Resultados Editorial "Charles River Editors" en Historia

Ever since Machiavelli penned The Prince, his 1513 treatise on princely rule and the politics of reality, a work that infamously advises rulers to abandon virtue and morality when necessary, his name has been synonymous with deceit, duplicity, and amoral pragmatism. Since then a sinister reputation has posthumously plagued the controversial Florentine. But is this depiction of Machiavelli as wicked and immoral accurate?

By his mid-20s Graham was a Baptist pastor in the Midwest, and throughout the 1940s he began traveling across the country to spread his ministry and message through large gatherings that he termed "crusades". In time these crusades would take place in nearly 200 nations and attract hundreds of millions of people, helping to catapult him to international prominence and making him a household name.

The 1920s in the United States were known as the "Roaring '20s" and the Jazz Age, a time in the nation that glorified hard and fast living. Nobody personified the age or wrote so descriptively about it better than F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), whose name became synonymous with the times after penning the epic The Great Gatsby.

The Enlightenment is looked upon fondly, and it serves to reinforce the notion that the present is superior to the past, but things did not change as rapidly or as completely as many believe. In fact, some recent historians have challenged the belief that the Enlightenment was responsible for the French Revolution, which is a vital issue when it comes to Voltaire. After all, Voltaire, as his contemporaries and as most of his modern listeners know him, is widely regarded as the pinnacle of Enlightenment thought.

In the space of just a few years, Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, rose from the obscurity of a small Minnesota town to a position of royalty atop the folk music landscape. Not content to remain for long within that niche, however, he went on to conquer rock with elements of blues, jazz, pop, country, gospel, rockabilly, and ethnic music of the British Isles, not to mention authoring several books, working in film soundtracks, acting, and holding international art exhibits of his work along the way.

"TV had much more impact back in the '70s than it does today. Charlie's Angels got huge numbers every week - nothing really dominates the television landscape like that today. Now there are so many channels and so many more shows it's hard for anything to get the audience, or amount of attention, that Charlie's Angels got. Farrah was a major TV star when the medium was clearly dominant." - Larry King

After a series of conflicts among feudal lords, the new city of Edo became and remained Japan's beating heart, and in the 17th century Edo gave birth to a vibrant, new urban culture marked by woodblock prints, the kabuki theater, and haiku poetry. By the 18th century, with its ranks swelled thanks to a flood of provincial daimyo, along with their households, clients, and retainers, Edo had become the most populous urban area in the world, a title Tokyo still can lay claim to today.

By the 1920s English comic Stan Laurel had been in dozens of films, and American Oliver Hardy had appeared in hundreds, but it was not until they formed a duo together in 1926 that they began to truly be noticed. Once they did, however, Laurel and Hardy became one of the most famous comedy teams in American history, with a career that spanned four decades and included over 100 combined shorts and feature films.

Over 2,300 years after their deaths, Plato and Aristotle remain the most influential ancient Greek philosophers and arguably the greatest icons of ancient thought. Their legacies expanded rapidly and extensively across the ancient world, helped in part by the fact Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. Both philosophers were recognized as celebrated intellectual forces during all of antiquity and the Middle Ages.

When it comes to Hollywood and the entertainment industry, perhaps nobody catapulted to fame as quickly or as strangely as Orson Welles, but it would also be safe to say that few produced such critically acclaimed work either. Though he had worked on stage productions from an early age and seamlessly transitioned into radio, few were familiar with his work until a legendary 1938 radio broadcast of H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, during which some people who heard Welles narrating the work truly believed that an alien invasion was underway.

There has been no shortage of shocking crimes and trials that generated frenzied coverage across America, but few can lay claim to the "crime of the century" like the murder carried out by Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb in 1924. While studying as young adults at the prestigious University of Chicago, Leopold and Loeb devised a meticulous plot to kidnap and murder a child while managing to get away with ransom money, thereby perpetrating what they considered a "perfect crime".

Of all the great actors of the 20th century, none personifies acting royalty more than Laurence Olivier. Some of this is simply due to the fact that he was actually knighted in 1947, along with a lengthy list of other honors. Of course in addition to the literal sense of the term, there is undeniably a manner in which Olivier qualifies as acting royalty. It is not for nothing that Spencer Tracy once referred to Olivier as "the greatest actor in the English-speaking world".

There may be no director in American film history who was better able to combine commercial appeal with art-house style than Stanley Kubrick. As his career progressed, his films grew increasingly challenging, with slow, methodical plots that made for running times that spanned upwards of three hours. No matter how much Kubrick may have broken away from the standard 90-minute Hollywood fare and threatened to alienate his audience, there is no denying the special place his films hold in pop culture.

Near the end of the 20th century, the American Film Institute ranked the greatest actors and actresses who worked during the Golden Era of Hollywood and the first half of the 1900s, and Sidney Poitier was ranked 22nd among the men. Given the company he was surrounded by, such a distinction could be considered honor enough, but Poitier also happened to be the only minority on the list, an accomplishment made all the more incredible given the systematic discrimination he faced within the industry and the land where he grew up.

Mexico City is not a new place. Mexico City instead has much in common with cities like London, Delhi or Cairo in the East in that it is an ancient city dating back centuries before the arrival of Colombus in Hispañola. For, while much (including the name) has changed, Mexico City is the mighty Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire and the great American metropolis of the Spanish Empire. There has been no break in occupation, and despite much devastation, the city was never fully destroyed.

In 1948, American polls rated Bing Crosby "the most admired man alive", and it's no surprise given how popular he was across every major form of entertainment during the decade. With a string of major hits, Crosby was the most popular singer in the country during that era, with classic songs like "White Christmas" helping pave the way for other singers as varied as Bob Hope, Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra. In fact, young Sinatra modeled his clothing and style after Crosby, who was his idol growing up.

Woodstock, more accurately entitled the Woodstock Music Festival; An Aquarian Exposition: Three Days of Peace and Music, represents one of the most enduring symbols of the youth movement of America's late 1960s and early '70s. As the public pinnacle of that social phenomenon, the giant festival that overwhelmed a section of an upstate New York farm for a week during a time of national and international upheaval evolved from a typical speculative financial venture to a defining historical monument.

If Billie Holiday wanted to become a jazz singer, she chose the best of all eras in which to attempt it. A wave of great jazz and jazz/pop crossover artists swept over the United States from the 1920s through the 1950s, generating a golden age for the genre. Emerging from such a powerful group of talented vocalists was not easy. The woman who has come to represent a model of great, instinctive jazz singing came from nowhere, had nothing, and virtually had no one. She was raw and untrained, but went forward with limited and quirky vocal gifts.

No history of American pop culture in the 1940s would be complete without mention of Betty Grable, the most popular pin-up girl of the World War II era. Grable possessed the outstanding fortune of not only having an ideal body but arriving at the most fortuitous time imaginable; the famous pin-up photo of her, taken by Frank Powolny, made her the highest-earning actress in Hollywood from 1943 to 1951.

It's possible that Michelangelo is the most famous artist in history, but it's also possible that he's an underrated artist. The vast influence of his career is reflected by the fact that he is not only known for his own art but has also come to embody an entire epoch of Western art. Along with Leonardo da Vinci, there are no other artists who so fully capture the spirit of scientific and artistic discovery that characterized art during the late 15th and early 16th centuries.