Lawyer, judge, banker, classics professor, and councilman, Thomas Mellon greatly influenced the fortunes of his hometown, Pittsburgh, throughout the nineteenth century. In the process, he became one of the city's most important business leaders, and...

"The international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm", writes Charles Hill in this powerful work on the practice of international relations. "It is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out". A distingu...

The world spins in economic turmoil, and who can tell what will happen next? Cold numbers and simple statistical projections don't take into account social, financial, or political factors that can dramatically alter the economic course of a nation o...

According to the federal Office of Minority Health, African Americans "are affected by serious diseases and health conditions at far greater rates than other Americans". In fact, African Americans suffer an estimated 85,000 excess deaths every year f...

Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) ranks with Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pasternak as one of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets. Her suicide at the age of forty-eight was the tragic culmination of a life beset by loss and hardship. T...

"Alphabets and names make games and everybody has a name and all the same they have in a way to have a birthday" muses Gertrude Stein in "To Do: A Book of Alphabets and Birthdays". Written in 1940 and intended as a follow-up to her children's book "T...

An American painter usually associated with the Precisionist movement, George Copeland Ault (1891-1948) created works that provide a unique window on to the uncertainty and despair of the Second World War. Despite early commercial success in the 1920...

The 1990s brought surprising industrial development in emerging economies around the globe: firms in countries not previously known for their high-technology industries moved to the forefront in new Information Technologies (IT) by using different bu...

The collapse of General Motors captured headlines in early 2009, but as Alex Taylor writes in this in-depth dissection of the car manufacturer's undoing, GM's was a meltdown forty years in the making. Drawing on more than thirty years of experience a...

With the creation of the dramatic Supper at Emmaus and a series of intimate oil sketches of Christ on oak panels, Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) overturned the entire history of Christian art. Traditionally, when depicting Christ, artists had relied...