World War II began for the United States with a catastrophic intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor. Two decades earlier, during the First World War, the US military had begun building capacity in signals and communications intelligence. But little was left in place by 1941. Yet, just four years later, tens…

Rome’s death throes sputtered out not in the fifth century, as is widely believed, but in 1453 when Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmet II, “the Conqueror.” He then renamed the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire Istanbul. Yet the Ottoman Empire — eventually Rome’s rival in its vastness…

I’ve spent more than half my life in business, engaged in founding or leading a number of small companies. So it’s only natural that I should read a good deal about economic and business history. Here, I’ve listed more than sixty of the best books about the history of business…

He was the most famous man in the world, and more places are named after him than anyone else. To many of the giants of his time — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Thomas Jefferson, Simon Bolivar, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau — he was a colossus whose genius overshadowed their…

Resistance to Hitler was notoriously weak. After all, he had ended unemployment and restored Germany’s stature in the world. His regime kept spirits afloat with adroit public pageantry and incessant propaganda. And official terror reigned, imprisoning those who spoke out in opposition and cowing those who feared to do so…

Words, words, words. How else might we perceive the reality we live in, much less convey what we see, think, or feel to another? Unfortunately, as the seventeenth century English philosopher John Locke once wrote, “So difficult it is to show the various meanings and imperfections of words when we…

Over the past decade, beginning with the police murders that triggered the Black Lives Matter movement, discussion of reparations for slavery has surfaced in public discourse across the United States. After all, some four million African-Americans were enslaved in 1860. And their descendants, the overwhelming majority of the forty-two million…

Romanticized accounts of the World War II codebreakers at Bletchley Park convey the impression of a cozy community of brainy people with Oxford and Cambridge degrees laboring in isolation in the countryside. And there is some truth in this picture during the first two years of the war. But that…

When the idea surfaced in 1857, scholars thought it was impossible. A comprehensive, historical dictionary of the English language encompassing every word ever repeatedly used in print for a thousand years? Nonsense! It would take years for a team of hundreds of lexicographers to make even a dent in such…