Kim Phillips-Fein

In 1925 the publishing world was rocked by an up-and-coming advertising executive named Bruce Barton, who’d written a book called The Man Nobody Knows. The man in question was Jesus Christ, the “most popular dinner guest in Jerusalem,” who had “picked up twelve humble men and created an organization that won the world.” Jesus, Barton […]

Ever since the McClellan Committee investigations of racketeering in the 1950s, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) has occupied a lurid place in the American imagination. From Jimmy Hoffa to “Tony Pro,” from “Red” Dorfman to Jackie Presser, the Teamsters have been known as the id of the labor movement–a seething hotbed of greed, violence, […]

G ary and Virginia have lived at Berkeley Place in lower Park Slope, Brooklyn, for the past 29 years, almost since moving to the United States from Trinidad in the late 1960s. It’s a peaceful neighborhood of oak trees and brownstones, a neighborhood of middle-class homeowners near the park and immigrant renters farther west, families […]

Ben Franklin might seem, at first glance, to have little in common with Karl Marx. But when the German philosopher wrote in the Grundrisse that “the individual carries … his bond with society in his pocket,” the author of Poor Richard’s Almanack might well have agreed. One of our most enduring American faiths is that […]

April 1865: The Month That Saved America, Jay Winik. HarperCollins, 496 pages, $32.50 In January 1913, the 50th anniversary of the EmancipationProclamation, Dudley Miles, a professor at Columbia University, published anessay titled “The Civil War as Unifier.” The “true significance” of the war, Mileswrote, was how quickly sectional reconciliation had been achieved. Unlike civilwars and […]