National Security

On October 15, 2007, FPRI’s Program on National Security held a conference on American civil-military relations, hosted and co-sponsored by the Reserve Officers Association in Washington, D.C. Mackubin T. Owens, Frank G. Hoffman, Michael P. Noonan, and Robert Feidler,...

When I signed on to do my volume in the Oxford History of the United States, several volumes had already appeared, so I knew what was expected. I also knew that I wanted to address not just fellow academic...

Slavery lasted for 250 years just in the territory of the United States, and for half a millennium in the Atlantic world. Teaching about it is therefore a huge assignment. I will begin with a wide-angle, panoramic lens, and...

Most high schools and even colleges and universities do not offer courses on technology in America, which is extraordinary because technology plays such a dominant role in our life. For instance, of the many revolutions invoked by the invention...

Throes of Democracy Walter A. McDougall, professor of international relations at University of Pennsylvania and author of Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, reviewed how, after an unprecedented economic boom, by June 1857, the New York...

Twenty-five years ago, when I began to contemplate a dissertation topic concerning women’s work on Civil War battlefields, a prominent historian asked me, “Were there any women at the front?” Since then, historians have documented the lives of women...

In yet another display of madness, Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe and his cronies have decided that if you lose the presidential election, simply do not announce the result and maybe everyone will go away. Mugabe and his party, Zanu-PF,...

No story in American history has captured the popular imagination better than that of Abraham Lincoln’s youth. A poor boy growing up in what was then a remote area, enduring the tragic death of his mother at an early...

China’s Early Encounters with the West: A history in reverse Andrew Wilson of the U.S. Naval War College explained how the image of a weak backward China adrift in a modern world, bullied by Western powers, dominates China’s historical...

I am going to look at the history of China’s encounters with the West in reverse order, beginning with the more familiar storyline of China as a weak and battered power in the modern era and closing with a...