20th century

From a letter written in 1905 by Friedrich Trump, Donald Trump’s grandfather, to Luitpold, prince regent of Bavaria. Trump had been ordered to leave Bavaria for failing to complete mandatory…

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From the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, published in 1944 by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services. The manual, which was declassified in 2008, was intended for distribution to citizens of enemy…

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From a letter written in July 1961 by the psychiatrist Howard Rome, who treated Ernest Hemingway at the Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, before the writer’s suicide earlier that month. The…

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I was chief inmate clerk at a prison housing nearly three thousand convicts, and it was part of my duty to keep an up-to-the-minute record of the inmate population. When…

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Only once have we elected a really ignorant man to the Presidency. Andrew Jackson was almost completely innocent of book-learning when he came to the White House. Furthermore, he was…

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From an interview with the philosopher George Steiner that was conducted in 2014 by Laure Adler, a journalist. The interview appears in A Long Saturday, which will be published in…

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What informants taught an intelligence officer

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A young writer finds his voice on the radio

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Greeting the holidays in an age of mass incarceration

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