Mitoe Matsumoto was three years and four months old when an atomic bomb exploded over Nagasaki at 11.02am on 9 August 1945. Eighty-one years later, the 84-year-old Japanese survivor says the experience
Global political history is punctuated by state entities that, after vanishing from the international stage, have reemerged in new forms—sometimes radically transformed, sometimes strikingly faithful to their origins. These revived states—polities that
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A new study reveals that West Germany’s early postwar civil service relied heavily on former Nazi officials, raising questions about the foundations of the young democracy. According to research published in The
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Eighty years after the end of the Second World War, Japan is beginning to acknowledge a group of victims long overlooked — the children of traumatised veterans whose post-war lives were marked
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In July, a few days after the centenary of Frantz Fanon’s birth, I had lunch with his daughter, Mireille Fanon Mendès-France. When I commented that Fanon had died so young, at thirty-nine,
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Ayano Hirashima was just eight years old when she became a living witness to one of the darkest turning points in human history—not once, but twice. On the morning of August 6,
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A long-overlooked act of wartime humanity has finally received the recognition it deserves. Eighty years after American and Japanese soldiers laid down their arms on a remote Okinawan beach, descendants, locals, and
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From the Pacific edges of Port Angeles to the warm winds of the Lion Nation, the sea carries stories that refuse to be forgotten. It has been just over a month since
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J. Randy Taraborrelli’s JFK: The Kennedy Years constitutes an ambitious, if occasionally florid, exegesis of John F. Kennedy’s life, with a particular emphasis on his personal entanglements and political ascendancy. This voluminous
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Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist offers a perspicuous and disquieting exploration of the psychological interplay between Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, a US Army psychiatrist, and Hermann Göring, a preeminent Nazi
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Eighty years after the world’s first nuclear detonation, the National Security Archive (NSA) has released a new collection of declassified documents, eyewitness accounts, and rare historical footage that provide a stark reminder
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by Durga Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Golden Throne: The Curse of a King is a masterful work of historical biography and narrative, weaving a vivid tapestry of the late Ottoman Empire under
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In 1957, Mao Zedong oversaw the publication of Socialist Upsurge in China’s Countryside, a three-volume collection of articles compiled by the Communist Party of China for the political education of the peasantry. The
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During the JVP’s second insurgency, various foreign intelligence services took notice, and from early 1989, the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency began providing military advisory support to the Sri Lankan government to suppress
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The chasm between the West and the Rest of the world has come to its apogee in these difficult days when US fighter jets fly above Isfahan and NATO countries suffer from
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S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike was not created by D.S. Senanayake. Bandaranaike was a leader who emerged from the Sinhala Maha Sabha. D.S. enlisted Bandaranaike to secure the Sinhala Maha Sabha votes for the 1947
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