Persian Gulf War

Max Boot | November/December 2006

How the U. S. military reinvented itself after the Vietnam disaster

November/December 2002

BLAMING POWELL—AND EISENHOWER—FOR NOT HAVING PUSHED THROUGH

EMBATTLED, SCRUTINIZED, POWELL SOLDIERS ON, ran the headline on the front page of The New York Times, as if the writer was astonished to find Colin Powell still at the State Department despite his disagreements with some of th

100 Bags of Mail

November/December 2001

SUPPORTING OUR GROUND TROOPS DURING THE GULF WAR, A NAVY SHIP AWAITS NEWS FROM HOME.

In December 1990, the USS Virginia left Norfolk on what was supposed to be a short training exercise. We weren’t told where we were going until we were under way, but we’d been told to pack well, to check medical and dental readiness, and so on.

Fighting The Last War, and the Next One

Fredric Smoler | November/December 2001

Our government called the terrorist attacks on our country an act of war and replied with a declaration of war on terrorism. What can history teach us about our prospects in such a war?

Generals are always prepared to fight the last war, as the durable and scornful proverb goes. But preparing to fight the last war is not necessarily a foolish thing to do.

A War Against History

Roger J. Spiller | February/March 2001

It's the tenth anniversary of the Gulf War. America certainly didn't lose, but what else do we know about it?

What Does History Have to Say About the Persian Gulf?

Fredric Smoler | November 1990

What the past tells of America’s role in the current crisis is sometimes contradictory, but always worth listening to.

Men and women achieve historical perspective by making analogies.

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Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.