The Russians were the first Europeans to sense California's potential, George Edinger writes, and had they not sold their settlement there in 1841, seven years before the Gold Rush, the world could have been a different place a century later.
Only a staff composed of men of military genius, and backed by a decisive and imaginative government at Westminster, could have secured a victory in the American War of Independence. Eric Robson reflects on how men of considerable talent, and of much good-will, failed in an impossible task.
Peter Mandler explains how the anthropologist Margaret Mead, author of best-selling studies of ‘primitive’ peoples, became a major influence on US military thinking during the Second World War.
Who is and who is not an American? The question goes back to the Revolution. The answer is always changing, says Tim Stanley.
The celebrated little person was married on February 10th, 1863.
An acute commentator on the French Revolution and on the development of the United States, Tocqueville foresaw a century ago many of the political and social problems that face democracy today. Gordon Philo introduces his life and career.
An acceptable minister in peace-time, Lord North’s misfortune was to hold office at the time of the American Revolution and War, as Eric Robson here shows.
The mountain country of Kentucky, until very recent years, has been the scene of fierce family feuds, as A.L. Lloyd records here.
H.G. Nicholas reconsiders the influence of this famous book on American opinion in the years preceding the Civil war, and on its world-wide public outside the United States.
Adrian Brunel profiles the influential revolutionary pamphleteer and political philosopher.
