The Republican presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz has made it clear that in lieu of “boots on the ground” his position would be to “carpet-bomb them into oblivion.” In a quick ...

Mr. Heather is professor at Worcester College, University of Oxford, and the author of The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians (Oxford University Press). The Roman ...

On the St. Louis theme park that never made it past the drawing board.

Mr. Wittner teaches history at the State University of New York/Albany. His latest book is Toward Nuclear Abolition: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement, 1971 to the Present ...

After the first shock, the questions about Jared Lee Loughner’s attempted assassination of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords quickly resolved to a familiar American dichotomy: Was his act political ...

Voter apathy is mostly a modern disease. Early in our history voter turnout in presidential elections was high. In the late nineteenth century it was common for more than 70 percent of the voting ...

Andrew W. Kahrl is Assistant Professor of History at Marquette University. His book, "Set in Sand: African American Beaches in the Age of Coastal Capitalism," is expected to be published by ...

Robert B. Townsend is the director of the Washington office of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, co-director of the Humanities Indicators, and the author of History’s Babel: Scholarship ...

Mr. Barrett is Professor of Law at St. John’s University in New York City. He discovered, edited and introduced Justice Jackson’s previously unknown, never-published memoir, That Man: An ...

Mr. Offner is Cornelia F. Hugel Professor of History at Lafayette College and past president, Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. His latest book is Another Such Victory ...

Mr. Gosse teaches history at Franklin & Marshall College. He was a founder of Historians Against the War. Nothing like it has happened in the 170 years since American political parties began ...

James Bryce was a nineteenth-century English writer who loved America and wrote passionately about politics. The following excerpt, from his book "The American Commonwealth," is still widely cited ...