RealClearHistory Articles

People may think the 2020s in America seem like strange times, but 1881 could give it a run for its money. A corrupt Vice President, Chester Arthur, ascended to the highest office in the land after a disgruntled madman shot President James Garfield. It’s a wild story that, nearly 150 years later, has slipped out of our collective memory. Netflix has resurrected this drama and its aftermath with a limited series called Death by Lightning. Though as is common for any dramatization of real events, not everything shown on screen is true to history. As a filmmaker who spent the past two...

Americans love to be outraged. Our identity is endowed with a consistent distrust, if not vitriolic animosity, towards both government and the conditions detrimental to everyday life which the government has failed to address. Whether it be in politics or business, there is little consideration for the severity of this hatred or even the influence and power of the entity that we are disposed to hate. It is a deeply rooted, instinctual exercise in what it means to be an American. In no other nation on earth can a school board administrator be expected to face as much enmity as a candidate for...

At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day, the guns went quiet. November 11 began as silence, not spectacle—but with ears still ringing from years of constant barrages. What we first called Armistice Day became Veterans Day a generation later, widening the circle from one war to all who wore the uniform. We’ve tinkered with the calendar, but meaning lives in the day itself. In 1954, Congress formally renamed Armistice Day to Veterans Day; in 1978 the holiday returned to November 11 after a brief Monday move.  That origin matters. Veterans Day isn’t a scoreboard for...

Donald Trump put things at the center of conservative politics. Since the 1950s, conservative intellectuals have championed individual liberty, limited government, and free markets as integral to the American way of life. Libertarians defended liberty from the encroachment of the state. Traditionalists urged a return to Judeo-Christian beliefs and Western values. Neoconservatives argued against the expansion of Communist ideologies. And, later, fusionists sought to combine these currents into a single ideology. Together, conservative thinkers and politicians sought to pay a...

Stock markets around the world are surging because of two things: an expected interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve and an AI investment boom. But neither of these things necessarily signal actual strength in the economy. Interest rates are set by the Federal Reserve, which is supposed to be completely independent from the legislative and executive branches. When the Federal Reserve was founded in 1913, it was carefully set up to be free from political control, as politicians would be tempted to expand the money supply in order to give the economy a short-run boost to help their political...

This is not a dream. It isn’t some nightmare from which we can awaken to find our friend alive and well. No.  This is a hero’s tale - one of a brave knight on a perilous journey who entered the battle and fought gloriously until his last breath. Our friend is dead.  That reality cannot be changed, no matter how much we wish it.  But, like all good fairytales, it is only the beginning of Charlie Kirk’s story. Like Arthur before he became King of Camelot working as a lowly squire for Sir Kay, 17 year-old Charlie was, not long ago, just an enthusiastic high...

Earlier this month, the hashtag #trumpisdead went viral on X, and the term “TRUMP DIED” earned millions of likes and views online. Anonymous left-wing social media accounts likely planted the rumor of Trump’s death, which similarly inclined journalists then amplified to create a “permission structure” to write about his demise. What they don’t understand is that Donald Trump will never die. Can a living man become a monument? Yes—if that man is Donald Trump. Traditional monuments include grand examples such as the Lincoln Memorial,...

At 9:02 a.m. on a terrifically hot late September Monday in San Diego, Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 182, banking steeply over the North Park neighborhood on final approach to Lindbergh Field, clipped a four-seat Cessna model 172 on a training flight. The resulting crash of September 25, 1978 killed 137 people in the air and seven on the ground, at the time the nation’s worst air disaster in number of deaths. It remains seared into San Diego’s collective past, symbolized by an iconic photo of the three-engine PSA 727 jet, right wing aflame, plummeting toward homes. Yet long...

While we may assume that we are currently in the most profoundly and rapidly changing era of humankind, the century spanning from 1450 to 1550 A.D. stands out as a period of such deep and interconnected change that it can be rightfully called the most amazing century in history. While other eras have seen great events, this particular hundred-year span was a cauldron where science, religion, politics, economics, and art were all fundamentally and irreversibly transformed. It was a time when the medieval world was dismantled, and the foundations of the modern era were laid. The Dawn of a New...

As night followed night during 1940-1941, civilians and civil defence teams across Britain were confronted by shocking sights and sounds. The spine-tingling, stomach-churning wail of air raid sirens. The distinctive, sinister drone of enemy aircraft engines.  The whistle of falling high explosive bombs, their ear-splitting detonation and lethal blast waves. The metallic tinkling sound of incendiaries dropping onto rooftops before igniting in a white-green flash. The dazzling, probing beams of searchlights and pounding anti-aircraft guns. The deafening roar of collapsing buildings....

As the Blitz progressed (from 7 Spetember 1940-11 May 1941) the undulating sound of German bomber engines became a nightly, dreaded sound over London and other British cities. The Luftwaffe fleet sent against London was composed of waves of twin-engined Heinkel HE-111, Dornier Do-17 and Junkers JU-88 aircraft from Luftflotten (Air Fleets) Two and Three, based in northern France and the Low Countries. They were accompanied by Bf-109E fighters by day but flew unescorted to the capital by night. From October to November 1940 – the so-called ‘Messerschmitt Month’...

September 2025 marks 85 years since the start of the Blitz, the systematic attempt by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to bomb Britain into submission from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941. 'The Blitz' - the phrase derives from the German word 'Blitzkrieg' ('lightning war') - is remembered as a national ordeal which marked all who endured it. Heavy air raids took place on London and other British cities for over eight months (243 days and nights). Nazi Germany’s area bombing campaign against Britain during the Second World War can be divided into several distinct phases. The Blitz was...

The living memory of World War II is passing away. In April, the oldest known survivor of Pearl Harbor died at 106 years old. A few weeks ago, a 102-year old veteran who stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day (June 6, 1944) entered his eternal reward.  Sadly, less than one percent of the war’s veterans are still alive. However, more troubling and dark, the increasing deaths of witnesses — those who endured the conflict and its horrors — has been coupled with the rise of revisionist ahistorical conspiracies about the Second World War. Worse,...

As President Donald J. Trump sends National Guard troops to help reduce crime in the nation’s cities, lessons from Edmund Burke, a prominent conservative politician in Britain during the 18th-century Revolutionary Era, remain relevant for Americans today. In a speech to Parliament, Burke issued a timeless political rights warning, stating, “If you take away the Civil Execution of justice, you maim and mangle the whole constitutional Polity of England.” The British legislator believed that the military should be used in policing roles as a last resort. He argued...

Sometime, someplace in the Judean Hills in the year 132 the storm broke. It had been a long time coming, but even so it shocked the Romans. It shocked them enough that it may have cost them a legion and possibly the life of the governor of the province of Judea. “May have” is necessary because the sources of evidence are scarce and because the detective work that has gone into reconstructing the war is as conjectural as it is ingenious. And yet, the story is as dramatic as any of the Jewish revolts against Rome and more decisive. The war was the third of the three major Jewish...

Yesterday marked the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, with the signing of the peace treaty aboard the USS Missouri. On August 22 the last American flying ace of the war died at the age of 103. My own father passed away last December just short of 98. He was about as young as someone could be and still be a WWII veteran. What had been 16 million servicemen is now about sixty thousand. The GI generation or “greatest generation” is rapidly passing away, and their view of World War II as “the good war” may pass with them. All US wars...

Theodore Roosevelt felt antsy amid the 1904 campaign season.  He was up for reelection, but the inexhaustible TR couldn’t hit the trail. Custom dictated that a sitting president not actively electioneer on his own behalf; surrogates alone would have to carry his message.  “I think it depresses you a little to be the only man in the country who cannot take part in the campaign for the presidency,” a fellow Republican wrote him. Indeed. A frustrated Roosevelt told his son, “I could cut [the Democratic nominee] into ribbons if I could get at him in the open. But...

On April 4, 2003, as the invasion of Iraq reached its critical phase, the 1st Brigade Combat Team of the 3rdInfantry Division, seized Saddam International Airport–codenamed Objective Lions–on the western outskirts of Baghdad. The operation marked one of the most decisive conventional victories of the war. It didn’t hinge on advanced sensors or over-the-horizon fires. It hinged on tempo–speed, initiative, and sustained shock. I was there, leading an infantry platoon in Charlie Company, 2-7 Infantry, attached to Task Force 3-69 Armor. We had just come off a...

August 8th marks 80 years since the dawn of the atomic age. This is a story about two cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and two remarkable men: Jacob Beser and Tsutomu Yamaguchi. Beser, a First Lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps at the time, was the only crewmember aboard both planes that dropped the atomic bombs. Tsutomu Yamaguchi, meanwhile, is famously known as the only person officially recognized by the Japanese government to have survived both bombings. The first bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 a.m. local time, when the B-29 bomber Enola Gay released an atomic bomb...