(NYTimes) - “What Feet Samuels does for a living is the best he can, which is the same thing many other guys in this town do for a living. He hustles some around the race tracks and crap games and prize fights, picking up a few bobs here and there as a runner for the bookmakers, or scalping bets, ...

(uboat.net) - With the japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbour on Dec 7, 1941 Hitler was bound by a promise to Japan to also declare war on the US. He did so promptly on Dec 11 and after that all restrictions on German U-boats (which had been attacked and hunted by US convoy escorts in the North A...

(HistoryNet) - On September 11, 1777, an army of 12,500 British troops who had recently landed at the northern end of the Chesapeake Bay marched through Pennsylvania toward the patriot capital of Philadelphia. Covering their flank, a detachment of green-clad British marksmen hid in the woods along B...

(LesTout) - Recently, NATO troops in Afghanistan have had trouble with one of the army's main supply routes, the Khyber Pass. This should come as no surprise to any student of history, the Khyber region has always been a hard place to manage. The British fought three wars in Afghanistan, in the 19th...

(Slate) - Presidential comparison isn't the most rigorous form of political analysis. Bill Clinton was the next JFK, until he was Warren G. Harding, and then Jimmy Carter. George W. Bush was Teddy Roosevelt until he was James Buchanan. And Barack Obama, if you believe everything you read, combines t...

Yummy tumbleweed. (LesTout) - There are a lot of statistics flying around about how bad the economy is doing, but they all seem rather abstract. The old joke about a recession being when your neighbor loses his job and a depression is when you lose yours, seems a little more apt. My own definition s...

(NYTimes) - What F. Scott Fitzgerald called the “fresh, green breast of the New World� that greeted Henry Hudson 400 years ago has been reimagined by a senior ecologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society.Drawing on 18th-century British military maps, the ecologist, Eric W. Sanderson, has pains...

(Historynet) - When fabled bison hunter William “Buffalo Bill� Cody first staged his Wild West show in 1883, he needed more than heroic cowboys, villainous Indians, teeming horses and roaming buffalo to transform it from a circus into a sensation. He needed star power. And there was one man who ...

(boingboing) - Holy cow, did I ever enjoy reading Veeps: Profiles in Insignificance by Bill Kelter and Wayne Shellabarger, a snarky, thorough look at the foibles and missteps of the vice presidency from John Adams to Dick Cheney. I had no idea how completely comic the office has been through the yea...

Presidential inaugurals have a cherished history at the Smithsonian. On March 6, 1865, Lincoln's second inaugural ball was held at the U.S. Patent Office, now the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery (currently on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Honor of You...