Category: History

When Churchill faced Hitler alone

Estimated reading time: 9 minutes On May 10, 1940, two historic events grabbed the world’s attention. Hitler’s Panzer armies broke through the Belgian and Dutch frontiers. And King George VI asked Winston Churchill to form a new government. To tell the story of the eighty days that...

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America’s first existential election

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes Three times in US history a presidential election has brought the nation to the brink of civil war. In 2020, when Donald Trump attempted to remain in office after losing by seven million votes. In 1860, when the election of Abraham Lincoln actually did trigger the...

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America’s home-grown fascism

A century ago in Italy, fascism began taking hold in much of Europe. Within a decade, illiberal and authoritarian political parties had moved into the mainstream, most prominently in Germany and Spain as well as Italy, Hungary, Greece, and Austria. Soon, the governments they led propelled the...

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Digging out the truth about Mao Zedong

History exerts a powerful force on the present. Why else would battles rage over the historical record around the world? In the United States, for example, some insist slavery was the central driver in our history, while others fight back fiercely. And in Russia, where the Putin regime seeks to...

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Is history too important to leave to historians?

A review of Why the West Rules — for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future, by Ian Morris. @@@@@ (5 out of 5). In Why the West Rules, he explores the state of society and the quality of life in both West and East since long before the onset of written history in the first millennium BCE — in fact, since the passing of the last Ice Age 15,000 years ago. Morris’s ultimate goal is to discern the shape of times to come. His conclusion is noncommittal: “The great question for our times is not whether the West will continue to rule. It is whether humanity as a whole will break through to an entirely new kind of existence before disaster strikes us.”

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