Robert Dallek’s latest book, “The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945-1953,” has just been published in paperback.

Nov. 30 (Bloomberg) -- The historian Richard Hofstadter said that the U.S. is the only country in history that believes it was born perfect and strives for improvement. The idea that we are a nation without flaws or that we can permanently eliminate our very human failings is, of course, delusional....

The attraction to easy answers is echoed in a 2010 Gallup poll that asked Americans to assess the last nine presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush. Kennedy topped the list with an 85 percent approval rating. Only Ronald Reagan was in hailing distance of him, with 74 percent. Deciphering these results presents a challenge: Kennedy’s thousand days comprised one of the briefest presidencies in U.S. history. His slight record, devoid of major domestic legislative achievements, seems smothered by the country...

Marian Kester Coombs writes from Crofton, Maryland.

All history is biography, it’s said, but an individual biography usually shines a mere flashlight on surrounding historical events. John Szwed’s book on Alan Lomax is more like a floodlight thanks to his subject’s centrality to so much of American 20th-century culture. Alan Lomax knew everyone, went everywhere, appreciated just about everything, and worked tirelessly to foster in all Americans his own great love for them: the people, the folk.

Imagine a world scarcely acquainted with the blues, bluegrass, work chants, gospel music and spirituals, jazz, zydeco, calypso, cowboy songs, and most of the great ballads of British and American folk music. Such a world would never have spawned rock ‘n’ roll. For some, that’s a tempting thought. But the world is richer for knowing these ancestors of rock. And for much of that knowledge we have the work of Alan Lomax to thank.

Alan’s story (1915-2002) is in many...

Caroline Moorehead's book, "A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship and Resistance in Occupied France," is out this month.

On Jan. 24, 1943, 230 French women who had been arrested for resistance activities were put on a train at Compiegne, outside Paris, and sent to Auschwitz. The youngest had just celebrated her 17th birthday; the oldest was 67. They were teachers and seamstresses, students and farmers' wives; there was a doctor, a dentist and several editors and chemists. They were to be a lesson to other would-be troublemakers.

The women were not Jewish, so they were not sent immediately to be gassed. However, they were subjected to interminable roll calls in arctic conditions, crushingly tough physical labor and the random, ceaseless brutality of the SS guards....

Lawrence Downes writes for the New York Times.

To people in parts of Hale County, Ala., it isn’t “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” it’s “that book,” the one everyone knows, even those who haven’t read it. The one that even now can stir the descendants of the families in it to feelings of irritation, weariness and sometimes seething anger.

Seventy-five years ago, in the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans went to Alabama to find subjects for an article about tenant farmers for Fortune magazine. They found three families living on Mills Hill, south of Tuscaloosa between Moundville and Greensboro, and spent weeks listening, watching and taking notes and pictures. Agee’s article, brilliant yet bloated with guilt and literary grandeur, was rejected by the magazine, which had been expecting something readable. So it became a book in 1941 — a classic of Depression documentary, thanks to Evans’s haunting photos and Agee’s writing, which turned reporting into...

Colum Lynch has been been reporting on foreign policy and national security for the Washington Post since June 1999.

Lisa Pease is an expert on the assassinations of the '60s in general and the Robert Kennedy assassination in particular. Several of her articles were published in "The Assassinations" (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2003), a book she also co-edited.

Each November, the media recalls the assassination of President Kennedy and its attendant controversies. Rarely, however, is a second Kennedy anniversary acknowledged. On Nov. 20, 2011, Robert Kennedy — JFK’s brother and devoted political partner — would have turned 86 years old had he not also been assassinated. Although the mainstream media has been all but silent on this case, the facts scream out for a deeper investigation.

The story of Robert Kennedy’s assassination seems deceptively simple. After winning the California Democratic presidential primary on June 4, 1968, Sen. Robert Kennedy traversed a pantry at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. A young Palestinian Christian named Sirhan Sirhan pulled a gun and...

William M. Adler is the author of "The Man Who Never Died: The Life, Times and Legacy of Joe Hill, American Labor Icon."

On the morning after the killings, Salt Lake City awoke to sensational headlines. "Father and Son Slain by Masked Murderers," the Herald-Republican bannered across its front page. The father, a 47-year-old grocer named John G. Morrison, and his son Arling, 17, had been shot to death on the night of Jan. 10, 1914.

Within hours, the police had detained a prime suspect for the father's death: Frank Z. Wilson, an alias of one Magnus Olson, an ex-convict who had done time in the Utah state penitentiary. Evidence that I uncovered — in court files, clippings buried in newspaper morgues, correspondence and photographs in prison archives — shows his rampaging criminal itinerary in the days and weeks before the killings, and his startlingly violent 50-year criminal career (including a later stint as a henchman for...

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s as well as The End of Victory Culture, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The United States of Fear (Haymarket Books), will be published momentarily.  This piece first appeared in slightly different form in the October issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Every childhood has its own geography and every child is an explorer, as daring as any Peary or Amundsen or Scott.  I was the mildest of children, such a picky eater that my parents called...

Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

With Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s impending return to the presidency, he is set to rule Russia for even longer than General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev, in power from 1964 to 1982. There is increasing talk of a Communist-type restoration. But what do we really know about the Soviet Union of the Brezhnev years? This topic has received scant scholarly attention in the West. The period is too distant to be worthy of study by political scientists, and yet recent enough that it is only now attracting the attention of historians.

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachevcleverly branded the Brezhnev period as the era of “stagnation” in contrast to what he saw as his own dynamic and visionary leadership. This...