History
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The Business Trip
In the film, a father’s arrest is disguised from his young son as a “business trip.” In my own family, the euphemism wasn’t far off — an uncle who told the wrong joke simply vanished from Belgrade, and turned up months later on Goli Otok, a barren island where Tito’s regime sent its “enemies” to…
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He Didn’t Even Know What Grant Looked Like
When Robert E. Lee rode up to Appomattox Courthouse to surrender, he didn’t even know what Ulysses S. Grant looked like. Grant recognized him instantly. What happened between them that day was generous, almost gentle — and Grant himself would later write that he felt anything but triumph watching the South go down.
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The Man Who Might Be Jim
Twain didn’t write the hardest word in American literature by accident — leaving it out would have been like leaving water out of a description of the Pacific Ocean. But the more surprising story is the one behind Jim: a real friendship, thirty years long, with a Black farmer named John T. Lewis who may…