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Writing a book like God Forgives, Brothers Don’t during the long twilight of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, journalist Jasper Craven discovered that the pipeline feeding young men into America’s fighting forces wasn’t just a response to war—it was a carefully engineered system. What he found was a sprawling network of military schools, ROTC programs, and a cultural pedagogy that had spent centuries convincing American boys that the path to manhood ran straight through the barracks. The result is a searing investigation into how the US military has become the nation’s primary engine of masculinity, and how that engine is…
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In 1991, George H.W. Bush promised a “new world order” — a world in which law and cooperation would replace force and rivalry. Within three years, 800,000 people had been murdered in Rwanda in a hundred days while the international community watched. The 1990s were not a liberal peace. They were a laboratory for the failures that would define the century to come.
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When Betty Friedan named “the problem that has no name” in 1963, she gave language to a dissatisfaction that millions of women had been living without the words to describe. What followed — the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s — was the most far-reaching cultural revolution of the postwar era. It was also an unfinished one.
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The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was, in a sense, a bureaucratic accident. But the accident was only possible because the system behind the wall had already ceased to function. This is the story of how the Cold War ended — and why the world it made was so different from what anyone expected.
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In August 1981, three days after eleven thousand members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation walked off the job in defiance of a federal law prohibiting strikes by government employees, President Ronald Reagan fired all of them, banned them from federal employment for life, and ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to begin immediately training replacements. The action was not unprecedented — there was legal authority for it — but no president had previously used that authority in this way against a union of middle-class professionals who had, moreover, endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election. The PATCO strike was broken…
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In the spring of 1968, something happened that had not happened before and has not happened since: a set of political explosions occurred simultaneously in countries that had almost nothing in common — in their economies, their political systems, their social structures, their histories — but that nonetheless felt, to those participating in them and to those watching from outside, as if they were expressions of a single underlying rupture. Students in Paris built barricades in the Latin Quarter and triggered a general strike that briefly seemed capable of ending the Fifth Republic. Students in Prague celebrated a Communist Party…
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On 30 June 1936, a small, erect man in a black cloak and a white robe walked to the podium of the League of Nations assembly hall in Geneva and waited for the jeering Italian journalists in the press gallery to be removed before he began to speak. Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia — King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah — had travelled to Geneva to make a personal appeal to the assembled representatives of world civilisation, eight months after Italian forces under Mussolini’s orders had invaded his country, six weeks after Italian troops had…
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On New Year’s Day 1959, Fulgencio Batista, the dictator who had ruled Cuba for most of the previous twenty-five years, fled the country in the early hours of the morning, boarding a plane for the Dominican Republic as his regime collapsed around him. The news reached the guerrilla column led by Ernesto Guevara, which had spent the previous weeks fighting its way toward Havana, and the fighters who heard it greeted it with disbelief and then elation.
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On the evening of 8 May 1956, the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square, London, staged the premiere of a new play by a twenty-six-year-old actor and writer from Fulham named John Osborne. The audience that night included a mixture of established theatre critics and younger spectators who had been drawn in by word of mouth and a sense — difficult to define precisely but real — that something was about to happen.
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On the morning of 13 December 1937, Japanese troops entered the Chinese city of Nanjing. The city had been the capital of the Nationalist government, which had fled westward ten days earlier, leaving behind a population of perhaps half a million civilians and a garrison of soldiers who had largely melted away into the city’s streets, stripped of their uniforms.