The Spanish Inquisition, which instituted mass conversions of Jews to Catholicism and the expulsion of the Moors, was only reluctantly endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church. Instead, it was largely a political maneuver by Ferdinand V and... Read More

Reconstruction remains one of the most contentious topics in American history. For a number of years, historians argued that Reconstruction had been counterproductive and had negatively impacted black-white relations in the South. And... Read More

Don’t judge a movement by its earliest adepts, advised Friedrich Nietzsche. He might have been talking about psychoanalysis, except that he died in 1900, the year that Sigmund Freud gave birth to the idea by publishing The... Read More

Had Samuel Johnson lived in the early twentieth century, his observation that “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel” would have applied to Anton Dilger, who sacrificed his medical ethics for his blind patriotism to Prussia.... Read More

On a late October night in 2001, twenty-five-year-old Amy St. Laurent disappeared from the Old Port section of Portland, Maine during a night out with an acquaintance who was visiting from Florida. He returned to her apartment with her... Read More

Young Tillie Pierce and a friend who wandered near the battlefield after the first day of fighting at Gettysburg were horrified at the sight. They were so overcome by the sad and awful spectacle that they hastened back to the house,... Read More

Like peanut butter and jelly or Abbott and Costello, Brooklyn and baseball belong together. The history of this seemingly symbiotic relationship began in the mid-nineteenth century, when a professional team made its home in Brooklyn in... Read More

“I have to state that Philology, both Comparative and special, has been my favourite pursuit,” said James Murray. Never before or since has an army of amateurs produced so vast and professional a product as the OED, the Mount Everest... Read More