected cattle owner, had five wives.
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If the U.S. withdraws its combat troops from Afghanistan by late 2014 as planned, it will mark the end of a 13-year American war.
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It wasn't that Hannah Pool's birth family in Eritrea didn't want to renew contact with her. When Pool was a university student in Liverpool, an older brother wrote her a letter.
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For a moment, set aside consideration of the well-known humanitarian crises of recent years in Lebanon, Iraq, Colombia, Darfur and Zimbabwe, and contemplate northern Uganda.
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The princes and artists of the Italian Renaissance strove mightily to revive the glories of classical Greek and Roman culture.
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In the midst of Britain’s phone-hacking scandal, well-known biographer Sally Bedell Smith’s solidly traditional new life story of Queen Elizabeth II is a great pleasure.
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Few among us can look back without regret at some silly youthful decision that had unforeseen consequences.
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Chimpanzees are loads of fun, or so movies and TV shows would have us believe. They’re charming, intelligent, affectionate—just like us.
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As a child in an orphanage in the Soviet Union, Ruben Gallego dreamed of becoming a kamikaze.
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In the recent debates over the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the U.S.
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Be very wary when you start reading a flood of stories in the papers about how ordinary folks are getting rich because all the fusty old economic rules no longer apply.
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To take the approach of a pitch for a Hollywood movie: Midnight in Peking is The Black Dahlia meets Inspector Morse, with a little Empire of the Sun thro
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The public record shows that Franklin D. Roosevelt had one wife. But from a purely emotional perspective, he had three: the Official Wife, the Work Wife and the Hidden Wife.
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Jan de Hartog, one of those rare talents who wrote well in two languages, was best known in his native Netherlands for Holland's Glory, a nautical tale that was hugely popular among the Dutch
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One sad lesson to be learned from Side Effects: when you're considering whether to take a new medication, don't assume anything.
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Issue:
Joe Rantz ended up in one of the finest eight-man crews ever to make it to the Olympics largely because he needed a janitor’s job to pay for college.
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Issue:
There are scores of heart-wrenching stories in veteran journalist Katherine Boo’s amazing book about a Mumbai slum. Here is one:
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The residents of Clarkston, Georgia (population: 7,100; 13 miles east of Atlanta), are the involuntary participants in a tricky sociological experiment.
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At 12, Ishmael Beah was a bit of a naughty boy.
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Winston Churchill was indisputably one of the great political figures of the 20th century. But as a young man just starting out, he had more than a little help from his mom.
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It's commonplace to read in the biographies of 20th-century artists that so-and-so left Europe in the late 1930s or early 1940s to live in the United States. The moves sound so sensible and easy.
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Elaine Pagels is a scholar of religious history who holds advanced degrees from top universities and has a wide reputation for pioneering research on early Christianity.
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In August of 1814, Maryland was invaded by foreign troops.
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Admit it, ladies: When it comes to cosmetics, one brand of lipstick is much like the next pigment in a waxy carrier, some slight variation on pink or red, priced at a huge mark-up over the modest
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Vertigo is the profoundly unsettling sensation that either you or your surroundings are spinning.
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No one knows how many people died in the sectarian violence that accompanied the coming of independence to India and Pakistan in 1947. Maybe 200,000, maybe 400,000, maybe 1 million.
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If you followed the Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s and early '90s, you might remember diplomat Charles Hill as the man who took the notes.
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By the time legendary frontier lawman Wyatt Earp, then 31, showed up in the mining boomtown of Tombstone, Arizona, in 1879, he had moved at least 12 times and lived in at least nine different state
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Until the mid-19th century, the only way to obtain a divorce in England was through a private act of Parliament.
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In the United States, we say that someone is “as rich as Rockefeller.” Cubans, even today, say someone is “as rich as Julio Lobo.” It’s their folk memory of a sugar-in
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In the first decades of the 19th century, the Cherokees did everything possible to adapt to the white settler culture that was encroaching on their homeland.
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In 1790, England had a new naval hero: a man who had saved the lives of more than a dozen sailors by navigating a 23-foot open boat over 4,000 miles a staggering feat of seamanship.
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Every time you call an outsourced computer help desk in Mumbai, you're continuing a tradition of international commerce that began as soon as human beings figured out how to cross mountains and ocean
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In America's 20th-century historical myth, author Lance Morrow says, John F.
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The Parthenon in Athens is inarguably one of the most famous buildings in the world. We think of it as the epitome of classical Greek culture.
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Artist Claire Roth’s life is at a low ebb when a powerful, handsome gallery owner shows up unexpectedly at her Boston studio. Just emerging from a scandal that damaged her reputation, she’s eking out a living by copying great paintings for an online reproduction company.
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In the current focus on the sectarian violence in Iraq between Sunnis and Shiites, it's easy to forget that the country was once a more cosmopolitan place, with Jews and Christians living among th
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There was one brief shining moment some 40 years ago when the word and the image were in fine balance in the world of politics. Into that time came John F. Kennedy.
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