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History

Dive into thoughtful and informative essays from the past and present, columns, and discoveries penned by Eli Lake, Niall Ferguson and others.

Tyler Cowen: Welcome to Our Weird and Wild Century. It’s a Lot Like the 17th.
England in the 1600s was full of radical progress—and also extreme disorder. Those qualities typify our own strange, unpredictable era.
Tyler Cowen
Luigi Mangione and the History of Bourgeois Terrorism
The alleged CEO assassin is not the first elite to break rad. The notorious Ulrike Meinhof also took the plunge from protest to resistance.
Eli Lake
Is Trump’s Mineral Deal Unprecedented? Not Exactly.
For lessons on the president’s offer to Ukraine, look back at FDR.
Ed Conway
The Nazis Did Not ‘Weaponize’ Free Speech. They Crushed It.
On CBS, our era’s historical ignorance hits a new low.
Andrew Roberts
EXCLUSIVE: Trump Is Starving the National Endowment for Democracy
DOGE has frozen funds to the organization that was instrumental in helping win the Cold War. ‘It’s been a bloodbath.’
Eli Lake
Andrew Roberts: The Historical Case for Trump’s Gaza Plan
Again and again in the past, peoples who unleash unprovoked aggressive wars against their neighbors and are then defeated lose either their government…
Andrew Roberts
How Republics Unravel: From Rome to. . . America?
A great state can fall apart when the rule-breaking of one man inspires his enemies to break the rules, too.
Eli Lake
Is This Mysterious Text the Most Ancient Hebrew Book Ever Discovered?
Found in a cave in Afghanistan, the parchment dates to between 660 and 780 CE. Soon, it will be on display at the Museum of the Bible.
Matti Friedman
Niall Ferguson: The Return of Anti-History
Podcasts are not reviving history, as is often claimed these days. They are mostly drowning it in a tidal wave of blather, at best sloppy, at worst…
Niall Ferguson
Bari Weiss: The War on Our History
We have an illiberal left that sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas, and an illiberal right that sympathizes with the original ones.
Bari Weiss
Victor Davis Hanson: The Truth About World War II
Germany and its fascist allies started the war. They felt empowered to do so not because of supposed Allied aggression, but because of Western…
Victor Davis Hanson
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