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World War II

Highly Ineffective People

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…

The Grace of God

by George McGovern,

An excerpt from George McGovern's diary.

Unjust Cause

by Andrew Cockburn,

Historian Gar Alperovitz on the decision to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki

American Imperium

by Andrew J. Bacevich,

Untangling truth and fiction in an age of perpetual war

Oath of the Elbe

by Walter Kempowski,

From Swansong 1945: A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich, edited by Walter Kempowski, out this month from W. W. Norton. On April 25, 1945, Soviet…

Giving Up the Ghost

by Leslie Jamison,

The eternal allure of life after death

The War of the World

by Rebecca Solnit,

On a single day in July of 1943, more than 500 Allied planes bombed Rome, killing 1,500 people. The city got off lightly compared with Naples, which was attacked 200…

Introducing the February Issue

by Ellen Rosenbush,

Christopher Ketcham investigates Cliven Bundy’s years-long battle with the BLM, Michael Ames examines the economics of incarceration, Annie Murphy reflects on Bolivia’s lost coast, and more

Body Count

by Alexander Kluge,Translated by Martin Chalmers,

By Alexander Kluge, from Air Raid, an account of the destruction of Halberstadt, Germany, by American bomber squadrons on April 8, 1945, out this month from Seagull Books. Kluge is…

The Global Game

by Simon Kuper,

By Simon Kuper, a columnist for the Financial Times, from lectures delivered in April at Occidental and Pitzer Colleges. Kuper’s books on soccer include Soccernomics, which he co-wrote with Stefan…

Invasion Diary

by Vernon Bartlett,

Tuesday, June 6. I turned on the radio for the eight a.m. news. The announcer spoke about special warnings which had been broadcast to our Allies in Western Europe. There…