Mark Twain's life (1835–1910) spanned an era that witnessed the transformation of America and the world by the Industrial Revolution. With the expansion of transportation, manufacturing, and communications technology, the focus of American life in the North began to shift from its farms and small towns to its cities. For Twain, such technological, industrial, and urban developments were the means by which America might become a more prosperous and just society and also realize the nineteenth-century ideal of universal progress.

In October 1940, Sala Garncarz was sixteen, the daughter of a rabbi and teacher and the youngest of eleven children in a poor family living in Sosnowiec, Poland, close to the German border. When her older sister Raizel was ordered to report to a Nazi forced labor camp, Sala volunteered to take her place. Neither she nor her family suspected that six weeks of required labor would stretch to almost five years of slavery. Through letters from family and friends that she managed to hide and keep safe, Letters to Sala tells the story of one young woman's experiences in the most inhumane and unimaginable of situations. An essay by historians Debórah Dwork and Robert Jan van Pelt provides

The lives of British women were transformed during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries -- the period we now call the Romantic era. In the wake of the French Revolution, political equality and something like a sexual revolution for women seemed possible, and thanks in part to Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the legal and social restrictions under which women lived were briefly but hotly contested. But by the time Victoria inherited the throne in 1837, different, gentler changes had occurred -- ones that inspired poetry, plays, and paintings as well as new ways of understanding feminine roles and sexuality. This vividly

September 11, 2001, distinguished Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis argues, was not the first time a surprise attack shattered American assumptions about national security and reshaped American grand strategy. The pattern began in 1814, when the British attacked Washington, burning the White House and the Capitol. This early violation of homeland security gave rise to a strategy of unilateralism and preemption, best articulated by John Quincy Adams, aimed at maintaining strength beyond challenge throughout the North American continent. It remained in place for over a century. Only when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 did the inadequacies of this strategy become evident: as