Walter F. Mondale was the embodiment of a kind of decency and civility that has all but disappeared from the American political scene.

Half a century later, Robert Ellsberg looks back on his father’s famous release of the Pentagon Papers—and the consequences of that decision for his father, for him and for the nation.

On the 109th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, Ashley Herzog writes about the last moments of Father Thomas Byles, who ministered to Catholic passengers and is being proposed for sainthood.

Prince Philip once described himself as “a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction.” Self-deprecation, of course, was one of his famous traits. But there were others, which point to some of the lessons to be gleaned from his extraordinary life.

The two most recent selections by the Catholic Book Club couldn't have been more different: A look at Thomas Jefferson's quixotic attempt to rewrite the Bible, and Niall Williams's richly evocative novel about a small village in the west of Ireland.

Going through old files, America's editors found a few interesting submissions (and rejections).