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 Isabella of Spain, after the Genoese Admiral of the Ocean Sea had been turned down by other monarchs of Europe. Oct. 12, 1492, was considered a momentous and wonderful day in world history: the discovery of America—by men from Europe. This ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Churchill: More Myth Than Legend

Last week a country-club Republican friend in Palm Beach gave me a copy of The Weekly Standard and urged me to read “A World in Crisis: What the thirties tell us about ...

Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger’s Fakepolitik

Henry Kissinger should emulate Old Marley's ghost, which "€œfloated out upon the bleak, dark night"€ from the chambers of Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge. It was a gentle, necessary ...

Posthumously Pardoning the Lizard King’s Penis

Sixties rock deity Jim "€œThe Lizard King"€ Morrison's bloated corpse was found in a Parisian bathtub in 1971, but apparently his soul had been writhing in restless torment ...

When Man Invented Science

Pope Benedict’s trip to Ole Blighty is over, and that sanctimonious gasbag Dawkins didn’t manage to arrest him in the name of secular humanism. While I’m not a ...


Sign Up to Receive Our Latest Updates!