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Determined not to leave anything to chance, fire-eaters unleashed a storm of propaganda to persuade hesitant South Carolinians. They printed more than 150,000 pamphlets in a matter of months. Some pamphlets targeted non-slaveholders—a narrow majority of the white population—arguing that slavery served as a bulwark against the possibility of white servility. One tract insisted that non-slaveholders had even more at stake in maintaining the peculiar institution than slaveholders, for “no white man at the South serves another as a body servant, to clean his boots, [and] wait on his table…. His blood revolts against this.” A Republican victory put this racial hierarchy, so important to poor and middling whites, at risk.

Other pamphlets aimed to boil the blood of slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike. Lincoln’s election, wrote planter John Townsend, portended “emancipation…then poverty, political equality…insurrection, war of extermination between the two races, and death.” Fire-eating newspapers joined the chorus too. “Should the dark hour come, we must be the chief sufferers,” warned a “Southern-Rights Lady” in the Charleston Mercury. “Enemies in our midst, abolition fiends inciting them to crimes the most appalling…we degraded beneath the level of brutes.” The purity of Southern ladies hung in the balance. Alarmed by the specter of race war and miscegenation, whites across the state rushed to join militia units, vigilante associations and militia companies , bringing together planters, yeomen and poor whites to defend the state against the danger of Republican ascendance. Class distinctions, more formidable in South Carolina than in other states, receded as Low Country planters marched together with the rabble. The secessionists’ arguments were winning the day.

Last month, the University of California system announced that a version of the Big History Project course could be counted in place of a more traditional World History class, paving the way for the state’s 1,300 high schools to offer it.

“We didn’t know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course into high school,” Gates told me. “How does one go about it? What did the guy who liked biology — who did he call and say, ‘Hey, we should have biology in high school?’ It was pretty uncharted territory. But it was pretty cool.”

The American high school experience, at least as we now know it, is a relatively recent invention. Attendance did not start to become mandatory until the 1850s, and the notion of a nationwide standardized curriculum didn’t emerge until the turn of the century. But by the early 1900s, most children were taking the same list of classes that remains recognizable to this day: English, math, science and some form of history. For much of the 20th century, this last requirement would usually take the form of Western Civilization, a survey course that focused on European countries from around the rise of Rome through modernity.

Romney 2016: The 'definition of insanity'?

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul probably captured the sentiment of most of Mr Romney's potential presidential adversaries when he said the prospect of the 2012 Republican nominee running again and expecting a different result is the "definition of insanity".

"I think he's had his chance, and I think it's time for some fresh blood,"

RUTH BADER GINSBURG isn’t planning on going anywhere any time soon.

The second woman to be appointed to the Supreme Court, she’s part of the generation who came of age after World War II and led a revolution that transformed women’s legal rights, as well as their role in the public world. There’s a famous story about the dean at Harvard Law inviting Ginsburg and her tiny group of fellow female law students to dinner, then asking them how they’d justify having taken a place that could have gone to a man.

“The kind of raw excitement that surrounds her is palpable,” Carmon said. “There’s a counterintuitiveness. We have a particular vision of someone who’s a badass — a 350-pound rapper. And she’s this tiny Jewish grandmother. She doesn’t look like our vision of power, but she’s so formidable, so unapologetic, and a survivor in every sense of the word.”

In a way, what one division of American soldiers and marines did there in June of 1918 is responsible for the carnage that took place to the east throughout the summer and fall that followed: Had they not attacked and taken those woods from the Germans, many historians believe, Germany would have won the war that month.

Plenty of others believe it, too. “If the Americans don’t stop the Germans at Belleau Wood, the Germans take Paris — the war is finished,” Jacques Krabal told me. Mr. Krabal is the mayor of Château-Thierry; every day, as he walks about the city, he can see, looming over it from the heights above town, the massive American monument built a decade later to commemorate Belleau Wood and the battles that followed it that summer.

In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched a series of offensives in France designed to win the war before too many more American troops could get there. The first two were exceedingly successful; the third was, too, until a fledgling American force pushed back at Château-Thierry. The Germans instead took up positions behind formidable defenses in nearby Belleau Wood — only about 40 miles from Paris, the closest they’d gotten since 1914. The French were panicked: As their roads clogged with terrified refugees, Allied commanders confided to one another that the war was lost, and drew up plans to abandon the French capital. Their only hope was to drive the Germans out of Belleau Wood somehow, but French commanders dreaded the prospect of such an assault. So they asked General John J. Pershing to do it.

Nancy Reagan dies in Los Angeles at 94: Former first lady was President Reagan's closest advisor

First Lady Nancy Davis Reagan, whose devotion to her husband made her a formidable behind-the-scenes player in his administrations and one of the most influential presidential wives in modern times, died Sunday of congestive heart failure, her office said

Although Reagan pursued some programs of her own as first lady, she considered her most important role promoting the political, physical and mental well-being of Ronald Reagan.

Is Donald Trump another Barry Goldwater?

Some Democrats are giddy about the possibility of Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination.

But other Democrats, including former President Bill Clinton, fear Trump could prove a formidable general election opponent.

Advisers to Hillary Clinton, including former President Bill Clinton, believe that her campaign made serious miscalculations by forgoing early attacks on Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and failing to undercut his archliberal message before it grew into a political movement that has now put him within striking distance of beating Mrs. Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire.

They have asked her advisers about the strength of the campaign’s data modeling and turnout assumptions in Iowa, given that her 2008 campaign’s predictions were so inaccurate.

As the Democratic rivals prepare for what is likely to be a contentious televised debate on Sunday night, the Clintons are particularly concerned that her “rational message,” in the words of an aide, is not a fit with a restless Democratic primary electorate

At a moment when France, in cooperatin with Britain, is negotiating with Germany with a view to lessening the restrictions which the treaty of Versailles placed upon her aviation-activities. French officials are concerned to learn of a further effort on the part of the Reich to build up just outside the borders of the country a formidable chain of German aviation factories.

America’s decline relative to a rising China has sparked interest among academics about power shifts in the international order—whether they can happen peacefully and under what conditions; what precedents exist and what they tell us. Now comes an important book, Twilight of the Titans, by Joseph M. Parent and Paul K. McDonald, who use quantitative analysis of power transitions to analyze the problem. What they find provides a warning to a rising China, and a road map for a declining United States to regain its standing.

The Harvard political scientist Graham Allison called the problem “the Thucydides Trap,” in which the country in relative decline so fears the rise of a challenger that it chooses to go to war to prevent it. And while Allison’s book Destined for War has its detractors, it served the worthwhile purpose of drawing us all back to Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian Wars and sounding the alarm that U.S. policies designed to confront China risked accelerating American decline.

History has really seen only one peaceful hegemonic transition: Britain to the United States in the late 19th century. It remains an open question whether nuclear weapons will stabilize hegemonic transition.

Florida lawmakers bucked the National Rifle Association on Wednesday to pass new firearms regulations and create a program for arming some school employees in a rare act of Republican compromise on the divisive issue of gun violence.

A bipartisan vote of 67 to 50 in the state House ended an emotional three-week process, during which the state’s legislative leadership toured the bloodstained hallways at the high school and thousands of students marched on the state capital in Tallahassee to demand change.

After weeks of debate, lawmakers approved a bill that would impose a three-day waiting period for most purchases of long guns and raise the minimum age for purchasing those weapons to 21.

A growing number of critics think these tech giants need to be broken up or regulated as Standard Oil and AT&T once were.

antitrust regulators have a narrow test: Does their size leave consumers worse off?

By that standard, there isn’t a clear case for going after big tech—at least for now. They are driving down prices and rolling out new and often improved products and services every week.

Incensed by lawmakers’ recent attempts to divert state money from public education and curtail the power of employee unions, public school teachers could prove to be a formidable force in upcoming Texas elections.

The efforts haven’t gone unnoticed by conservative groups and lawmakers, who have questioned the legality of tactics used by one of the groups, Texas Educators Vote, and participating school districts including Austin, Eanes, Del Valle and Pflugerville

According to previously unpublished findings, the blue-collar whites at the core of his coalition have lost faith over his first year in office.

Together, the results crystallize the bet Trump is making for his own reelection in 2020, and for his party’s chances in November’s election: that he can mobilize enough support among older and blue-collar (as well as rural and evangelical) whites to offset the intense resistance he’s provoked from groups that are all growing in the electorate: Millennials, minorities, and college-educated whites—particularly the women among them.

Previously unpublished results from the nonpartisan online-polling firm SurveyMonkey show Trump losing ground over his tumultuous first year not only with the younger voters and white-collar whites who have always been skeptical of him, but also with the blue-collar whites central to his coalition.

He received ordination as the most powerful lama in Tibet only to turn his back on monastic life. As a young adult he spent evenings in taverns with his friends and enjoyed sexual relations with women. He is sometimes called the "playboy" Dalai Lama.

a young man who was sensitive and intelligent, even if undisciplined.

After a childhood locked away in a country monastery with hand-picked tutors, his assertion of independence is understandable. The violent end of his life makes his story a tragedy, not a joke.

The long and distinguished annals of the British army contain numerous examples of courage, endurance and devotion to duty

The one hundred and thirty-six day defence of Alicante belongs to the latter category, and it is fitting in this, the two hundred and sixtieth anniversary of the siege, to recall the bravery of the Allied garrison, and above all of the man who was the very soul and inspiration of the defence both before and after his gallant death, namely the Governor, Major-General John Richards

The War of the Spanish Succession was more than five years old before Alicante figured in its history. Three campaigns had already been fought in the Iberian Peninsula when an Allied force appeared in the offing, determined to secure Alicante for the cause of the Habsburg claimant to the throne of Spain, Charles III (later the Emperor Charles VI).

The name Philip was Greek and uncommon in the Western Europe of the 11th century

He was only seven when his father Henry I had him crowned at Rheims as co-king

Philip’s mother and Count Baldwin V of Flanders acted as his regents

Of all the resources lacking in the Covid-19 pandemic, the one most desperately needed in the United States is a unified national strategy, as well as the confident, coherent and consistent leadership to see it carried out

The country cannot go from one mixed-message news briefing to the next, and from tweet to tweet, to define policy priorities. It needs a science-based plan that looks to the future rather than merely reacting to latest turn in the crisis.

rom an epidemiological perspective, the current debate, which pits human life against long-term economics, presents a false choice.

“What we see with President Donald Trump and his cast of sycophants and co-conspirators . . . is a rare thing: All seven deadly sins on display at once.”

The answer is presidential morals do matter, but only somewhat—though more than we realized until Trump demonstrated how costly their absence can be. Political wisdom, which itself requires certain virtues, is important, but so too are other skills like interpersonal and administrative ones.    

Focusing on Presidents Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, and Lyndon Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin writes that the four presidents were “at their formidable best, when guided by a sense of moral purpose, they were able to channel their ambitions and summon their talents to enlarge the opportunities and lives of others.”

Taiwan’s Military Now Overshadowed by China’s

Taiwan’s armed forces, by contrast, have fallen way behind, struggling to recruit enough soldiers and sailors — and to equip those they have

A major obstacle is that countries that might sell it the most sophisticated weaponry are increasingly reluctant to do so for fear of provoking China, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory.