The Bruising Battle

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The Bruising Battle

After returning from the Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson was determined to see the United States join the League of Nations, as he told the members of Congress. Still, many American politicians were unsure of whether entry into the League would be good for the United States. In order to fight for ratification, Wilson began a public speaking tour of the country in order to convince the American people to sway their senators in support of his plan.

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Mining Text

/ Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum/
Mining Text

One thing that scholars have been doing with all of the historical sources and literary works online these days is to apply tools of linguistic analaysis to the texts. For instance, if you take Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government from 1885 and look at weighted word frequencies through what is called a word cloud, you can see what sort of language he was using

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President Wilson Memorial in Prague, Czech Republic

/ Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum/
President Wilson Memorial in Prague, Czech Republic

Former US Secretary of State, Madeleine K. Albright had to live in exile with her family when she was a girl during the Nazi occupation of her native city of Prague, Czechoslovakia. Later, when the Communists took over the country’s government after World War II, her father took the family to the United States, where Madeleine became a citizen, raised a family and earned a PhD before joining the Carter administration. She is well aware of the troubled history of the Czech-speaking lands during the 20th century and before. And the Secretary of State knows very well the role that Woodrow Wilson played in creating the state of Czechloslovakia out of the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after the Great War.

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Prohibition: Early Days

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Prohibition: Early Days

In the first decades of the eighteenth century, people in the United States drank more than a bottle and a half of hard liquor each week, far more than today. They recognized that drinking added to numerous social problems, and it came to be seen as an enemy to the moral rectitude of the American home.

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