History

2009

• 

  The Misunderstood Robber Baron

  Steve Fraser : Biography

  T.J. Stiles's The First Tycoon is a gilded portrait of the robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt.

• Deficit Hawk Hysteria

  William Greider : U.S. Economy

  The time to pay down the deficit will come only after the economy recovers.

• The End of the Story?

  Lars T. Lih : Cold War

  Archie Brown's account of the high politics of communism's collapse is Kremlinology without the guesswork.

• 

  Empire Falls

  Ronald Grigor Suny : Former Soviet Republics

  The story of communism's rise and fall in Eastern Europe is a tale of two revolutions.

• The Generation That Failed

  Slavenka Drakulic : Former Yugoslav Republics

  Yugoslavs were unprepared for the surge of nationalism that followed Tito's communist rule.

• 

  Gorbachev on 1989

  Katrina vanden Heuvel & Stephen F. Cohen : Russia

  A wide-ranging Nation interview with the former Soviet president.

• 

  A City Unbottled

  Joy Connolly : Archaeology

  In The Fires of Vesuvius, Mary Beard unearths the seedier realities of the Roman social and political experience.

• 

  A Makeshift World

  Barry Schwabsky : Photography

  For the photographer Thomas Demand, Germany is like any other country because it is haunted by history.

• A Witness to Total War

  Daniel Eagan : World War II

  When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the only neutral filmmaker in the country was Julien Bryan. His round-the-clock footage of Warsaw's destruction, assembled in Siege, is now again on view.

• 

  Changing the Metaphor

  Richard White

  For Jackson Lears, the United States remains in thrall to a bogus spiritual quest born of a refusal to face the tragedy of the Civil War.

• A Gift From the Ramparts of Capital...

  Alexander Cockburn : Barack Obama

  People shouldn't take Peace Prizes too seriously except under those rare circumstances when a prize committee somewhere gets it right.

• The African Airlift

  Karen Rothmyer : African-Americans

  The 1960 "airlift" of 800 African students to study in the United States lent a crucial boost to John F. Kennedy's popularity among African-Americans.

• Auden's Love Poem for Humanity

  John Nichols

  The poet's "September 1, 1939" saw the start of World War II and declared: "We must love one another or die."

• 

  La Despedida

  Dan Kaufman : Autobiography & Memoir

  A long-lost memoir of the Spanish Civil War moves jaggedly between boredom, fleeting triumphs and terror.

• 

  Hiroshima Day

  Daniel Ellsberg : Nuclear Arms & Proliferation

  The official secrecy and deceptions about our nuclear weapons posture and policies and their possible consequences have threatened the survival of the human species.

• 

  Stolen Youth

  Ruth Scurr : France

  The French Revolution as seen from Versailles.

• Borrowed Time: The World at 65

  Tom Engelhardt

  The tumultuous American Century in the lives of a father and son.