In 1902, Wilhelm’s eldest son, the twenty-year-old Crown Prince and heir Frederick William, fell in love with an American girl from a prominent family and actually proposed, giving her a huge engagement ring.  The situation was widely discussed in many … Continue reading →

All educated Americans today know that the ruler of pre-WWI Imperial Germany was Kaiser Wilhelm, and such information is presented in virtually all modern historical texts.  However, this appears to merely represent a residue of wartime anti-German propaganda. Prior to … Continue reading →

Christina Agapakis, a blogger at Scientific American, recently discovered an interesting 1894 article describing the speculations of renowned early chemist Marcellin Berthelot on the likely nature of foods in the year 2000. Instead of agriculture, The epicure of the future … Continue reading →

A recent discussion of UNZ.org in the Wilson Quarterly, noted that some of the early opinions of the greatest works of Marcel Proust and James Joyce were hardly overwhelmingly favorable. For example: A browse through The Bookman, a New York-based … Continue reading →

As is well-known, the decade of the 1920s represented a sharp peak of anti-immigration sentiment in the United States, leading to the Immigration Act of 1924, which largely closed the door to heavy foreign immigration for over forty years. Furthermore, … Continue reading →

Although almost entirely forgotten today, a century ago Edward Alsworth Ross probably ranked as one of America’s most prominent academics and public intellectuals. Being one of the earliest sociologists, he published a couple of dozen books and perhaps hundreds of … Continue reading →

Jacques Barzun is a prominent intellectual theorist of education, and he is certainly the most prominent theorist of education who celebrated his one-hundredth birthday several years ago. As someone who began his academic career in the mid-1920s, he has surely … Continue reading →