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When Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was buried at Arlington National Cemetery in 1935 on what would have been his 94th birthday, he was one of the most famous men in [...]

'All battles,' the historian John Keegan once observed, 'are in some degree disasters.' The Battle of Kasserine Pass--actually a series of battles in February 1943 when raw American troops had [...]

On the first day of August 1812, a damp and foggy Saturday morning in Boston, the American frigate Constitution awaited only a fair wind to proceed to sea. Its captain, [...]

When fame reduces a man to caricature, his story is at the mercy of every succeeding generation, and few men in American history have been more famous or more caricatured [...]

JUST BEFORE noon on June 12, 1943, the crew of the U-118 was enjoying a welcome moment of idleness. Three days earlier they had been sent scurrying northward in response [...]

JUST WEEKS AFTER GERMAN BOMBERS began their nightly raids on London in September 1940, Warner Brothers released to American theaters a quietly powerful 10-minute documentary, London Can Take It! Narrated [...]

In early 1941, an astonishing idea began to dawn on John Masterman, a British official whose fluent knowledge of German, skill at interrogation of enemy prisoners, and more than a [...]

In June 1812, on the eve of America's headlong plunge into mad war against the mightiest seaborne power in the world, old John Adams confided to his grandson his opinion [...]

If Adolf Hitler's threat to invade Great Britain in the summer of 1940 was a bluff, it was a bluff carried through with exhaustive German thoroughness. Even as the German [...]

TO THE STUDENT OF INTELLIGENCE HIStory, there has been something eerily familiar in the recent headlines about American intelligence failures. Panels investigating weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the […]

For some time now I have been wondering why--to speak unscientifically--my orange barn cat, Shawn, thinks he is a dog. He follows me to the mailbox, he follows me on [...]

For several years something distinctly odd has been happening to the classical music played on WETA-FM, the National Public Radio station I listen to in Washington, D.C. From time to [...]

Within days of the September 11 attacks U.S. intelligence agencies were being blamed in many quarters for their failure to detect the terrorists' plans in advance. Mistakes in the formulation [...]

I have always been a firm believer in taking a bold approach to gardening, sort of a horticultural equivalent to what the military calls reconnaissance-by-fire: just get out there, blast [...]

BERTRAND Russell once observed that animal behaviorists studying the problem-solving abilities of chimpanzees consistently seemed to detect in their experimental subjects the 'national characteristics' of the scientists themselves. A divergence [...]

WHEN I dream about I horses, as I sometimes do, I often dream about my own horse, a large and touchy palomino, on the one day in ten years of [...]

FATS Waller's rise to lasting fame as an entertaining singer with a witty twist on the popular songs of his day was still several years off when, in November of [...]

WHAT strange epidemic has taken hold of our detectives these days? I'm referring to the detectives who inhabit the pages of novels, and all I can say is that they [...]

IF some advertiser or political consultant could figure out just what it is in human psychology that makes us willing to believe that dogs are loyal, trustworthy, selfless, loving, courageous, [...]

MONTHS before the crocuses peep through the snow or the barn swallows chatter about their return from points south, there are signs aplenty of impending spring for those who know [...]

IN one famous episode in the British comedy series Monty Python a foreign-looking tourist clad in an outmoded leather trenchcoat appears at the entrance to a London shop. He marches [...]