Victor David Hanson’s The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation (Basic, 2024) has chapters on the destruction of Thebes, Carthage, Constantinople, and Tenochtitlan that the author, or a good editor, should have abridged. Maybe the repetition, though, can drum into our heads a lesson we try to keep out: “Modern societies are not immune to the horror of Read More ›
If we believe there is no qualitative distinction between animals and humans, are we more likely to protect human life or devalue it? On this episode of ID The Future, host Eric Anderson talks to historian Dr. Richard Weikart about his latest book, Unnatural Death: Medicine’s Descent From Healing to Killing, now available from Discovery Institute Press. The book is Read More ›
On July 4 we celebrated the rare revolution that worked. This page focuses on two wonderfully readable books about the mostly unsuccessful 17th century revolution that preceded America’s 18th century one, and the partly successful 19th century revolution that followed. Jonathan Healey’s The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689 (Knopf, 2023) features vivid, specific detail. Some on Read More ›
We all tend to favor life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what happens when the pursuit ruins children’s happiness (and sometimes keeps them from life itself)? Melissa Kearney’s The Two-Parent Privilege (U. of Chicago, 2023) shows that the national Wars on Poverty and Drugs have been less effective than the War on Family that the cultural left has Read More ›
Two decades ago John Judis and Ruy Teixeira prophesied big changes in their book The Emerging Democratic Majority. Their new book asks, Where Have All the Democrats Gone? (Henry Holt, 2023). Essentially, college-educated professionals (some with unorthodox lifestyles) have now pushed out “many of the people in the deindustrialized towns and small cities of middle America [and left them] stripped Read More ›
Andrew Wilson’s Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Crossway, 2023) has probably left dozens of historians groaning, Why didn’t I think of that? Wilson could have written one more bloviating account of how the WEIRD revolution — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic — affected the world during the past 250 years. Instead, he concentrated on the one Read More ›
The best biography I’ve read the past year is Elizabeth Varon’s Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Robert E. Lee saw northern victory resulting from a brutal turning of soldiers into cannon fodder, and did not admit that slavery was wrong. But James Longstreet, Lee’s right hand after Stonewall Jackson died, joined the Republican Read More ›