FootNotes

Ask any British student about the Somme or any French or German student about Verdun and you are likely to get a quick response. It may be a response about an ancestor who fought in one of the war’s...

Early American military history is too often relegated to just a few early pages of military history textbooks or a few lines of general textbooks about American History, but the subject is vital to our understanding of both fields....

When I signed on to do my volume in the Oxford History of the United States, several volumes had already appeared, so I knew what was expected. I also knew that I wanted to address not just fellow academic...

In the Cold War years, the literature on China’s development focused on two themes. One was that trade and more generally participation in the international marketplace is unlikely to be helpful for poor countries in search of economic development....

Slavery lasted for 250 years just in the territory of the United States, and for half a millennium in the Atlantic world. Teaching about it is therefore a huge assignment. I will begin with a wide-angle, panoramic lens, and...

Most high schools and even colleges and universities do not offer courses on technology in America, which is extraordinary because technology plays such a dominant role in our life. For instance, of the many revolutions invoked by the invention...

Throes of Democracy Walter A. McDougall, professor of international relations at University of Pennsylvania and author of Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, reviewed how, after an unprecedented economic boom, by June 1857, the New York...

Twenty-five years ago, when I began to contemplate a dissertation topic concerning women’s work on Civil War battlefields, a prominent historian asked me, “Were there any women at the front?” Since then, historians have documented the lives of women...

China’s legal encounter with the West began unhappily in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the close of the preceding century, the Qianlong emperor had dismissively informed an emissary from King George III that China had no...

No story in American history has captured the popular imagination better than that of Abraham Lincoln’s youth. A poor boy growing up in what was then a remote area, enduring the tragic death of his mother at an early...