History, said Emerson, is "the biography of a few stout and earnest persons." But history also is a story of unpredictable contingencies and improbable caroms, and of a 4-foot-7, 15-year-old girl's leap from a dangerously bobbing boat to a pitching South Vietnamese ship in the South China Sea. It was April 1975. The Communists were overrunning South Vietnam. At that time, Osama bin Laden was 18. The arc of his life, and Anh Duong's, would intersect.

Her leap propelled her to freedom. She grew up to be a 5-foot-1 chemist who, 26 years later, led the development of a bomb efficient at killing America's enemies in Afghanistan's caves. As a result, fewer American soldiers have had to enter those caves to engage Osama's fighters. This is Anh Duong's story.

The U.S. Navy took her and her family to Subic Bay in the Philippines. Next stop was a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. After five months this Buddhist family was adopted by the First Baptist Church in...

[Karin Chenoweth, author of It's Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, is currently with The Education Trust, a national education advocacy organization. Before joining The Education Trust, Chenoweth wrote the Homeroom column for the Montgomery and Prince George’s Extras of The Washington Post, which gained a national readership for its focus on schools and education.]

... For decades there has been a systematic debasement of the role that knowledge plays in an education. This was exemplified for me in a talk I recently heard by a well-known education professor who said that he didn’t care if kids knew the kind of “trivial pursuit” question of where Kansas is. What he cared about, he said, was whether kids could “think critically” about the causes and effects of the Civil War. Any student of American history could have told him that knowing the location of Kansas is integral to understanding the causes of the Civil War. But by pushing for a system of...

[David McNeill writes regularly for a number of publications including the Irish Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is a Japan Focus coordinator.]

A crop of new movies released to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Nanjing Massacre is set to again dredge up the controversy about one of the 20th Century’s most notorious events. How will Japan react?

One way to learn what happened in one of history’s most noxious but disputed episodes is to ask Mizushima Satoru. After what he calls “exhaustive research” on the seizure of the then Chinese capital by Japanese troops in 1937, estimated to have cost anywhere from 20,000 to 300,000 lives, Mizushima offers a very precise figure for the number of illegal deaths: zero.

“The evidence for a massacre is faked,” explains the president of right-wing webcaster Channel Sakura. “It is Chinese communist propaganda.” For support, he brandishes a book containing what he says are dozens of doctored...

[William Hogeland is the author of The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America's Newfound Sovereignty.]

... The once “forgotten founder” [Alexander Hamilton] is now the subject of a PBS American Experience feature, which aired in the spring and is likely to live on in classrooms on DVD. Between scenes of bewigged actors reciting their characters’ written prose in awkward soliloquy, Chernow and a raft of other historians relate an even more vaulting story than those told in the exhibit and the biographies. Some of the talking heads give Hamilton virtually sole credit not only for founding the American financial system, but for the country’s very nationhood.

There’s a wonkish side to the Hamilton revival too. Certain policy writers, way ahead of the curve, have been contributing to its torque, shooting Hamilton’s legacy past history buffs and toward the halls of power. In 1997 David Brooks and...

Democrats and Republicans are alike in one respect, according to the libertarian writer Brink Lindsey: their shared nostalgia for the 1950s. Except, he says,"Republicans want to go home to the United States of the 1950s, while Democrats want to work there."

Indeed, from television (where Mad Men has faithfully recreated the furnishings, boozy smell, and chronic sexual dishonesty of the New York executive suite circa 1960), to the celebrated 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, to the current political debate, we seem to be awash in 1950s nostalgia. While most of the Republican presidential candidates have life experiences more reminiscent of The Ice Storm than The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, all invoke a vision of the patriarchal, orderly family of post–World War II suburban fantasy. And in their approaches to the world, all recreate that combination of belligerent, can-do triumphalism with mortal terror not seen since the decade of duck-and-cover drills, before...

[Ron Neumunz is an American living in London working in the hedge fund industry.]

We are all out there, at different times and on different days, always looking. It's a search for information, it's a search for family, and, in the end, a search for self.

We know all the Web sites, like ArmyAirforces.com and b24proboards, and a handful of others. We use them to reach out, ask questions, exchange information and hunt again for more information.

One is looking for friends of his uncle, listed as KIA in 1943; another for fellow crew members of a father or grandfather. In many cases, the person he or she is looking for never came back from this World War II. Or, if he did, he never talked about it, and now it is too late to ask.

So, we look and we seek, because we want to find out more about our families, more about a war that is ever more distant, and more, ultimately, about ourselves....

[Stephen Brown is a columnist for Frontpagemag.com. Email him at alsolzh@hotmail.com.]

“Suffocate the bitch.”

It was June 27, 1950, when these savage words were spoken to a hangman behind the thick, grim walls of Prague’s Pankrac Prison in communist Czechoslovakia. The unfortunate soul the executioner was instructed to make suffer as much as possible before her death that day was Czech national heroine and anti-communist dissident, Milada Horakova.

“Don’t break her neck in the noose” – “Suffocate the bitch - and the others too” was the full, hideous text of hatred spoken just before the extinguishing of Horakova’s life.

On the day before her execution on trumped up charges of treason and espionage, the 49-year-old woman and Czech democrat had received a heart-wrenching visit on death row from her 16-year-old daughter and only child, Jana, who, to this day, remembers her mother’s “enormous courage...