Historian’s Corner

Victor Davis Hanson I just returned from leading 160 travelers on a tour to Normandy for the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings. The tour went quite well. The participants were especially enthusiastic, good sports, extremely knowledgeable, and above all, happy people. We had three great Hillsdale professors providing morning lectures (Professors Connor, Calvert, and […]

Victor Davis Hanson Much of the screaming about tyranny, Trump fascism, internment camps, etc., is also ego-driven. AOC in her selfies believes that she must be Trump’s numero uno target (No one cares about her psychodramas). The barking Michael Cohen sounds like a disaffected Putin thug warning about Trump pushing people off buildings. Rachel Maddow,

Victor Davis Hanson Biden’s favorability is now consistently below 40 percent. His brain and body freezes are routine. Biden’s word salad and fantasy spins do not even merit the news. His lectures about the “convicted felon” Trump are over, along with his rants about the evil Second Amendment—given Hunter’s felony gun convictions. If Hunter is

Victor Davis Hanson So no wonder about 80 percent of the American people support Israel’s efforts against Hamas, a margin that has stayed more or less constant since October 7, despite global elite and media condemnation of the Israeli entry into Gaza. Biden keeps pandering to a quarter-million potential Arab American voters. Yet, it is

Victor Davis Hanson At home, we have seen all sorts of violent campus and street pro-Hamas demonstrations over the last nine months. Their method is to cause the greatest disruption in commutes, or to instill the greatest outrage in defacing iconic monuments, or to elicit the greatest repulsion in chanting post-October 7 slogans that call

  Israel is not losing its wars against radical Islamic terrorists in Gaza, at least not as we are led to believe by the Western media and political apparatuses. The usual pessimism runs something like this: no state can eradicate terrorism, especially of the radical Islamic brand. Terrorist, Hamas-like cells, we are further lectured, are

Victor Davis Hanson We saw on October 7 unprovoked mass slaughter, rape, torture, mutilation, decapitation, and hostage-taking, and agreed that human nature has not changed much since the era of the Aztecs or Macedonians. But the delivery systems of mass death—nuclear, chemical, biological, and the use of artificial intelligence—have evolved far beyond the muscular strength

Victor Davis Hanson Hernán Cortés was an unlikely conqueror of civilizations. He was born into a middle-class Castilian family, leaving Spain just 12 years after the European discovery of the New World. At 18, the young Cortés planned to get rich, acquire estates, and thus advance in the New World’s Spanish elite hierarchy—in a way

Victor Davis Hanson Despite bouts of destructive bubonic plague, the pillaging of the city by fellow Christians from Western Europe during the aborted Fourth Crusade (1204), and a tidal wave of Turkish invasions that finally under the Ottoman Sultanate had surrounded Constantinople, the eternal city of 1453 and its vestigial outlands still held out. Under

Victor Davis Hanson Carthage had fought and lost two Punic wars against Rome (264 BC–201 BC). After the end of the Hannibalic War (201), the city lost almost all its empire, many of its North African alliances, and was forced to pay Rome huge fines. Yet a mere half-century later, by 149 BC, Carthage was