Some of America’s most pressing civil rights issues—desegregation, equal educational and employment opportunities, housing discrimination, and free speech—have been closely intertwined with higher education institutions.

A few years ago, I was in the Medieval Collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York City examining one of the objects I was writing a book about when a father came by with two children, a boy of about 10 and a girl of 7 or 8. He was taking them to see the medieval armor in the next exhibit room.

At the end of the fourth century, as the power of Rome faded and Constantinople became the seat of empire, a new capital city was rising in the West. Here, in Ravenna on the coast of Italy, Arian Goths and Catholic Romans competed to produce an unrivaled concentration of buildings and astonishing mosaics.

College presidents have described the uncertainty within higher education due to the coronavirus pandemic and subsequent economic downturn as “uncharted territory.”

Between 1940 and 1945, German occupiers transformed Norway into a vast construction zone. This remarkable building campaign, largely unknown today, was designed to extend the Greater German Reich beyond the Arctic Circle and turn the Scandinavian country into a racial utopia.

The Fourth of July that mattered most to Revolutionary Boston, the Cradle of Liberty, was not the one in 1776 when the thirteen united states issued a declaration of independence to a “candid world.” Rather, it occurred the year before, in 1775, when the stakes were highest for Boston and New England, and in the form of a much quieter and little-known document.