After five years of war, the battered cities and towns of Great Britain, frayed but unbroken, took on a dingy sameness. They smelled of coal smoke and infrequent bathing, while “privation lay on the land like another odor.” Shortages of food and the simplest tools of everyday life, from shoelaces…

Thomas Mathew, who farmed on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, remembered the year 1675 as beginning with all manner of fearful portents: a blazing comet, an invasion of millions of carrier pigeons, and a biblical plague of locusts. But it was Mathew himself who helped bring on the calamity…

Francis Scott Key and the rockets’ red glare at Fort McHenry. Dolley Madison rescuing Washington’s portrait from the sack of the White House. Andrew Jackson’s lopsided victory at New Orleans after the Treaty of Ghent. These are colorful episodes that people at least hazily associate with the…

And the Show Went On Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris by Alan Riding Knopf, 416 pp., $28.95

A Kingdom Strange

During a visit to London in the 1990s my wife and I attended a service at St. Clement Danes, a once-bombed-out Wren church in the Strand, now station church of the Royal Air Force. By pure chance it was September 15, Battle of Britain Day. Half a century had passed since the stooped, graying…

I Am Murdered

Cradle of America