Alan Turing—an English mathematician, logician, and cryptanalyst—was a computer pioneer.

Down the road only a few generations, the millennium of Magna Carta, one of the great events in the establishment of civil and human rights, will arrive. Whether it will be celebrated, mourned, or ignored is not at all clear.

Alexander the Great, who ruled much of the ancient world until his death in 323 B.C., was conquered at age 32 not by an enemy, but possibly by a tiny intestinal bug.

The direct costs of World War I to the United States were: 130,000 combat deaths; 35,000 men permanently disabled; $33.5 billion

For weeks, Joseph Stalin had been plagued with dizzy spells and high blood pressure. His personal physician, Professor V. N. Vinogradov had advised that Stalin step down as head of the government for health reasons.

By the fall of 1944, it was obvious that the war in Europe was in its final year. In France, British and American forces had broken out of Normandy and were driving toward Paris and the Rhein.

The moral grandeur of Lincoln is rooted in the myth that he made a war on the South to abolish slavery. This is, at most, a Platonic noble lie designed to legitimate the Unionist regime.

The belief that dictatorship of some kind is the inevitable outcome of any attempt at radical change is one of the main barriers to people's engagement with socialist ideas today.

On the eve of 1959, the US-backed Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, instead of welcoming in what might have been his 25th year in power, spent the evening hurriedly packing his bags and preparing to flee to the Dominican Republic.

The madness that was the Democratic Republic of Congo during the period 1960-1997 sprang in large part from massive, clandestine intervention by the western powers.

Hundreds of millions of Americans took in, as gospel truth, the heavily edited stories about the end of the war. To the average American, the war’s end was such a relief that there was no questioning.

The story of escaped Nazis after the collapse of the Third Reich in 1945 has long gripped novelists and Hollywood screenwriters