Gordon F. Sander

On Dec. 2, 1948, evidence stashed in a hollowed-out pumpkin incriminated suspected Soviet spy Alger Hiss and boosted a young Richard Nixon’s political status.

As world leaders scramble to prevent the Israel-Hamas war from escalating, it is often forgotten just how close the Yom Kippur War came to all-out nuclear war.

Franklin D. Roosevelt called the Evian Conference in France in 1938, as the Holocaust loomed. It remains “an indelible stain on American and world history.”

Harry Truman used antisemitic slurs in private. But his surprise decision 75 years ago to recognize Israel, launching a fierce alliance, was a long time coming.

Émile Coué, a French apothecary, started an “autosuggestion” craze that was the biggest thing in America in the early 1920s, practiced by millions every day.