Sublime

Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck,

In his history of the Emancipation Proclamation, Allen C. Guelzo suggests that “the gift of coup d’oeil” allowed Lincoln to “take in the whole of a situation at once and know almost automatically how to proceed.”

Smuts,

At the close of the war, Washington had circulated a letter to the thirteen governors, outlining four things America would need to attain greatness: consolidation of the states under a strong federal government, timely payment of its debts, creation of an army and a navy, and harmony among its people.

Eisenhower had made the final crucial decision. At any time during the last few weeks at Dien Bien Phu he could have ordered an air strike, but he refused to do so. As at D-Day, it was his decision. And in many respects, it was of far greater import. The landing on D-Day was a purely military matter. If not June 6, then sometime later. At Dien Bien

In the end, Paris was saved by the actions of five men: Model, who ignored Hitler’s order to defend the city and moved Army Group B north to the Marne and the Somme; von Choltitz, who reached out to the Resistance and disobeyed the Führer’s instruction to demolish the city; Leclerc, who moved more than a hundred miles in two days and provided a mas

Conner recognized that the inability of either side to advance on the Western Front had produced a stalemate that “showed most of the characteristics of siege warfare.” Pershing, however, did not intend simply to feed his men into the same trenches that had devoured the young British and French men before them. Instead, the American commander aimed

When war came, everyone told her it was her war, and she thought so too. In South Carolina, as the war commenced, the wife of a plantation owner wrote in her diary that naturally slavery had to go, but added, “Yes, how I envy those saintly Yankee women, in their clean cool New England homes, writing to make their fortunes and to shame us.” Harriet