National Security

Teaching East Asian, South Asian or Middle Eastern military history permits students to explore the rich potential areas of study that encompass half the globe and trace back five thousand years. Moreover, since Asian states have historically been far...

The past few weeks have introduced a whirlwind of reporting on the current situation in Iraq. In particular, the reports of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces in Iraq, the U.S. General Accountability Office’s report, and the September...

Will America soon find itself in a counterinsurgency fight in another “Iraq”? There are responsible people who believe that, notwithstanding the U.S. experience since 2003, the American body politic still retains an appetite for colossal boots-on-the-ground efforts like Iraq....

In 1989 an article appeared in the Journal of American History that asked rhetorically, “Have Social Historians Lost the Civil War?” It observed that when historians analyzed social developments within the United States, they tended to focus on pre-Civil...

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...

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,...

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...

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...