Boston Brahmins traced their families back to the Mayflower. New York’s upper crust was dubbed by Edith Wharton as the “tribe”. They were fabulously wealthy trust fund babies who attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton. They set a glittering path between their vast country estates, their townhomes, academic appointments and government service.

Yet in the early 1900’s these trust fund babies were deeply worried. Their cozy world was being invaded by immigrants who didn’t look like them or speak American English. Between 1890 and 1910, over 11 million European immigrants arrived, an average of 550,000 per year. (By comparison, about 1.3 million immigrants arrived in the European Union in 2015 before the door slammed shut.)

About 150 miles south of Leningrad is the town of Demyansk. In 1941, the German Army II Corps captured the town during the invasion of Soviet Russia. They were soon surrounded and had to be supplied by air, like a mini-Stalingrad, until a relief column opened a corridor to them in 1942. The corridor was only six miles wide at the Lovat River at the western edge of the pocket.

It’s not often that we are invited to a museum exhibit full of artifacts that everyone knows were stolen. I had that opportunity in 1992 when the Dallas Museum of Art held a special exhibit of the Quedlinburg Treasure. How these artifacts came to north Texas is a sordid tale of greed and official indifference.

The stolen artifacts came from an abbey later converted to a Lutheran church in Quedlinburg, Germany and some pieces dated to the 10th century. The collection included jewel-encrusted books and reliquaries with ivory inlays.

General Dietrich von Choltitz didn’t look like a hero. He was a chubby little Prussian from Silesia (now southwestern Poland) who joined the military because all the men in his family were soldiers. He had no sense of humor or charisma and his career advanced mostly due to his rigid habit of never questioning his orders. He also had a reputation for destroying cities.

The disease arrived in Messina, Sicily aboard a merchant ship returning from a Crimean port. The sailors had black lumps in their armpits and groins about the size of an egg or an apple. The black swellings oozed blood and pus and spread over the men’s bodies as boils and black spots caused by internal bleeding. A revoltingly foul odor emanated from their bodies.

March 1942 was better for civilians in Leningrad than the prior three months. In March, civilian deaths due to starvation, illness, hypothermia and the constant bombardment decreased to 98,966. The daily bread ration for manual laborers increased to 500 grams (17.6 ounces). The worst of the starving time was over.

The starving time “was when life ended and existence began”, said one survivor. About 2.5 million civilians, including 400,000 children were trapped when Leningrad was cut off from the rest of the Soviet Union. Our closest contemporary example is the city of Idlib, Syria into which civilians were herded so that Bashar al-Assad’s forces could more easily bomb and starve them to death.

Desperation leads to innovation in wartime. In 1942, the Allies were desperate because they were losing the war. Japan was winning in the Far East, the Afrika Korps was winning in North Africa, and the Wehrmacht had reached Stalingrad. U-boats were sinking supply ships in the North Atlantic.

In desperation, Britain and the U.S. decided to create a unique commando force, consisting of Canadian and U.S. soldiers. They gave it an innocuous sounding name, First Special Service Force (FSSF). Robert T. Frederick was appointed commander. He was a West Point graduate with a reputation for being opinionated but having a flair for organization.

Ancient Egyptian pharaonic culture stretched for millennia of kingdoms, dynasties, foreign invasions and civil war. The best known period today is the 18th Dynasty of the New Kingdom (c. 1549 – 1298 BC), thanks to the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun. But poor little buck-toothed Tut was a footnote in the history of the pharaohs, overshadowed by his predecessors.

One of his 18th Dynasty predecessors was Hatshepsut. Her father was Thutmose I, a great warrior king and Ahmose, his Chief Royal Wife (yes, it was an official title). Hatshepsut became the wife and queen of her half-brother, Thutmose II. It seems revolting to us today that step-siblings would marry, but the practice is rooted in how the 18th Dynasty pharaohs came to power.

It all started with a fender bender at the corner of 5th Avenue and 67th Street.  An angry driver chased the other car through Central Park.  It ended at 65th Street where Major Terry Allen was charged with driving a motor vehicle without proper identification. A charge of disorderly conduct was added after Allen stated his opinion of the arresting officer.

In court that day in 1926, Terry Allen admitted his guilt, but complained that the cops hadn’t allowed him to call friends to post the $500 bail.  When Allen insisted he was a reliable person, the judge asked how he’d prove it.   A police officer present in court spoke up. “I can vouch for him. He led me over the top many times. He always brought me back safely, too”.  The policeman had been an Army private during WWI with troops led by Allen.  The judge immediately suspended the sentence. 

The greatest and most loyal knight ever was William Marshal.  He outlived his enemies, amassed great landholdings and titles, and married a woman he loved.  He managed it all while serving a family that makes Game of Thrones and Empire seem tame.

William was born around 1147 during the civil war between Stephen of Blois and Empress Matilda. Both were grandchildren of William the Conqueror and both claimed the English throne.  William’s father, John Marshal, supported Matilda which was a lucky break when her son was designated as Stephen’s heir.

In 2003, the U.S. and its allies invaded Iraq intent on overthrowing Saddam Hussein.  President George W. Bush referred to the invasion as a crusade. Calling it a crusade was a gift to Saddam Hussein. Among Arabs, “crusade” is code for European cultural and racial imperialism.  

While most Europeans have moved on, the Arabs have never forgotten the original Crusades.  In the 1090’s Pope Urban II called for a crusade to save Christian Byzantium from the Seljuk Turks and liberate Christian sites in Jerusalem from Muslim control.     

On May 21, 1921, Anna Brown arrived half-drunk at the home of her sister Mollie Burkhart in Gray Horse, Oklahoma.   After causing a scene in front of Mollie’s in-laws who had been invited to dinner, fighting with her invalid mother and with Mollie, Anna walked out the door and became a statistic.   

Her badly decomposed body was found about a week later in the bottom of a ravine.  The coroner had her body hauled to the top of the ravine where an inept autopsy was immediately performed.  A bullet hole was found in the back of her skull.  A coroner’s inquest, composed of white men present during the retrieval of the body and the autopsy, concluded that Anna had been murdered.  

On April 15, 2019, Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France suffered a devastating fire.  Donations flowed in immediately to restore the cathedral. Imagine if donors had told France that they could only have the money if they waived all rights to the cathedral. 

That is essentially the deal the U.S. offered to the Lakota in 1980 for the Black Hills. The U.S. Supreme Court held that the U.S. government violated the 5th Amendment by not paying fair compensation when it took the Black Hills from the Lakota in 1877.  The court calculated the 1877 value of the land at $17 million; then added interest to set compensation at $102 million.  By comparison gold worth about $358 million was mined in the Black Hills from 1876 to 1935.  

In 1793, George Washington was a year into his second term as President when he faced a crisis caused by foreign interference in America’s domestic politics.  A foreign envoy was undermining his administration’s policies and attacking him personally.  

The crisis originated in Europe where Britain was fighting revolutionary France.  Should the U.S. get involved in their war?  American opinion was evenly split. Britain was the largest market for American goods, but France helped us win independence from Britain.

Flying a rocket-propelled plane can be deadly even for an experienced test pilot. Everything happens faster than in a conventional plane and a light touch on the joystick can cause the plane to spiral out of control.  In 1942, Messerschmitt AG, an aircraft manufacturer, needed a pilot to test their Me 163a (later renamed Me 163b) rocket plane.  

The plane was basically a pilot’s seat and joystick strapped to a rocket.  The rocket burned at 1800º centigrade with a back thrust of about 4500 horsepower.  At takeoff the plane reached speeds of 220 – 250 m.p.h.  Once the undercarriage detached, the plane could accelerate to 500 m.p.h. and climb to 30,000 feet in less than two minutes.  Landing was difficult because the plane approached the landing strip at 145 to 150 m.p.h. and had to be landed like a glider

On a cold day in February 1877, an emigrant named Emil A. Bode volunteered for the infantry.  Bode listed his civilian job as laborer, but was unemployed, most likely as a result of the Panic of 1876 when Wall Street losses tanked the economy.  Unemployment is still a primary motivation for joining the military.

Bode (pronounced Bodie) passed the entrance physical and in March 1877, he enrolled in Company D, 16th Infantry Division.  After two months in the army, Bode’s first payday arrived.  A long row of conmen, professional gamblers and prostitutes were waiting to relieve the soldiers of their pay and most of the men were broke by sunset.  Bode noted that this pattern repeated every payday.

Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce friction.  The friction arises because every action in a war depends on each individual involved.  This theory of friction was created by Carl von Clausewitz.  

He argued that in a war, decisions are made with three-fourths of the needed information hidden in a fog of uncertainty.  As a result, the best plan of action may fail due a mental lapse, a mistake, or a misunderstanding of a single individual.

Eighty years ago on September 1, 1939, World War II began. One German who came through the war mostly unscathed was Eugen Dollman.  Dollman came from an aristocratic family with roots in both Bavaria and Austria.  He graduated magna cum laude from a university in Munich with a degree in history.  In 1927, he moved to Rome to continue his studies.

Dollman seems to have spent very little time doing scholarly research. Most of his time was devoted to socializing.  As a German national and minor aristocrat, he was invited to parties hosted by the German ambassador, Ulrich von Hassell. (Hassell was part of the anti-Hitler opposition. He was murdered in 1944 during the purges following the July 20, 1944 assassination attempt against Hitler.)

She was beautiful and looked fragile, but years of skiing had strengthened her body.  She faced death many times without flinching.  She also seduced virtually every male agent with whom she worked.  After her death in 1952, a group of her lovers formed a club to protect her reputation.  In the 1950’s, women who slept around were sluts, even if they were also war heroes.

Christine Granville (Krystyna Skarbek) was born in 1908 into an aristocratic Polish family.  Her father, Count Jerzy Skarbek, married a Jewish heiress who converted to Catholicism.  Jerzy soon resented his wife’s Jewish heritage which denied them access to the top tier of society and the fact that her money saved his ancestral estates from bankruptcy.   He eventually abandoned her.

Group tours are only as enjoyable as the people who join you on the tour. In 1413, an English tour group suffered from one of the most obnoxious, tactless twits to ever join a package tour.  Her name was Margery Kempe.

Margery Kempe was born around 1373 in present-day King’s Lynn, England into a prosperous merchant family.  Her father was the mayor of the city.  At an early age, Margery committed a sin that left her worrying about her chances of getting into heaven.