Roger Bishop
Content by Roger Bishop
-
Theodore Roosevelt said, with good reason, “I have enjoyed life as much as any nine men I know.” When he died in 1919, he was only 60 years old and probably could have been elected agai
Read more »
-
We know Washington Irving best for his folk tales The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle.
Read more »
-
Harry Truman liked to drive and once said, “I like roads.
Read more »
-
John Eisenhower believes that his father's military career was much more important to him and to history than his eight years as a popular president.
Read more »
-
After his junior year at Harvard College in the 1930s, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Read more »
-
The great rivalry between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta developed into a war of unprecedented brutality that lasted from 431-404 B.C..
Read more »
-
Issue:
Abraham Lincoln regarded the Emancipation Proclamation as “the central act of my administration and the great event of the nineteenth century” because it “knocked the bottom out o
Read more »
-
Issue:
An admiring Henry Kissinger noted in 1979 that “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.” The origins of what became k
Read more »
-
Issue:
The 10-month struggle in the U.S.
Read more »
-
Through his sermons, public addresses and writings, Henry Ward Beecher was an immensely influential and often revered public intellectual in 19th-century America.
Read more »
-
Noah Webster devoted his life to establishing a distinctly American culture.
Read more »
-
<b>A journalist's tribute to a mentor from the ancient world</b> In the 1950s, when Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski was just beginning his career, an editor asked him about his pl
Read more »
-
Spartacus was the gladiator/slave who escaped from bondage in 73 BC and led an army of 70 slaves that eventually grew to 140,000, and who may have defeated Roman soldiers in as many as nine battles
Read more »
-
In 1944, U.S. researchers conducted what is still considered to be the definitive study on human starvation.
Read more »
-
When Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir apparent to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, there was no outpouring of collective grief.
Read more »
-
Benjamin Franklin's extraordinary and complex life as a printer, entrepreneur, postmaster and diplomat, among other activities had a profound effect on the development of the United States.
Read more »
-
George Washington was the indispensable Founding Father.
Read more »
-
Issue:
James Madison remains one of the most important political thinkers in American history.
Read more »
-
Daniel Swift’s paternal grandfather died during World War II, at the age of 30, while on a bombing mission for the Royal Air Force over Germany in 1943.
Read more »
-
<B>A scholar's case for war</B> The way a society wages war reveals more than just its military strategy. At its core, the approach to combat reflects the values of a nation.
Read more »
-
Germany was a signatory to the Hague Declaration of 1889, a decision that helped to establish the principle that some kinds of wartime combat were "uncivilized." Among those types of combat was the u
Read more »
-
Traditional histories of the European colonization of North America concentrate on British settlements along the Atlantic seaboard.
Read more »
-
During most of his adult life, Abraham Lincoln was a conscientious, ambitious mainstream politician.
Read more »
-
Andrew Johnson, the military governor of Tennessee, was chosen by the 1864 Union Party convention (a coalition of Republicans and so-called "War Democrats" opposed to the Civil War) as Ab
Read more »
-
Issue:
Alex Haley is one of the best-known and most widely read authors in the world.
Read more »
-
<B>All the presidents' spin: leaders' lives defined by power of stories</B> Storytelling is one of the primary ways by which we learn about the world and how we relate to it.
Read more »
-
Timothy Garton Ash believes that "If we are free, we can work with other free people toward a free world." He understands that freedom means different things to different people and that democrac
Read more »
-
When Roger Williams was born in England, probably in 1603, the feudal system was dying, capitalism was being born and the country was in the midst of religious turmoil.
Read more »
-
Americans have always been dreamers, beginning with the Founders, who aspired to liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness for all. At the end of World War II, the U.S.
Read more »
-
Holden Caulfield famously remarks in J.D.
Read more »
-
The extraordinary talents and outstanding accomplishments of John Adams tend to be overshadowed by the illustrious and colorful careers of his contemporaries George Washington, Thomas Jefferson a
Read more »
-
Abigail Adams is by far the most richly documented American woman of the Revolutionary era.
Read more »
-
During his 24 years as an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Harry Blackmun wrote many landmark opinions on an array of controversial issues.
Read more »
-
Through the centuries, technologies have profoundly affected the way people read.
Read more »
-
Hadrian, Roman emperor from A.D. 117 to 138, looked back appreciatively on an earlier classical world.
Read more »
-
Although, as Peter Ackroyd writes, "without London there would have been no Shakespeare," it was Stratford, where Shakespeare was born, "that remained the center of his being." He continued to have c
Read more »
-
The arts and culture flourished in many ways during the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Read more »
-
Louisa May Alcott and her father, A. Bronson Alcott, died within three days of each other in March, 1888.
Read more »
-
Joseph Wheelan raises serious questions about Thomas Jefferson's legacy as a wise, elegant and eloquent Founding Father in Jefferson's Vendetta: The Pursuit of Aaron Burr and the Judiciary.
Read more »
-
One of America’s first celebrity heroes, David Crockett (as he always wrote his name) declared in his autobiography, “I stood no chance to become great in any other way than by accident
Read more »
-
The civil rights movement that began in the 1950s continued to grow in scope and intensity into the early 1960s. A series of non-violent protests in such places as Birmingham, St.
Read more »
-
Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited was a bestseller in England and the U.S. in the 1940s and a huge success as a BBC and PBS series in the 1980s.
Read more »
-
During the 19th century, as the United States developed economically, many people broke family ties, some forever, and headed west or to sea where they could reinvent themselves.
Read more »
-
Edith Wharton is perhaps best known for translating social history into fiction as she did in two of her most widely read novels, The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (192
Read more »
-
James Monroe served in more public positions than anyone else in American history. He was both a U.S.
Read more »
-
<B>Clinton and Yeltsin's diplomatic duet</B> When Bill Clinton assumed the presidency in 1993, he hoped to focus on the U.S. economy.
Read more »
-
One of the most persistent literary controversies is the question of who really wrote the plays and sonnets attributed to William Shakespeare.
Read more »
-
Despite billions of dollars spent on the most extensive intelligence network in the world and much diplomatic activity, presidents from Eisenhower to George W.
Read more »
-
During the 28-year period between the start of the War for Independence in 1775 and the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, decisions were made, or avoided, that established the foundation for much that was
Read more »
-
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) considered himself a man of three lives: one as an ethnic Pole born in the Ukraine who lived the early part of his life in what is now Poland; one as a widely traveled seama
Read more »
-
Joseph Medill was one of the great journalists of 19th-century America.
Read more »
-
Issue:
John Hay modestly insisted that the unique opportunities that came his way during an extraordinary life, and the accomplishments that resulted from them, were just the result of fortunate accidents
Read more »
-
The years during and following the Civil War saw momentous social, polticial, religious, scientific and artistic ferment.
Read more »
-
George Washington sat for at least 28 different portraits.
Read more »
-
On March 4, 1861, retiring president James Buchanan remarked to his successor, "Abraham Lincoln, If you are as happy in entering the White House as I shall feel on returning [home] to Wheatlan
Read more »
-
Issue:
Alfred Kazin (1915-1998) was one of the two or three most prominent and influential writer-intellectuals in post-World War II America.
Read more »
-
Some of the happiest times in Paul West's life were spent as a student at Oxford University in the mid-20th century. It was there that he launched his literary career as a poet.
Read more »
-
One of the major literary events of the year is the publication of Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters, an extraordinary portrait of his marriage to poet Sylvia Plath through 88 chro
Read more »
-
Philip II of Spain was, without question, the most powerful ruler in Europe during the 1580s. A zealous Catholic, he felt it was his role to eliminate heretical Protestantism from the continent.
Read more »
-
Who was Dwight Eisenhower? His extraordinary leadership of the Allied forces in Europe led to victory in World War II. Under his presidency the nation enjoyed eight years of peace and prosperity.
Read more »
-
Throughout U.S. history, presidents and vice presidents usually have not been close to each other. One has all the power of his office; the other does not.
Read more »
-
In 1931, a panel of notable American men named Jane Addams first on a list of the 12 greatest living American women.
Read more »
-
<b>John Brown's civil disobedience</b> In a hearing before a special committee of the U.S.
Read more »
-
From the early 19th century until his death in 1859, Leigh Hunt was a significant and controversial man of letters.
Read more »
-
In 1952, with the Cold War beginning and a hot war raging in Korea, American voters sought a leader whose foreign policy could bring peace and security.
Read more »
-
Issue:
When Lyndon Johnson was a teenager, in a family of modest means, he predicted that some day he was going to be president of the United States.
Read more »
-
In Master of the Senate, the third volume of his magisterial study of Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro continues to probe the personal and political sides of a complex man who, during the 1950s, p
Read more »
-
When Warren G.
Read more »
-
Issue:
Read more »
-
The United Nations was created from the strategic vision of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who deemed it essential that the world have an effective international security organization.
Read more »
-
The foreign aid provided by France during the American Revolution was crucial to the outcome of the uprising. French funds kept the Revolution alive.
Read more »
-
John Updike is one of America's most renowned men of letters.
Read more »
-
An innocent error in judgment by geographers in 1507 at St.
Read more »
-
The eight days of the wartime Yalta Conference in February 1945 had a major impact on history, down to the present day.
Read more »
-
Public attention has focused in recent years on charges of professional misconduct by four prominent historians, all authors of best-selling and award-winning books.
Read more »
-
From the late 1930s through the early 1960s, Partisan Review was the most influential literary and cultural journal in the United States.
Read more »
-
The famous photo of a smiling President Harry Truman displaying the inaccurate Chicago Tribune headline Dewey Defeats Truman the day after the 1948 presidential election succinctly captures what
Read more »
-
Thomas Jefferson’s eloquent writings have made him revered as the nation’s premier spokesman for democracy.
Read more »
-
In her stimulating and, for some, controversial book The Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb seeks to reclaim the Enlightenment
Read more »
-
Henry Adams, whose grandfather and great-grandfather were both U.S.
Read more »
-
Jill Ker Conway describes autobiography as "our favorite form of fiction." A distinguished and best-selling autobiographer herself (The Road to Coorain and True North) as well as a scholar of the s
Read more »
-
Since his acclaimed first novel, The Naked and the Dead, was published exactly 50 years ago, Norman Mailer has been at or near the center of our literary stage.
Read more »
-
Annie Turner Wittenmyer? James Fortem? Myra Colby Bradwell? Although forgotten today, in their time each of these figures was influential and made important contributions to the lives of others.
Read more »
-
Contrary to widespread public opinion several years ago, war in Bosnia was not inevitable. But once the war began, peace, or at least an end to hostilities was not inevitable either.
Read more »
-
For over four decades, Stephen Sondheim has been the most innovative composer-lyricist in the American musical theater. He first gained renown as the lyricist for West Side Story in 1956.
Read more »
-
Stephen Crane was only 28 when he died of tuberculosis in England in 1900.
Read more »
-
Samuel Clemens was rarely impressed with other people of note. But after meeting Helen Keller, he considered her to be the most remarkable woman he had ever met.
Read more »
-
In Dean Acheson's 1969 Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir of his years in the State Department (1941-1953), Present at the Creation, he wrote, In a sense, the postwar years were a period of creation, f
Read more »
-
Our foremost literary critic, Harold Bloom, is known for his influential and often controversial views, whether the subject is his theory of poetic influence or which authors and their works should
Read more »
-
Many of the books on race relations in the U.
Read more »
-
Thomas More's Christian faith was inseparable from all other aspects of his life.
Read more »
-
Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the most revered and influential public figures in recent history.
Read more »
-
How did humanity develop? Why have some societies thrived for long periods and others disappeared quickly?
Read more »
-
During the late 1950s and 1960s, Norman Podhoretz was influential both as a literary critic and as the editor of Commentary magazine.
Read more »
-
Henry Kissinger is one of the towering and most controversial American statesmen of this century. Even his critics can attest to his brilliance.
Read more »
-
On their 40th wedding anniversary, Winston Churchill sent the following message to his wife Clementine: My Beloved, I send this token, but how little can it express my gratitude to you for making
Read more »
-
Last October, on the occasion of John Kenneth Galbraith's 90th birthday, he was honored with a reception and dinner at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.
Read more »
-
Between 1929 and 1945 the American people and their political leadership met and emerged victorious over two daunting challenges.
Read more »
-
In the words of noted military historian John Keegan, World War I was a tragic and unnecessary conflict.
Read more »
-
Franklin Delano Roosevelt rarely mentioned his wife's political influence or gave her credit for a job well done.
Read more »
-
The legacy of the ancient Greeks is so overwhelming in so many areas democracy, literature, philosophy, science, mathematics, mythology, drama, art, the Olympic games it is easy to idealize them.
Read more »
-
More Matter: Essays and Criticism By John Updike Alfred A.
Read more »
-
Ever since he composed his first line of hand-set type in 1969, Barry Moser, the extraordinarily talented book designer and illustrator of literary classics and children's books, has dreamed of d
Read more »
-
James Kugel regards the Bible as sacred scripture; he does not particularly like to write about prayers, psalms, or prophetic speeches as poems.
Read more »
-
Arthur Koestler's novel of ideas, Darkness at Noon, was originally published in England in 1940 to great acclaim.
Read more »
-
At the middle of the last decade, there were 56 wars being fought around the globe.
Read more »
-
The United States, as part of the United Nations and NATO, has sought to bring peace, reconciliation, and order to Bosnia and Kosovo.
Read more »
-
When he was 10 or 11 years old, Harold Bloom read the poetry of William Blake and Hart Crane and was profoundly moved.
Read more »
-
Vaclav Havel is one of the genuine political and moral heroes of the last half of the 20th century.
Read more »
-
Why did Germany defeat France so easily in 1940? Conventional thinking has focused on three reasons.
Read more »
-
The Gentleman From New York : Daniel Patrick Moynihan Daniel Patrick Moynihan describes his extraordinary career as public servant, academician, and public intellectual as a series of "chanc
Read more »
-
he political face of Europe changed more between 1989 and 1999 than in any other decade since the period between 1939 and 1949.
Read more »
-
is inaugural address on March 4, 1825, John Quincy Adams declared, "From the experience of the past we derive instructive lessons for the future." This was not mere political rhetoric.
Read more »
-
For years, we have been told there is a crisis in our libraries, that books and newspapers will soon be turning to dust, that we should microfilm virtually everything as soon as possible, while dis
Read more »
-
he Metaphysical Club, a group that discussed philosophical questions, held its first meeting in January 1872, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Read more »
-
hen he moved to Washington in December, 1823, newly elected Tennessee Senator Andrew Jackson was carefully scrutinized by other politicians and citizens from all walks of life.
Read more »
-
el Johnson (1709-1784) was the literary lion of his era. An essayist on many subjects, he was a moralist, lexicographer, biographer, editor and poet.
Read more »
-
When Hubert H. McAlexander, a professor at the University of Georgia, first told Peter Taylor he wanted to be his biographer, Taylor replied, Oh, no, I haven't had a very interesting life.
Read more »
-
Alfred Habegger's magnificent biography of Emily Dickinson, My Wars Are Laid Away in Books, is a comprehensive portrait of the poet's life and art.
Read more »
-
Very little of what we know about Shakespeare's life can be documented; of his wife, Ann Hathaway, we know even less.
Read more »
-
Issue:
During the period from 1800 to 1835, what was then called Washington City underwent significant social change with regard to slavery.
Read more »
-
The frontier looms large in the American imagination. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, in an influential essay, wrote: The frontier is productive of individualism.
Read more »
-
William Strachey wanted to be a writer. He hoped to publish travel narratives and sonnets; his best friend in London was John Dunne.
Read more »
-
From 1791 through 1794 in western Pennsylvania, acts of resistance to a federal excise tax on the production of whiskey led to an insurgency serious enough for George Washington to deploy the nation'
Read more »
-
Robert Morgan is keenly aware that there are many ways to interpret the westward expansion of the United States of America.
Read more »
-
The many years he has spent as our pre-eminent literary naturalist have not diminished Peter Matthiessen's enthusiasm for his work.
Read more »
-
The crucial political decisions in the young American republic of the late 18th century were made by relatively few leaders.
Read more »
-
In her consistently enlightening new book, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600-1850, award-winning historian Linda Colley examines the limitations and vulnerabilities of the British
Read more »
-
The story of the Jamestown colony the first permanent English settlement in the New World is familiar to most of us, but it has often been hard to separate the facts about the colony from myth.
Read more »
-
Issue:
William McKinley and Leon Czolgosz lived in the same country but had virtually nothing else in common.
Read more »
-
Landon Carter was one of the wealthiest planter patriarchs in Virginia, a man of letters and Enlightenment science and a member of the House of Burgesses from 1752 until 1768.
Read more »
-
Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) is best known for his classic prescient satirical novel Brave New World, in which leaders maintain their power by thought manipulation.
Read more »
-
Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was America's most influential literary critic from the early 1920s through the 1950s.
Read more »
-
When John Adams was sworn in as our nation’s second president, his wife Abigail was in Massachusetts taking care of John’s dying mother.
Read more »
-
Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson corresponded for almost 25 years, yet met in person only twice.
Read more »
-
The American Revolution was routinely regarded at the time as a civil war between rebels who desired to break away from Great Britain and loyalists who retained allegiance to the monarchy.
Read more »
-
Andrew Jackson, our seventh president, held ideas about the role of government that were shaped by his experience on the American frontier.
Read more »
-
Best remembered as the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, shy, retiring Andrei Sakharov was an unlikely Russian dissident.
Read more »
-
Other than George Washington, no other American leader was present at more turning points in the early years of the Republic than Alexander Hamilton.
Read more »
-
Nathan Hale is best known for what are reported to have been his last words, often misquoted or paraphrased, before he was hanged by the British as an American spy during the Revolutionary War.
Read more »
-
Winston Churchill’s foremost quality was his strength of will, according to Max Hastings, renowned British author of many widely acclaimed books of military history.
Read more »
-
Some of the most influential physicists of the 20th century were deeply involved in the creation of the atomic bomb and the much more destructive thermonuclear hydrogen bomb that followed.
Read more »
-
Issue:
Decisions made by the Continental Congress in Philadelphia and the Continental Army in New England between May and October of 1776 were crucial to everything that happened later in the American Rev
Read more »
-
The largest slave rebellion in U.S. history took place in the New Orleans area in January 1811.
Read more »
-
The early years of the 20th century in Europe were characterized by an accelerating arms race.
Read more »
-
In the days before D-Day, everyone knew that a seaborne invasion of Europe by the Allies was coming. The big questions were when and where.
Read more »
-
One of Nelson Mandela's closest friends and colleagues, Joe Slovo, noted in 1994 that "Without Mandela South African history would have taken a completely different turn." Mandela
Read more »
-
In recent decades, some historians have challenged the conventional view that there was a decline and fall of Rome.
Read more »
-
William James (1842-1910) was a seminal thinker and author whose life and work as a philosopher, psychologist and teacher with a deep interest in both science and religion put him in the vanguard
Read more »
-
Globalization, according to Charles C. Mann, began in December of 1492, when Christopher Columbus established what he hoped would be a permanent settlement in what is now the Dominican Republic.
Read more »
-
The assassination of Abraham Lincoln on April 14, 1865 just days after the surrender of the Confederacy dramatically affected the course of post-war Reconstruction.
Read more »
-
<B>The tumultuous times of England's greatest writer</B> While the works of William Shakespeare are for the ages, they were written in a particular place and time.
Read more »
-
In 1825, when John Quincy Adams became the sixth president of the United States, he appeared to be as well prepared for the job as anyone could be.
Read more »
-
In the widely praised Lincoln's Virtues, historian William Lee Miller explored Abraham Lincoln's moral choices during his ascension to power.
Read more »
-
In his engrossing new book, award-winning historian Alan Taylor masterfully explores the transition of the borderland of Iroquoia, an alliance of Native American groups called the Six Nations, into t
Read more »
-
Thomas Hardy's extraordinary journey from modest beginnings as the son of a builder to the pinnacle of British literary society was the result of his exceptional talent and fierce ambition.
Read more »
-
Winston Churchill played many roles during his extraordinary life. In addition to being one of the 20th century’s great leaders, he was also the father of five children.
Read more »
-
Harry Truman was ambitious, but his journey from a Missouri farm to the White House was largely the result of circumstances beyond his control.
Read more »
-
Issue:
During the pivotal immediate post-World War II period—the beginning of the Cold War and the dawn of the age of nuclear weapons—the U.S.
Read more »
-
In 1948, Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin ordered a blockade of Berlin to pressure the Western Allies into leaving the city or giving up the establishment of a state of West Germany.
Read more »
-
The February 1763 Treaty of Paris that officially ended the French and Indian War (the Seven Years' War) set in motion a series of actions that led to unintended and unpredictable consequences for th
Read more »
-
Many have proclaimed Winston Churchill the greatest statesman of the 20th century.
Read more »
-
Nikita S. Khrushchev was a walking bundle of contradictions. He rose to power in the Soviet system in the service of the dictator Josef Stalin.
Read more »
-
When Martin Luther King Jr. met Lyndon Baines Johnson on December 3, 1963, the latter did most of the talking.
Read more »
-
In The Conquerors, presidential historian Michael Beschloss delivers a fascinating exploration of how the Allies decided to deal with the threat posed by Germany after World War II.
Read more »
-
When Margaret Hardenbroeck Philipse died in 1691, at the age of 53, she was the richest woman in what was then the English province of New York.
Read more »
-
Many of the literary masterpieces of 19th-century American literature were written within a relatively short span of time by writers who lived in Concord, Massachusetts.
Read more »
