The Making of a Leader: The Formative Years of George C. Marshall By Josiah Bunting III (Alfred A. Knopf, 245 pages, $30) At a time when the United States Military Academy removed “duty, honor, country” from its mission statement in…
Fear. Merriam-Webster defines it as “an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger.” That’s a decent definition — and it is reasonably useful when looking at historical events where fear is a motivator. What Merriam-Webster’s definition…
Military history is replete with famous battles that turned the tide in war. When a superior force overextended itself in the wrong place at the wrong time. These include the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC, where 10,000 Athenians and…
Corregidor is a small island. At just over two square miles, it’s shaped like a thought bubble in the mouth of Manila Bay. It may be a tiny dot in the ocean, but it’s also a well-positioned dot. Nothing gets…
We spoke to Roger Kaplan, the regular American Spectator tennis correspondent, on the subject of Presidents Day, who admitted to feeling peeved by the lack of response from the White House to the offer from his organization, the East Side…
Former President Donald Trump has made news by criticizing NATO members for not paying their NATO dues. Newsweek reported Trump’s latest remarks to an anonymous leader of a presumably NATO country this way: The Republican presidential nominee frontrunner said the anonymous…
The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson By Patrick Weil (Harvard University Press, 378 pages, $35) Had you told Mattie Ross that Woodrow Wilson’s reverence for his father indicated he…
Savile Row, located in central London, was once the home of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS). Lord Curzon described the building as “cramped and rather squalid,” but on January 25, 1904, the audience heard a paper read by Halford Mackinder…
If you tour the magnificent Blenheim Palace, you will see the room where 150 years ago Winston Churchill was born — Nov. 30, 1874. A short distance from the palace is the very modest Bladon churchyard where Churchill was buried…
A century ago, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who kept his underground nom de guerre, Lenin, had achieved all that a revolutionary could wish. After his Bolshevik Party seized power he was the most important person in the Soviet Union. Then he…