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Collected reviews from decades of reading — organized by subject and written for clarity, context, and long-term reference.
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Eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon famously wrote, “The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.” More than two centuries and countless scholarly debates later, British historian Alexander Demandt wryly observed, “The only thing historians agree on about the fall of the Roman Empire is that it happened.” Indeed, yet another…
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Each year I choose a broad historical subject to immerse myself in and, if possible, come close to mastering. In 2024 it was the Italian Renaissance; the year before, the Industrial Revolution. In 2025 I turned to early colonial America. Of the dozen or so books I read – ranging from accounts of the Spanish…
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In Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (2022) historian Chris Miller delivers a comprehensive and urgent account of how the semiconductor has become the most critical – and contested – resource in the modern world. His central insight is that microchips are not merely the foundation of the digital economy but…
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The American Revolution established the world’s first modern republic, but it did not establish a democracy in the sense that Americans understand the term today. The men who declared independence from Great Britain in 1776 and drafted the Constitution eleven years later were committed to representative government, individual liberty, and the principle that political authority…
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Few artists did more to transform the course of modern sculpture than Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), the French master whose extraordinary ability to capture the human form in all its physical and emotional complexity helped elevate sculpture from a largely decorative art to a powerful medium of individual expression. Yet Rodin’s ascent to artistic greatness was…
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Few events in modern history have been studied, debated, and reinterpreted as extensively as the American Revolution. Historians have variously explained the break with Great Britain as a struggle over taxation and parliamentary sovereignty, a conflict between competing economic interests, a revolt against imperial mismanagement, or the emergence of a distinct American national identity. In…
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It has been argued that the United States was the world’s first modern society. The American colonies slowly developed into a pioneering, large-scale experiment in organizing an entire nation around the defining ideals of modernity: nonhereditary political authority, religious pluralism, commercial capitalism, and individual achievement rather than inherited privilege as the principal determinant of social…
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Author Pierre Schneider makes a compelling case that Édouard Manet was one of the most revolutionary artists in history. In the mid-nineteenth century, Manet almost single-handedly upended the conventions of Western painting in a manner comparable to Giotto’s transformation of art in the fourteenth century. His revolution was not so much a matter of style…
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Eric Cline achieved something of a surprise commercial success with 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, an early volume in the Turning Points in Ancient History series. In After 1177 B.C., he returns to answer the obvious next question: What happened between the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, beginning around 1200 BC,, and the…
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I have read widely about Classical Antiquity and have even dabbled a bit in ancient Egypt, including taking a course on hieroglyphics, so I was somewhat stunned to encounter the fascinating story Eric H. Cline tells in 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. I’m embarrassed to admit that I had never fully appreciated the scale…
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“Neoconservative” is one of those political labels that many people recognize but relatively few understand. French political scientist Justin Vaïsse has therefore done a great service in writing this deeply researched, admirably objective, and well-balanced history of a movement that has exerted an outsized influence on American foreign policy over the past half century, particularly…
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In 1888, James Bryce, a British historian, jurist, and future ambassador to the United States, published The American Commonwealth, a sweeping three-volume study of American government, politics, and society. Bryce sought to do for the United States what Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America had done half a century earlier: explain how American democracy actually…
