"The Book of Jewish Food" by Claudia Roden.

The Desk Dispatch: Layla Schlack on What Jewish Food Means to Her

"Frustratingly, Talmudically, Jewish food is simply what Jews eat," she writes.
A parade in Rio de Janeiro consisting of Brazilian Expeditionary Force soldiers and American 10th Mountain Division soldiers.

Skis, Samba, and Smoking Snakes: An Unlikely World War II Partnership

What happened when glacier-goggled American ski troops and samba-loving Brazilian soldiers fought side-by-side halfway across the world?
Jean-Jacques Dessalines

The U.S. Has Never Forgiven Haiti

What 220 years of Haitian independence means for how we tell the story of abolition and the development of human rights around the world.
Cuban refugee children.

When the U.S. Welcomed the ‘Pedro Pan’ Migrants of Cuba

Cold War America resettled unaccompanied minors as an anti-communist imperative. Today, the nation forgets this history.
A baby awaiting adoption near Guatemala City.

Guatemala’s Baby Brokers: How Thousands of Children Were Stolen For Adoption

Baby brokers often tricked Indigenous Mayan women into giving up newborns; kidnappers took others. International adoption is now seen as a cover for war crimes.
Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat shake hands at the White House

A Brief History of Peace Talks, Israel & the Palestinians

Who's to blame for failures in 2000, 2001 & 2008?
A faux Brazilian village constructed for Henry II and Catherine de’ Medici on the banks of the Seine in Rouen, France, and inhabited by fifty Tupinambá people who were forcibly brought there from Brazil, 1550.

The Discovery of Europe

A new book investigates the indigenous Americans who were brought to or traveled to Europe in the 1500s—a story central to the beginning of globalization.
Lagoon in Majuro Atoll with tropical trees in the background and a rainbow in the sky

On the Map

The flag of Bikini Atoll looks a lot like the American flag. It has the same red and white stripes. The resemblance is intentional.
An electrified barbed-wire fence around Fort Bliss in El Paso, Tex., near the Mexican border, in 1915 or 1916.

The Long, Ugly History of Barbed Wire at the U.S.-Mexico Border

The first barbed wire border fences were proposed to keep out Chinese migrants. They’ve been debated for over a century.
Joel Roberts Poinsett (left). The poinsettia, which takes its name from Poinsett (right).

Poinsettia Day, the Monroe Doctrine, and U.S.-Mexican Relations

The troubled history of the famous poinsettia plant.
Japanese prime minister and minister of war Hideki Tojo on trial in 1947.

Japan’s Incomplete Reckoning With World War II Crimes

Gary Bass’s new book asks why the tribunal in Tokyo after World War II was so ineffective.
A collage of Meir Kahane, a pistol, and the outline of Israel and Palestine on a yellow background.

The American Origins of Israel’s Armament Campaign

How Kahanism infiltrated the political mainstream.
Photographer shooting Henry Kissinger on Air Force One.

Notes From the Front

Henry Kissinger’s Vietnam diary shows that he knew the war was lost a decade before it ended.
The aftermath of U.S. bombs in Neak Luong, Cambodia, on Aug. 7, 1973.

Kissinger's Bombings Likely Killed Hundreds of Thousands of Cambodians and Set Path for Khmer Rouge

A Cambodian scholar who fled the Khmer Rouge as a child writes about the legacy of Henry Kissinger, who died at the age of 100 on Nov 28, 2023.
Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger, War Criminal Beloved by America's Ruling Class, Finally Dies

In a demonstration of why he was able to kill so many people and get away with it, the day of his passage will be a solemn one in Congress and newsrooms.
U.S. President Truman smiles next to the President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann

A Brief History of the US-Israel 'Special Relationship'

A historian of the Middle East examines how connections have shifted since long before the 1948 founding of the Jewish state.
Henry Kissinger, 1975.

Henry Kissinger: The Declassified Obituary

The primary sources on Kissinger’s controversial legacy.
Henry Kissinger in his office, standing behind a desk and reading a folder

The People Who Didn’t Matter to Henry Kissinger

Lauded for his strategic insights, the former secretary of state is better remembered for his callousness toward the victims of global conflict.
Jacob Schiff.

Jewish Leaders a Century Ago Had Complicated Feelings About Israel

Fierce disagreements over Zionism have played out from the movement’s inception among Jews, including community leaders who worried it would spark antisemitism.
Collage of women's profiles, CIA reports, and Osama bin Laden, by Joan Wong.

The Women Who Saw 9/11 Coming

Many of the CIA analysts who spotted the earliest signs of al-Qaeda’s rise were female. They had trouble getting their warnings heard.
Anwar El-Sadat, Jimmy Carter, and Menachem Begin after the Camp David Accords.
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Jimmy Carter and the Israel-Hamas War

How America's failures in the Palestinian-Israeli crisis of the 1970s hurt U.S. security and contributed to the current war.
Rubble in the aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima

Big Six v. Little Boy: The Unnecessary Bomb

A new book's insistence that the bomb was necessary to bring about Japan’s surrender is largely contradicted by its own evidence.
Tank on the street of Santiago, Chile.

How Pinochet's Chile Became a Laboratory for Neoliberalism

The Chicago Boys and the tragedy of the Chilean coup.
US Marines marching in Da Nang, Vietnam, 1965.

How Israel Is Borrowing From the US Playbook in Vietnam

Justifying civilian casualties has a long history.
From left: snow, three men, and several vehicles with large tires.

The U.S. Army Tried to Build a Secret Nuclear City under Greenland’s Ice

Long before Greenland’s shifting ice threatened sea level rise, it doomed one of the military’s most audacious Cold War projects.
Cover of book Seeing Red.

The State of Nature

From Jefferson's viewpoint, Native peoples could claim a title to their homelands, but they did not own that land as private property.
Enslaved people working on South Carolina Plantation.

A Historian Complicates the Racial Divide

"African Founders" corrects some of the ideological uses of Black American history.
Grandmaster Flash, DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Chuck D.
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Hip-Hop's Black Caribbean Roots

The relationship between the DJ and his MC derived from a Jamaican “toasting” tradition and its related “sound clash” culture.
Drawing of Patrice Lumumba with Congolese people in the background.

The Real Story Behind Patrice Lumumba’s Assassination

A new book sorts through the fate of the leader of the fight for Congolese independence.
Shrapnel damage to an exterior of a home in Rehovot near Tel Aviv, Israel.
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The Problem With America's Reagan-Era Approach to Terrorism

While condemning terrorism should be a no-brainer, "moral clarity" has not guaranteed sound U.S. counterterrorism policy.