Sitting down to write my annual assessment on trends in terrorism in early 2025, I am struggling more than usual, fresh off ...

Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Walter A. McDougall argues powerfully that a pervasive but radically changing faith that “God is on our side” has inspired U.S. foreign policy ever since 1776. The ...

H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) was a reporter, literary critic, editor, author — and a famous American agnostic in the twentieth century. From his role in the Scopes Trial to his advocacy of science and ...

Over the last decade, the U.S., UK Israel and other states have begun to use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for military operations and for targeted killings in places like Pakistan, Yemen and ...

The first serious book to examine what happens when the ancient boundary between war and peace is erased. Once, war was a temporary state of affairs—a violent but brief interlude between times of ...

There is little documented mapping of conflict prior to the Renaissance period, but, from the 17th century onward, military commanders and strategists began to document the wars in which they were ...

Misunderstanding Terrorism provides a striking reassessment of the scope and nature of the global neo-jihadi threat to the West. The post-9/11 decade experienced the emergence of new forms of ...

Nancy Ries is Emerita Professor of Anthropology and Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University. Her specialty is ...

“Speak softly and carry a big stick” Theodore Roosevelt famously said in 1901, when the United States was emerging as a great power. It was the right sentiment, perhaps, in an age of imperial rivalry ...

In the late 1970s, the United States often seemed to be a superpower in decline. Battered by crises and setbacks around the globe, its post–World War II international leadership appeared to be ...

The New Republic. Her first biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life (Liveright/W.W. Norton, 2016) won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography about and was named a New York ...

From the “Great Arab Revolt” against Ottoman rule in World War I to the upheavals of the Arab Spring, this text analyzes a century of modern Arab history through the lens of three intertwined notions: ...