In his sweeping new history of the Democratic Party, historian Michael Kazin finds that “what it took” for Democrats to win historically was an outspoken commitment to moral capitalism. The term, coined in 1990 by another historian, connotes “a form of political economy . . . that promised everyone, owner…

Far too few Americans acknowledge the ugliest aspects of our history. Slavery and Jim Crow. The genocide of Native Americans. The “Yellow Peril.” The U.S. conquest of Cuba and the Philippines. Typically, our history books treat these events as isolated and disconnected. Dig a little deeper into the sources, though…

If you think you know the salient facts about Charles Darwin and evolution, prepare to be surprised when you read A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. For starters, Charles Darwin was by no means the first person to posit a theory of evolution. His own grandfather, Erasmus…

Joe Biden is the 46th in the line of US Presidents who have served since 1789. Every list of the greatest among them invariably includes George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and (usually) Franklin D. Roosevelt. There is no consensus among historians about the men who fall into the second tier. But…

Few subjects are more likely to set off heated arguments among American Jews than the actions of the State of Israel. Since the country claimed its independence in 1948, Israel’s wars and its relations with the Palestinian Arabs who live inside its disputed borders have accounted for more tears and…

Most literary awards celebrate a mixed bag of fiction that runs the gamut from pretentious and unreadable to spellbinding. But that tends not to be the case with science fiction. The Hugo Award, conferred annually by members of the World Science Fiction Convention (“Worldcon”), understandably leans toward stories that attract…

Sometime in the mid-1950s, when I was in what is today called middle school, I eagerly snapped up a new nonfiction book about an astonishing World War II British spy caper. The book, The Man Who Never Was by Ewen Montagu, had been published in 1953 in the UK to…

Over the past decade, I’ve read and reviewed more than 150 espionage novels (not counting a great many more I never finished). My 15 favorites are listed immediately below. Though my preliminary list included multiple titles by several of the authors included here, I’ve arbitrarily limited myself to a single…

Soon after Winston Churchill became Prime Minister of Great Britain in May 1940, he turned to a Canadian industrialist named William Stephenson for help. Stephenson’s charge was to weigh in on his biggest challenge in prosecuting the war against Germany: persuading the United States to join the fight. Churchill appointed…