Tuesday History is a great help in understanding today and tomorrow. Specifically, what we are seeing right now shows how thoughtfully Mr. Putin has read and understood his progenitor in statecraft, Adolf Hitler. As everyone once knew, World War I…
When you walk the Fredericksburg battlefield, especially near the stone wall at the base of Mayre’s Heights (which is just beyond the National Park’s visitor’s center), there is an eerie feeling of tragedy mixed with bewilderment and awe. The battle…
Three weeks past my 15th birthday, I attended the New York Giants-Brooklyn Dodgers football game at the Polo Grounds with my friend Burt Boyar and 55,000 fans. At half-time, the stadium announcer read a long list of names — high-ranking…
We recently commemorated another “Veterans Day” — known by an earlier generation as Armistice Day. On November 11, 1918, the guns on the Western Front fell silent after more than four years of war. The First World War — what…
As tensions increase between China and the United States over the South China Sea and Taiwan, American strategists and statesmen might benefit from reading two recent fictional accounts of a future Sino-American war. Those novels — Ghost Fleet by P.W….
British historian Paul Johnson’s 1983 book Modern Times is a brilliant and eminently readable history of the world from the end of the First World War to the early 1980s (Johnson later updated it in 1992). Some of Johnson’s vivid descriptions…
We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count…
The York Patrol: The Real Story of Alvin York and the Unsung Heroes Who Made Him World War I’s Most Famous Soldier James Carl Nelson (William Morrow, 247 pages, $29) America has always been blessed with brave men, and now…
Winston Churchill gave his maiden broadcast to the United Kingdom as prime minister 80 years ago May 19. It was a day long in coming. He was a brave, irritating, complex, frustrating, energetic, enigmatic, and confounding figure. He had a…
