<p><span class="deck">The furious speaker was Field Marshal Kesselring. The time was 1944. And the “shadow” was cast by Italian partisans and a handful of brave Americans from General Bill Donovan’s O.S.S.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">For a few weeks, Hitler came close to winning World War II. Then came a train of events that doomed him. An eloquent historian reminds us that,however unsatisfactory our world may be today, it almost was unimaginably worse.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">A cameraman at Yalta tells what it was like to spend a few days in claustrophobic luxury with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. and to be offered a job by Joseph Stalin.</span></p>
<p><span class="deck">Compromise upon compromise whittled FDR’s dreams down considerably, but enabled him to pass the Social Security Act, perhaps the most sweeping social reform of the 20th century.</span></p>
<p>Tears ran down the cheeks of Abraham Lincoln when he heard the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” sung in Congress in 1864 by a chaplain who had survived a Confederate prison. It would become the most famous literary production of the Civil War.</p>
