I had a call from Rosalie Kunoth-Monks the other day. Rosalie is an elder of the Arrernte-Alyawarra people, who lives in Utopia, a vast and remote region in the “red heart” of Australia. The nearest town is Alice Springs, more than 200 miles across an ancient landscape of spinifex and swirling skeins of red dust. More

The Clintons’ high-profile interest in Haiti dates back almost all the way to their wedding in 1975. Shortly after their honeymoon in Acapulco, Bill and Hillary Clinton received an invitation from David Edwards — a friend and Citibank executive — to accompany him to Haiti.

Edwards’s motivation in getting the Clintons closer to Haiti was neither cultural nor humanitarian. The reason was Citibank’s long-standing financial interests in the country, which now go back over a century. More

On my desk I keep an early Ambrotype photograph of my great-great grandparents, Needom Gunn and Margaret Lemon. The young couple look out at the camera on the occasion of their marriage, in central Illinois, just four months after Lincoln’s assassination, and not 50 miles from his burial site.

Maybe Margaret, or her parents, had attended the Lincoln-Douglas debate in nearby Quincy, in 1858. Needom came from a Union family in neighboring Missouri, a Border South state in which sectional loyalties had been fiercely contested since before the Missouri Compromise, in 1820. At the outset of the Civil War, his father had been murdered on his 42nd birthday, the family farmhouse had been burned to the ground, and his mother Eliza had fled with her children the eleven miles to the town of Harrisonville in the middle of the night. More