RealClearHistory Articles

August 20 marked the 193rd birthday of an American president.  Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know that. Benjamin Harrison is used to being forgotten.  Harrison is almost comically overlooked. Ask someone to name the presidents between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, and you would probably hear crickets.  It’s even worse for a guy like Harrison, whose lone presidential term is sandwiched between Grover Cleveland’s two nonconsecutive terms. Even his grandfather, William Henry Harrison, is better remembered, and the man was president for just 31...

At a time when universities are shuttering their presses, Grove City College has launched Faith & Freedom Press through publisher Whitaker House. Their inaugural book, Born of Ideas, written by distinguished author, academic and historian Lawrence W. Reed, frames how our nation’s founding was “born of ideas” through the lens of faith, personal responsibility and divine purpose. Rather than reiterating the more conventional Revolutionary yarns, Reed commences his dissertation not in 1776 but with the Mayflower Compact in 1620. Reed is a learned student of the...

What does it mean to be an American? How do we define America? Some say it’s an idea. Others say a place. Still more say a people. In truth, America encompasses all these components. Each plays its unique part, but they also reinforce one another, forming an organic and indivisible whole. An analogy from James Madison illustrates this understanding. In The Federalist Papers, our fourth president articulates his theory of separation of powers and checks and balances: Although the branches of government have their unique responsibilities, each branch holds a piece of another....

The Panama Canal stands as one of the most monumental engineering achievements in modern human history. Stretching approximately 50 miles across the narrow Isthmus of Panama, this artificial waterway connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, fundamentally altering the trajectory of global trade and maritime navigation. Before its completion, vessels traveling between the eastern and western coasts of the Americas were forced to navigate the treacherous waters of Cape Horn or the Strait of Magellan at the southernmost tip of South America. The canal eliminated nearly 8,000 nautical miles from...

In The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, author Thomas Kuhn argued that science progresses through long periods of stability within a shared paradigm, punctuated by revolutions when that paradigm breaks down. Kuhn devised his theory to explain scientific revolutions, but it explains Republican politics just as well. Fifty years ago, Ronald Reagan’s paradigm rested on a three-legged stool: free-market economics, social conservatism, and muscular foreign policy. For decades, Republicans practiced Kuhn’s "normal science," operating within Reagan’s framework. But as anomalies...

As Washington continues to argue over whether the American founding should be celebrated or deconstructed, and while most parts of Europe consider anti-Americanism fashionable, one of the most compelling tributes to the American experiment has opened – not on the banks of the Potomac but on the Danube. The Hungarian National Museum’s new exhibition, American Dream: Hungarians in the United States, 1776–2026, is a masterclass in how to tell America’s story with both historical honesty and patriotic confidence. Created to commemorate the...

On paper, military engagements often seem dictated by raw numbers: the size of a fleet, the count of infantry divisions, or the caliber of heavy artillery. Military strategists frequently rely on quantitative ratios to predict outcomes, such as requiring a three-to-one numerical advantage to assault a fortified position. Yet across American history, several critical battles shattered these mathematical calculations. In these moments, small or heavily disadvantaged American forces faced imminent destruction, only to turn guaranteed defeats into historic victories through clever tactics, field...

The birth of the United States is often taught as a neat sequence of political philosophies, iron-willed generals, and decisive musket volleys. But look closer at the faded journals of the men who stood in those frozen mud trenches or watched their capital burn, and a different pattern emerges. They spoke constantly of "Special Providence” – bizarre, hyper-localized weather anomalies that tore through the landscape at the exact moment all hope seemed lost. To modern military historians, these turning points represent extreme tactical luck or rare meteorological coincidences. But...

The use of oaths of office in the United States is widespread. At the federal level, oaths are required of the President, Vice President, cabinet officials, members of Congress, civil officials and military members. More broadly, oaths of office have been used throughout history and across nations. What do such oaths require, and do they matter? Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution sets out the oath required of a President upon assuming office. The oath has two parts: (1) to faithfully execute the office of President; and (2) to protect, support, and defend, the Constitution. Apart...

The 56 men who signed their names to the Declaration of Independence knew that if the British prevailed, they’d be tried for treason. When they pledged “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor,” they meant it – and put all those things at risk. Ben Franklin reportedly quipped, “we must all hang together, or assuredly we will all hang separately.” The courage of America’s founders in their David-and-Goliath struggle for freedom from Great Britain comes through loud and clear in “Revolutionary America,” a stunning new documentary...

In 1811, several hundred enslaved men walked off the sugar plantations of Louisiana, armed themselves, and began marching toward New Orleans. Their uprising is often described as the largest slave revolt in American history. Most Americans have never heard of it. Most Americans know of Nat Turner. They may recognize the names Denmark Vesey or Gabriel Prosser. But few know Charles Deslondes, who led an armed uprising through the plantation country along the Mississippi River and, for a few days in January 1811, terrified the people who controlled Louisiana. How did a revolt this large nearly...

Modern military planners warn of conflict in the unforgiving, claustrophobic environments of the world's cities. The contemporary defense community parses the lessons of urban siege warfare, looking to recent battlefields for insights into how decentralized units navigate dense subterranean and structural mazes. Yet the challenge of urban operations is far from a 21st-century novelty. Military organizations have long faced a structural crisis when rigid, open-terrain doctrines collide with the realities of fortified cities. In September 1846, Gen. Zachary Taylor’s army confronted this...

Soon, America will celebrate its 250th birthday. As the day approaches, we can look back at the commemorations of four milestone anniversaries to provide context for our celebrations to come. We start with July 4, 1826, the 50th celebration of American independence. At the time, the nation had 24 states and about 11 million people. To mark the occasion, businesses closed, cannons fired, parades rolled and fireworks lit the sky. In small towns and growing cities, dignitaries mounted hastily built platforms to hold forth on the young nation’s short history.  In New Orleans,...

As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, many Americans are reflecting on the revolution’s legacy by visiting historical exhibitions, attending regional fairs, and watching battle reenactments. Some, however, are wondering how everything might have been different by exploring the possibility of the revolution’s failure. In recent months, journalists, bloggers, and other writers have explored whether George Washington’s forces might have lost key early battles – from the Battle of Long Island to the Battle of...

A visitor standing at the intersection of D’Evereux Drive and Liberty Road today would find little reason to linger. Cars pass through the traffic light. Businesses line the road. The sounds are those of any American town going about its day. Nothing suggests this quiet crossroads was once one of the most consequential sites in the American South. Nearly two centuries ago, thousands of enslaved men, women, and children stood here against their will. Some had been marched hundreds of miles from Virginia, Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Others had endured weeks or months of uncertainty...

In segregated twentieth-century Natchez, Mississippi, power wore predictable faces: white, male, and respectable, at least on paper. Yet one of the town's most influential figures fit none of those categories. Ten blocks from City Hall, in a modest white house at 416 North Rankin Street, a different kind of power thrived. It was quieter, unlicensed, and defiantly female. The house belonged to Nellie Jackson and behind its doors operated one of the most infamous and paradoxically respected brothels in the South. What makes Nellie Jackson historically significant isn't simply that she ran a...

For nearly 35 years, H. W. (Harry) Crocker III ran the editorial department at Regnery Publishing—America’s then-leading conservative book publisher—in a storied career that made him an indispensable shaper of the conservative movement of the last half century (and included, for a while, doing double duty as editor of that one-time beacon of the conservative movement, The Conservative Book Club, and taking on journalistic stints as senior editor of The American Spectator, columnist at The National Catholic Register, and much else besides). His authors included everyone from...

The conventional way to mark a 250th birthday is to call the Founders “visionaries,” to say they saw around corners and anticipated the country we became. These authors would push back on that, gently. The founders were brilliant, but they were not prophets. They wrote with quill pens by candlelight and traveled by horse. They could not have anticipated most of what their country would become. And they didn't have to. Two and a half centuries later, we're still reaching back to the documents they left behind to answer questions they never thought to ask. That isn't a failure of...

What if the greatest investment in history wasn't a stock… but a country? As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, much of the reflection will focus on politics, culture, and global leadership. There's another lens less discussed, yet just as consequential: America as the most successful long-term investment in history. From its earliest days, America wasn't just founded as a nation. It was funded as an idea. The first colonies were financed by joint-stock companies, early ventures that pooled capital in pursuit of uncertain but transformative returns. That spirit of...