For a century, from the 1870s to the 1960s, their family name was one of the most recognizable in the world. They were wealthy beyond the limits of imagination, and they married into European royalty and other ultra wealthy families such as the Rothschilds. Their roots lay in ancient Babylon…

Consider the Pacific Ocean. It’s the largest expanse of territory on the planet, spanning 63.8 million square miles. That’s seventeen times the territory of the United States, and ten times that of Russia, by far the largest nation on Earth. Should we wonder, then, why fleets of Japanese and American…

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, people we now call Asian Americans have made major contributions to American society. You have only to look around you in a hospital, where Philippine American nurses work in huge numbers. Or to glance at the headlines about the CEOs of high-tech companies…

Histories of the US role in World War II frequently mention the famous Tuskegee Airmen, a segregated African-American fighter squadron that distinguished itself in the European Theater. Sometimes they also cite the 92nd Infantry Division (“Buffalo Soldiers”), which breached the Gothic Line in northern Italy. The 761st Tank Battalion(“Black Panthers”)…

Why, you might ask, should an American care to read a history of medieval England? Of course, that’s a question most of us would shrug off. But for me the reasons are clear. The period before and after the Norman Invasion of 1066 was a time with clear echoes in…

Since the advent of the Second World War more than eighty years ago, spies have stripped the United States of a sobering volume of critical, top-secret information that threatens our security. Name a few names, and students of espionage will immediately recognize the spy scandals they caused. Julius Rosenberg. Jonathan…

Follow the news about the high-tech industry, and you’ll likely come across apocalyptic warnings that China is about to overtake the US in just about every field that matters, from artificial intelligence to semiconductors. What a relief it is, then, to read Chip War, a sober, up-to-date survey of the…

Historians long debated the Great Man Theory of History attributed to the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle in 1840. As we have come to understand the contrasting views on either side of the question, some insist that the course of history is set by the ideas and actions of “great men.”…

Six pivotal events set the course of history in the twentieth century. The emergence of the United States as the world’s preeminent economic and military power. The Bolshevik and Chinese Revolutions. World Wars I and II, often lumped together into a latter-day Thirty Years War. And decolonization, accelerated by the…