Historian’s Corner

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

Victor Davis Hanson As the power of the fifth-century Athenian and fourth-century Spartan empires declined, and after the stunning defeat of Sparta at the battle of Leuctra (371 BC), the most ancient of the Greek city-states Thebes proved re-ascendant. And for more than a decade under the twin leadership of Epaminondas and Pelopidas, it dominated

Victor Davis Hanson I wrote The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation out of curiosity as to why on rare conditions wars don’t just end in the capitulation of the defeated, the occupation or annexation of its homelands, or the victors’ demands to pay reparations or fines.* Rather, they sometimes cease only with

Victor Davis Hanson The people yearn for laws to regain their potency. They are sickened by statutes on the books that vaporize upon needed enforcement. They are tired of excuses and inaction. We feel the chaos everywhere from the trivial to the existential. How many times has Joe Biden threatened the Houthis? Is the Red

Victor Davis Hanson In short, if Alvin Bragg or Letitia James or Fani Willis were to forsake lawfare and the publicity it earns, and instead treat the criminals in their big city with steep bail, speedy trials, and stiff sentences upon conviction, we know calm would return to urban America. We know that truth because such a renaissance occurred

Victor Davis Hanson America is facing a number of existential crises—an open border, 30 million illegal immigrants, $36 trillion in debt, borrowing at the rate of $1 billion every 100 days, a suicidal war on gas, oil, and coal production, a recrudescence of premodern racial and ethnic tribalism, the destruction of deterrence abroad, blue state

Victor Davis Hanson A third component of the street and campus madness is the destruction of all deterrence abroad and at home by the Biden administration. The Middle East has concluded that the U.S. is in escalating decline. Biden is seen as decrepit and terrified of losing power and thus will do anything to prevent, (1) Middle-East tensions that will disrupt

The epidemic of Diversity/Equity/Inclusion ideology fuels much of the current violence on campus and in the street, and for two reasons. One, we are now in our third year of reparatory admissions. That is, the SAT/ACT required admission exams have been absent on elite campuses for two or even three years. Racial quotas have severely