A Nation Must Think Before it Acts
FootNotes
A nation must think before it acts.
FootNotes
Footnotes are essays designed in particular for teachers and students and are often drawn from the lectures at our nationally recognized Butcher History Institute for Teachers.
When Repression Masquerades as Social Justice: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
As Elie Wiesel reminds us, there is no more eloquent witness against injustice and evil than eyewitness memory. A colleague of mine at Yale, the theologian Miroslav Volf, who spent time in prison in Croatia simply because his father...
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World War II and Its Meaning for Americans
When America went to an all-volunteer force in the 1970s, many predicted that a gap in outlook would arise between the military and civilian worlds. To counter the growing gap that has indeed arisen, military history and subjects like...
Read more »Teaching About the Military in American History: A History Institute for Teachers
Paul Herbert, Ph.D., Colonel, US Army (Ret.), Executive Director of the Cantigny First Division Foundation, welcomed participants to Cantigny. The Museum grounds were provided by the estate of Robert McCormick, editor-owner of the Chicago Tribune from 1911-55, a WWI...
Read more »Teaching About the Military: Some Basics
I take the inspiration for this talk from the distinguished military historian Maurice Matloff, who wrote that military history is a combination of general history and military art and science, and that it lies at the intersection of diplomatic,...
Read more »Genocide: The Cases of Rwanda and Sudan
There is a relationship between societies that aren’t free and genocide, but it’s not exactly the relationship one might assume. The common wisdom is based on our knowledge of the Holocaust, which we think of as the prototypical case...
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North Korea: The Nadir of Freedom
North Korea is a country devastated by tyrannical rule, famine, death, and a strict caste system. A small country, it is nonetheless important because it’s located in the middle of the dynamic Northeast Asia region, surrounded by China, Russia,...
Read more »Understanding the Creation of the U.S. Armed Forces
The creation of the United States’ military forces was a prolonged, complicated process that unfolded in three distinct periods, beginning with the Revolution but continuing through the Confederation and early Constitutional eras. The American Revolution The armed forces date...
Read more »What Every American Needs to Know about Taiwan
About a month and a half ago, a college student in Taiwan ran away from home because, as he told a reporter later, “There’s only negative news on TV, and I do not believe Taiwan is such a bad...
Read more »Teaching the Classics: What Americans Can Learn from Herodotus
There is one obvious reason why Americans ought to find it useful to read and study Herodotus. He described a world that is in certain crucial regards like our own. Athens and Sparta were, of course, tiny communities. Herodotus...
Read more »War and the Military in American History
At past FPRI history institutes I have praised and thanked the teachers in attendance because I likened them to front-line soldiers in the war to prove the ignorance of America’s youth is not invincible. Our subject this weekend makes...
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