Quotes from Tom Reiss

Columbus brought sugarcane to Hispaniola, the first European settlement in the New World, on his second voyage, in 1493.

Servitude, like a destructive volcano, desiccates, burns, engulfs everything it surrounds: liberty, on the contrary, always brings in its wake happiness, abundance, and the arts.… Everything is free in a Kingdom where liberty is seated at the foot of the throne, where the least subject finds in the heart of his king the feelings of a father.… No one is [a] slave in France.

matter of form, rather than substance.

Dr. Barazon had maintained that Elfriede would not have needed to provide an Aryan cover for the real author of Ali and Nino, because the book contract was signed in April 1937, almost a full year before the Nazi Anschluss of Austria.

The way it had originally worked was that each of the three estates got an equal say: each had an equal number of "deputies" to represent it. This meant that the clergy and the nobility together could outvote anything that the rest, collectively known as "the Third Estate," wanted; the idea of proportional representation—or any meaningful voice for the people—was

the Stefansplatz, where the largest spontaneous demonstration in Austrian history was held—to celebrate the Anschluss and Hitler's surprise tour of the city—in the spring of 1938.

Spain laid the foundations of this great wealth and evil in the Americas, then quickly became distracted and forgot about it. After introducing the plants, the technology, and the slaves into Santo Domingo, the Spanish dropped the sugar business in favor of hunting for gold and silver. They moved on to Mexico and South America in search of the precious metals

But clothing themselves in the trappings of democracy, dictators may, like drag queens, tend to overdo it, and Napoleon wanted there to be no doubt that his French Republic was more democratic than any before it.

unearthing some of the most disturbing moments in Austrian history. He had made a sort of subspecialty of studying intellectuals persecuted in the pre-Nazi era, and we discussed his fascinating work on the assassination of Hugo Bettauer, the writer and editor whose dystopian 1923 novel, Die Stadt Ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), remains one of the most uncanny predictions of a historic catastrophe ever written.

WHAT dark and bloody secrets the future hides from us," Alexandre Dumas would one day write in his memoir, meditating on his father's fate. "When they are revealed, men may realize that it is by the good providence of God they were kept in ignorance of them until the appointed time.

As the Iberian explorers made their way down the African coast—the Portuguese going around the Horn to East Asia, the Spaniards cutting west to the Americas—both powers had two main goals in mind: finding precious metals and planting sugarcane. (Oh, and spreading the word of God.) The

What the novel portrays is basically the reality of Vienna today: one of the world's great cities robbed of its lifeblood, reduced to a bland provincial capital filled with beautiful old buildings.

In October, after a two-month siege, the government had retaken Lyon from a group of moderates who had overthrown the local Jacobin club the previous spring; the government carried out reprisals intended to punish the entire city, destroying many of its finest buildings and murdering nearly two thousand of its residents. The Jacobins then proceeded to rename Lyon—with no apparent irony—"Liberated City.

Nazism and use the alliance among Fascists to steer the Nazis away from the racial policies.

A group of "citizens of color" marched to the Hôtel de Ville carrying a banner that read THE RIGHTS OF MAN AND OF CITIZENS OF COLOR: LIVE FREE OR DIE.

most of its existence, Mussolini's regime had not been anti-Semitic, and early on, the Duce had explicitly criticized Hitler's racism—probably in part because Nazism did not include modern Italians in its pantheon of Aryan supermen.

Hitler responded by calling Mussolini's movement "Kosher fascism.")

Three months earlier, in that first riot, the French Guards had followed orders and fired on the rioters. Yet on July 14, instead of doing their job and defending the Bastille, the French Guards joined the rioters, and would soon declare themselves the National Guard. The war minister informed the king that he could no longer guarantee the loyalty of any French soldier or junior officer. Without its army, the royal government collapsed.

Thus the oldest great monarchy in the West assured the establishment of the first great republic since ancient times. In the process, Versailles bankrupted itself.

Mussolini's mistress, a leading Fascist intellectual and theorist of the movement, was openly Jewish. Perhaps less well known is that the Israeli Navy was born out of a 1930s Fascist training program, and the Duce even endowed a Fascist chair at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Alex Dumas had the confidence that accompanies a life of physical exploits, along with an unwavering faith in the rightness of his actions that made him tough to intimidate. But to survive the treacherous waters of the time, which claimed the lives of hundreds of respected, patriotic officers, he needed more than naive bluster and love of justice.

eclipsed and forgotten by Mussolini's brief but disastrous alliance with Hitler.

Commoners already paid the lion's share of national taxes and, because of these old feudal records, they now also paid a whole host of other duties to their local nobles (who, further inspiring anger, were exempt from most national taxes). Like the American Revolution before it, the French Revolution began as a tax revolt, and there were even rumors that King Louis XVI himself authorized the burning sprees because he felt the taxes on his people were unjustly high.

Modern versions of this argument held that American democracy was born of the slave society of rural Virginia, because slavery gave men like Washington and Jefferson the free time to better themselves and to participate in representative government.)