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10,045 illustrations — Lessons from history, biography, and world events
In the winter of 1942, Vichy police arrived in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small village in the mountains of southern France, and demanded that Pastor André...
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These were new settlers, their survival dependent upon immediately cultivating their property and erecting shelter.
In the autumn of 1944, as the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp prepared to send its remaining prisoners to Auschwitz, a German industrialist sat at his desk...
While some interpret this through shepherds moving behind their flocks, a sharper meaning emerges: the guides were meant to be before us, yet when we decline from the right way, our backs turn toward them.
William Hayley, M.A., observed that true and substantial happiness depends necessarily upon morality and religion.
In September 1849, Harriet Tubman fled Dorchester County, Maryland, traveling nearly ninety miles on foot through swamps and forests to reach Pennsylvania. She was free...
I am the son of the wise, the son of ancient kings?" The prophet indicts a specific vice: descendants trafficking in their ancestors' glory while possessing none themselves.
By 1944, the Weihsien internment camp near Weifang, China, had stripped its prisoners down to almost nothing. Among the roughly 1,800 Allied civilians held by...
He ascribes his peaceful happiness not to his own skill, but to Adonai's kindly guidance—the same God who once led his flocks to green pastures.
For decades, a quiet church canon named Nicolaus Copernicus climbed the tower adjoining Frombork Cathedral in northern Poland, studying the night sky with nothing more...
In January 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution denied Marian Anderson permission to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., solely because she was...
Eastern storms possess a peculiar ferocity: vivid lightning and suffocating darkness alternate with startling rapidity, creating an appalling effect.
In October 1943, the Gestapo came for Irena Sendler. For months, the thirty-three-year-old Polish social worker had used her permit to inspect the Warsaw Ghetto...
Memory transfigured that simple draught into something radiant—cool, sweet, crystalline with the nostalgia *pothos* of his former innocence.
When Rabshakeh addressed Hezekiah's officials in this diplomatic tongue, his words carried the smooth insinuation of a seasoned negotiator.
In the winter of 1942, Pastor André Trocmé stood before his congregation in the small Protestant church of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a village perched on a...
In March 1841, Dorothea Dix walked into the East Cambridge Jail to teach a Sunday school class and encountered something that changed her life. Mentally...
Berlin, August 4, 1936. Jesse Owens stood at the edge of the long jump runway, shaken. The twenty-two-year-old son of Alabama sharecroppers had fouled on...
The wisest person must contemplate two humbling truths: his knowledge against what remains unknown, and his knowledge against what he ought to have learned.
In the spring of 1945, Colonel Benjamin O. Davis Jr. led the 332nd Fighter Group on bomber escort missions across Nazi-occupied Europe from Ramitelli Airfield...
Finn, observing harvest customs in the Holy Land in 1866, illuminated this ancient practice: the grain was not cut with a sickle but rather pulled from the earth by hand.
In the winter of 1906, sanitary engineer George Soper was hired to investigate a puzzling typhoid outbreak at a rented summer home in Oyster Bay,...
A paradox haunts this tetrarch: he reverenced God's faithful minister while remaining enslaved to his own appetites.
Property exists for four essential purposes: to increase the earth's produce; to preserve that produce to maturity; to cultivate and develop human nature; and to advance intellectual development.