World War II

Fathers, Sons, Screaming Eagles

By Joan Didion,

From Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a collection of essays that will be published next month by Knopf. The essay originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in…

Abstract Expression

By Jacob Mikanowski,

The former Yugoslavia’s enigmatic memorial architecture

Life During Wartime

By Enid Griffis,

Learning to Go to Sea on Shore, by George Wright. Originally published in the November 1918 issue of Harper’s Magazine It is a small hotel compared with the fashionable resorts…

Things to Come

By Kevin Baker,

On March 30, during one of the daily briefings on the COVID-19 outbreak that had so captured the hearts and minds of New Yorkers, Governor Andrew Cuomo uttered a sentence…

Survive and Advance

By Albert Camus, Translated by Madison Mainwaring,

A letter written in 1943 in response to a request from the Committee of National Liberation in Algiers to outline the mood in France, which was under Nazi occupation at…

Killing Time

By Jean Giono, Translated by Jody Gladding,

From Occupation Journal, a diary that Giono kept during the Nazi occupation of France, which was published last month by Archipelago Books. Translated from the French by Jody Gladding. tuesday,…

The Most Hated Nation

By John Dos Passos,

It was the foggy end of a drizzly day. Along the lunch counter of the Ferry Dock Tavern, gray-haired men in overalls and leather jackets were eating oyster stew. A…

Freedom from Inspiration

By Kevin Baker,

The fight over which of our public monuments should remain where they are is as complicated as the American past they commemorate. For all the fighting over who and what…