Mark Kishlansky

Harry Widener went down on the Titanic at the age of 27. He was the scion of a wealthy Philadelphia family whose patriarch began life as a street vendor and ended it as one of the richest men in America; one of his early coups was a contract to supply the Union army with meat. Harry grew up amid priceless collections of pictures, coins, and especially books. When he graduated from Harvard in...

The Russians have a saying: ‘The past is unpredictable.’ So it has proved for Gerrard Winstanley. For all but one of his 67 years he lived in obscurity and then he died forgotten. Generations of historians passed over him either in silence or derision. He entirely eluded the notice of the Earl of Clarendon in the 17th century and of David Hume in the 18th. Even the Jacobin William...