Tales From The Black Chambers
THE MAKING AND BREAKING OF CODES AND CIPHERS HAS PLAYED AN EXCITING AND OFTEN CRUCIAL PART IN AMERICAN HISTORYClifford B. HicksApril 1973By choice, cryptographers are an unsung and anonymous lot. In...
View ArticleThe Relief Of Fort Pickens
WAR WAS DAYS AWAY, A UNION STRONGHOLD WAS THREATENED, AND THROUGH A FOG OF RUMOR, DOUBT, CONTRADICTORY ORDERS, AND OUTRIGHT LIES THE ARMY AND NAVY SET OUT TO HELPJames CooleyFebruary 1974A good place...
View ArticleGaribaldi And Lincoln
Would the great fighter come over for the Union? Italian freedom and lead troops Lincoln hoped soHerbert MitgangOctober 1975In the summer of 1861, when the newspaper generals in New York clamored for...
View ArticleThe Ten Best Secretaries Of State…
The EditorsDecember 1981When the first Secretary of State, Thomas Jefferson, took office in 1790, his entire staff consisted of just six people, including himself and a part-time translator. The...
View ArticleWhat If?
Conjectural or speculative history can be a silly game, as in “What if the Roman legions had machine guns?” But this historian argues that to enlarge our knowledge and understanding it sometimes makes...
View ArticleLincoln’s Life Preserver
To stave off despair, the President relied on a sense of humor that was rich, self-deprecating—and surprisingly bawdyCharles B. StrozierFebruary/march 1982A great “intensity of thought,” Abraham...
View ArticleTargets Of Opportunity
MATTERS OF FACTGeoffrey C. WardApril/may 1984“ASSASSINATION IS NOT an American practice or habit,” wrote Secretary of State William H. Seward on July 15, 1864, “and one so vicious and so desperate...
View ArticleMatters Of Fact
Vidal’s LincolnGeoffrey C. WardAugust/september 1984WHEN ABRAHAM LINCOLN’S wartime secretaries, John Hay and John G. Nicolay, serialized their life of the President in Century magazine in 1885,...
View ArticleHow We Got Lincoln
Every presidential election is exciting when it happens. Then the passing of time usually makes the outcome seem less than crucial. But after more than a century and a quarter, the election of 1860...
View Article“Frozen Asset” Or Forty-ninth State?
(Congress debates acquiring Alaska, 1867)October 1958R EPRESENTATIVE C ADWALLADER C. W ASHBURN (on whether to make an appropriation)“All the evidence we have in regard to the country goes to show its...
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