If you wonder who wrote the playbook for the lunatic fringe in today’s Republican Party, look no further than the John Birch Society. Established in 1958, the Society terrorized moderate and liberal Republicans as well as Democrats in the 1960s and early 70s. Its founder, Robert Welch (1899–1985), had called…

Ask just about any American at random to describe the Chinese political system, and the answer is likely to be “Communism.” It’s a convenient label that results from Mao Zedong’s 1949 revolution and seven decades of reporting by and about the Chinese Communist Party. Not to mention decades of over-simplified…

Someone famous probably urged us never to delve too deeply into the lives of our heroes since we’re so likely to become cruelly disappointed. And you may have held a vision of Lawrence as one of the few genuine heroes of the 20th Century — a vision nourished by David…

Military leaders famously protest that they love peace, not war. But the evidence suggests otherwise, as David Vine’s explosive book, The United States of War, makes abundantly clear. His book updates and sets in historical context the case laid out nearly twenty years ago in Blowback by former Cold Warrior…

Historians debate whether Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) had a material effect on the outcome of World War II. After all, they operated on the margins, behind enemy lines, never capable of mounting strategically significant missions. But later testimony from military leaders…

One of the ugliest aspects of life in America today is the appalling level of poverty — and the failure of our government to do anything meaningful about it. As sociologist Matthew Desmond makes clear in Poverty, By America, a single action by Congress and the President could easily generate…

Why was Ivan the Terrible so terrible? Why did Napoleon lose the Battle of Waterloo? What did Queen Victoria have to do with the fall of Russia’s last tsar? These are among the intriguing questions Frederick Cartwright and Michael Biddiss answer in Disease and History. The book, first published in…

You may have come across reports about the violence surrounding the mining of the rare mineral coltan in Central Africa. It’s a source of the element tantalum, which is essential in the manufacture of cell phones and laptops. And about eighty percent of the world’s supply comes from the Democratic…

Even in today’s multipolar world, the President of the United States is often referred to as the most powerful person on the planet. Understandably, then, the news media and politicians worldwide scrutinize his actions with ferocious attention to detail. And they double down during an international crisis. Presidential decision-making then…