Christopher Colombus

Goodbye, Columbus

In 1492, “Columbus sailed the ocean blue” and discovered the New World. And Oct. 12 was once a celebrated holiday in America. School children in the earliest grades knew the date and the names of the ships on which Columbus and his crew had sailed: the Nina, the Pinta, the Santa Maria. They knew his voyage had been financed by Queen ...


John F. Kennedy

Birth of the Victory Riot

The great mystery of my lifetime has been the 1960s. It's worth returning to this vast subject periodically as new perspectives unveil themselves. The closest thing to a successful prophecy of that era was made by science-fiction ...

Trace Adkins

The Myth of Northern Innocence

Burly-and-bearded country singer Trace Adkins ruffled all the usual feathers and bruised all the usual feelings when he dared to wear a Confederate battle flag earpiece in full view of gasping national TV viewers while singing "€œThe ...

Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini

Is Fascism Innately Anti-Semitic?

Fascism is presumed to be intrinsically and violently anti-Semitic, and the fascists wanted to exterminate the Jews, right? Wrong. That was the National Socialists. The German historian and journalist Emil Ludwig, who wrote a ...

The Greatest Generation Has Left the Building

The recent anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki's destruction by atomic bombs reminded me of an odd encounter I once had with one of the responsible parties. It happened at a Starbucks in a small Northwestern college town several ...

Declamations of Independence

Every Fourth of July, a heretical question nags: Would it have been so bad if America hadn"€™t won its independence from Britain? This is not a popular topic among Americans, who invest everything about independence with transcendent ...

Counting the Dead Equally

Much to the consternation of Western intellectuals and journalists, Hungary's government sponsors a House of Terror in Budapest which dares to devote attention to not only Nazi crimes, but also Stalinist ones. Ever since the ascendance ...

Wehrmacht soldiers

The Eternal German Guilt Trip

Political correctness has permeated the historian’s craft to such a degree that honest historians must reinvent the wheel. PC has infected German history in particular. The doctrine of German “collective guilt” is often held as a ...

A Fiscal Quarrel Called The Civil War

Confederates are a misunderstood bunch. April marked 150 years since the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, launching the Civil War. Though hostilities didn’t last half as long as Vietnam or even our current Afghan skirmish, ...

Vilfredo Pareto

My Dinner With Vilfredo Pareto

My list of historical personages I"€™d invite to a dinner party doesn’t include any of the obvious choices. Who really wants to eat dinner with Genghis Khan or Julius Caesar? They’d probably make beetle brows at each other ...


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