Ralph Bunche, American political scientist and civil rights advocate, was born August 7, 2009. For his mediation between ethnic groups in Palestine, Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950, becoming the first person of color in the history of the Prize to earn the honor…
The Rise and Fall of Communism
by Archie Brown
When the Soviet Union unraveled, so did the last vestiges of the notion that Communism was a viable means of organizing society. It did not deliver, to say the least….
Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 (Americans and the California Dream)
by Kevin Starr
California in the 1950s is collectively remembered as a collage of tailfins, swimming pools, and modernist architecture, a time when any hardworking sap could own a single-family home in the suburbs….
Dennis Ross and David Makovsky’s Myths, Illusions, and Peace: Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East
Larry Samuel has long followed the rich. In 2000, JP Morgan hired him to do what he calls “a sort of anthropological study of wealth culture.” He repeated his study — dubbed “Wealthology” — again five years later, after the burst of the dot-com bubble and the rise of the hedge fund, segmenting his subject by age, residence, gender. For his new book….
Orson Welles was born on May 6, 1915, and directed his most acclaimed film, Citizen Kane, at age 26. Years later, after a couple disastrous movies and a sojourn in Europe, he would reunite with one of its stars, Joseph Cotton, in The Third Man. Welles' character, Harry Lime, is the missing center of the movie until he appears, finally, and explains his motives for entering a less-than-savory line of work....
