In July of 1923, Franz Kafka, forty years old, is ill with tuberculosis and convalescing near the Baltic Sea, when he meets twenty-five-year-old Dora Diamant, a remarkable woman fifteen years his junior who seems to him the essence of... Read More

In 1847, Taos, New Mexico, in the parched hinterland of the nation’s newest territory, was about as remote as it got in America. It was not, however, an unlikely location for a revolt against America’s heavy-handed takeover of what... Read More

The dozen literate and usually affluent hunters and fishermen in the South during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries whose writings comprise this anthology depict an environmental sensitivity that has been undervalued, Jacob F.... Read More

This history of the Church of Latter-day Saints in Germany during Hitler’s murderous reign should be taken as yet another warning of how basic goodness—in this case religious faith—can be cruelly bent when it accommodates itself to... Read More

The South’s storied charm and civility are overshadowed by more hostile tendencies in this account of the role the region played in the Vietnam War. Joseph A. Fry, who has written extensively about the eleven states of the former... Read More

Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famed British lexicographer and essayist, was at his acerbic best when he described those in Britain’s American colonies who bemoaned taxation without representation: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps... Read More

The South’s defeat was inevitable when, on a chilly Sunday April 3 morning in 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s prayers at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, Virginia, were interrupted when the church sextant... Read More

The dramatic reign (1558-1603) of Queen Elizabeth I, known during her own times as the Virgin Queen, has spawned more than a dozen movies with her being played by the likes of Bette Davis and Cate Blanchett and, in old age, Dame Judi... Read More