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Woodrow Wilson
In the hundred years since his death, features of Woodrow Wilson’s philosophy have become central to international politics and American foreign policy.
Editor's Note: Michael Mandelbaum is professor emeritus at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and the author most recently of The Titans of the Twentieth Century: How They Made History and t
A century after the guns fell silent along the Western Front, the work they did there remains of incalculable importance to the age we inhabit and the people we are.
We republish an essay President Hoover wrote for American Heritage in 1958 in which he recounted his experiences as an aide to Woodrow Wilson at the peace talks after World War I. This important first-person narrative candidly details the difficulties that Wilson faced in what Hoover called “the greatest drama of intellectual leadership in all history.”
Reprinted from the June 1958 issue of American Heritage.
Former Secretary of State Dean Acheson recalled his time as a "driver" in the horse-drawn artillery, after President Wilson discovered that the United States had practically no army.
From "Practice Range," American Heritage, February, 1968
In 1917, fed up with the inaction of conservative suffragists, Alice Paul decided on the unorthodox strategy of pressuring the president directly.
Women suffragis
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On a busy Wednesday morning last August, President and Mrs. Clinton found an hour to speak with me in the Oval Office of the White House.
Of all the Allied leaders, argues FDR's biographer, only Roosevelt saw clearly the shape of the new world they were fighting to create.
AFTER HALF A CENTURY, IT IS HARD TO APPROACH FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, EXCEPT through a minefield of clichés. Theories of FDR, running the gamut from artlessness to mystification, have long paraded before our eyes.
Seventy-five years after the guns fell silent along the Western Front, the work they did there remains of incalculable importance to the age we inhabit and the people we are.
In many ways, 1918 is closer to us than we are inclined to think.
The sad lessons of 1919 are eloquent regarding today’s endlessly wretched situation in the Balkans.
The chronicles of our time will someday record how President Clinton struggled in the earliest months of his administration to find an appropriate response for the United States to the civil war and “ethnic cleansing” taking place in Bosnia.
The Cold War was an anomaly. More often than not, the world’s two greatest states have lived together in uneasy amity. And what now?
Exactly 200 years after George Washington’s inauguration as the first president of the United States and 300 years after Peter the Great’s ascent to the Russian throne, a new chapter opened in the history of the relations of the two greatest states of the wor
President Woodrow Wilson proclaimed the first Mother’s Day on May 10.
You Asked for It
When American Heritage suggested last year that I put together the article that became “101 Things Every College Graduate Should Know about American History,” I accepted the assignment eagerly.
An old, familiar show is back in Washington. There’s a new cast, of course, but the script is pretty much the same as ever. Here’s the program.
WHEN THE IRAN-CONTRA STORY BROKE LAST NOVEMBER, A NUMBER OF public figures as well as news commentators put the revelations in a historical context.
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When Beatrix Farrand arrived to work on a garden, clients knew they were in the presence of someone extraordinary.
A noted historian’s very personal tour of the city where so much of the American past took shape, with excursions into institutions famous and obscure, the archives that are the nation’s memory, and the haunts of some noble ghosts.
The only one of our presidents who retired to Washington after leaving office was Woodrow Wilson, and for all his celebrated professorial background he certainly did it in style.
This is not a test. It’s the real thing.
How precise is the educated American’s understanding of the history of our country? I don’t mean exact knowledge of minor dates, or small details about the terms of laws, or questions like “Who was secretary of war in 1851?” ( Answer: Charles M.
Banking as we’ve known it for centuries is dead, and we don’t really know the consequences of what is taking its place. A historical overview.
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SENT ON A HOPELESSLY VAGUE ASSIGNMENT BY WOODROW WILSON, AMERICAN SOLDIERS FOUND THEMSELVES IN THE MIDDLE OF A FEROCIOUS SQUABBLE AMONG BOLSHEVIKS, COSSACKS, CZECHS, JAPANESE, AND OTHERS
During mid-August, 1918, American forces began landing at Vladivostok, the capital of the Soviet Maritime Territory, in one of the more curious side shows of the First World War.
Wilson's letters to Mary were frequent and intimate, but it would have been political suicide to marry a divorcee by the post-Victorian standards of the time
On the afternoon of September 18, 1915, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States and a widower, wrote a brief note that he knew might change the rest of his life. The note, sent by messenger, was for Edith Boiling Galt, to whom he was secretly engaged.
Of the skyscrapers that sprang up in American cities in the early years of this century and embodied in masonry and steel the swaggering vitality of American technology and American business enterprise, none took so firm a grip on the public imagination as th
Unlike many other flags, which evolved long after the character of their nations was established, the American flag was born with the Revolution, and few if any national emblems have inspired the veneration we accord it.
It became apparent that this influenza was a first-rate killer.
In the last week of October, 1918, 2,700 Americans died “over there” in battle against the kaiser’s army. The same week 21,000 Americans died of influenza in the United States.
An interview with the famed suffragette, Alice Paul
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