Victor Davis Hanson

A definitive account of World War II by America's preeminent military historian World War II was the most lethal conflict in human history. Never before had a war been fought on so many diverse landscapes and in so many different ways, from rocket attacks in London to jungle fighting in Burma to armor strikes in Libya. The Second World Wars examines how combat unfolded in the air, at sea, and on land to show how distinct conflicts among disparate combatants coalesced into one interconnected global war. Drawing on 3,000 years of military history, Victor Davis Hanson argues that despite its novel industrial barbarity, neither the war's origins nor its geography were unusual. Nor was its ultimate outcome surprising. The Axis powers were well prepared to win limited border conflicts, but once they blundered into global war, they had no hope of victory. An authoritative new history of astonishing breadth, The Second World Wars offers a stunning reinterpretation of history's deadliest conflict.

How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won

The Second World Wars

A colorful history of the Peloponnesian War and its dramatic repercussions on the history of ancient Greece brings to life the events of the conflict, its impact on the great city-states of Athens and Sparta, and the personalities involved, including Pericles, Alcibiades, Sophocles, Thucydides, and others. Reprint. 35,000 first printing.

How the Athenians And Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

A War Like No Other

The New York Times bestselling author of The Case for Trump explains the decline and fall of the once cherished idea of American citizenship. Human history is full of the stories of peasants, subjects, and tribes. Yet the concept of the "citizen" is historically rare--and was among America's most valued ideals for over two centuries. But without shock treatment, warns historian Victor Davis Hanson, American citizenship as we have known it may soon vanish. In The Dying Citizen, Hanson outlines the historical forces that led to this crisis. The evisceration of the middle class over the last fifty years has made many Americans dependent on the federal government. Open borders have undermined the idea of allegiance to a particular place. Identity politics have eradicated our collective civic sense of self. And a top-heavy administrative state has endangered personal liberty, along with formal efforts to weaken the Constitution. As in the revolutionary years of 1848, 1917, and 1968, 2020 ripped away our complacency about the future. But in the aftermath, we as Americans can rebuild and recover what we have lost. The choice is ours.

How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America

The Dying Citizen

John Heath

With straightforward advice and informative readings of the great Greek texts, the authors show how we might still save classics and the Greeks for future generations. Who Killed Homer? is must reading for anyone who agrees that knowledge of classics acquaints us with the beauty and perils of our own culture.

The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom

Who Killed Homer?

One of our most provocative military historians, Victor Davis Hanson has given us painstakingly researched and pathbreaking accounts of wars ranging from classical antiquity to the twenty-first century. Now he juxtaposes an ancient conflict with our most urgent modern concerns to create his most engrossing work to date, A War Like No Other. Over the course of a generation, the Hellenic city-states of Athens and Sparta fought a bloody conflict that resulted in the collapse of Athens and the end of its golden age. Thucydides wrote the standard history of the Peloponnesian War, which has given readers throughout the ages a vivid and authoritative narrative. But Hanson offers readers something new: a complete chronological account that reflects the political background of the time, the strategic thinking of the combatants, the misery of battle in multifaceted theaters, and important insight into how these events echo in the present. Hanson compellingly portrays the ways Athens and Sparta fought on land and sea, in city and countryside, and details their employment of the full scope of conventional and nonconventional tactics, from sieges to targeted assassinations, torture, and terrorism. He also assesses the crucial roles played by warriors such as Pericles and Lysander, artists, among them Aristophanes, and thinkers including Sophocles and Plato. Hanson’s perceptive analysis of events and personalities raises many thought-provoking questions: Were Athens and Sparta like America and Russia, two superpowers battling to the death? Is the Peloponnesian War echoed in the endless, frustrating conflicts of Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and the current Middle East? Or was it more like America’s own Civil War, a brutal rift that rent the fabric of a glorious society, or even this century’s “red state—blue state” schism between liberals and conservatives, a cultural war that manifestly controls military policies? Hanson daringly brings the facts to life and unearths the often surprising ways in which the past informs the present. Brilliantly researched, dynamically written, A War Like No Other is like no other history of this important war.

How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

Hanson thinks the ancient Greeks deliberately made warfare physically and psychologically intolerable so that no one could stand it for long and wars could be fought and settled in a single afternoon.

Infantry Battle in Classical Greece

The Western Way of War

Moving portraits of five commanders whose dynamic leadership styles changed the course of warfare and history trace the stories of Themistocles, Belisarius, William Tecumseh Sherman, Matthew Ridgway and David Petraeus, evaluating their pivotal military roles and the controversies that marked their careers.

The Savior Generals

One of America's pre-eminent scholars explains the appeal and purpose of Donald Trump

The Case for Trump

James Edward Thomas

The Dying Citizen Lib/E

La supériorité militaire de l'Occident, depuis l'Antiquité, semble reposer sur une conception particulière de la guerre et de la mort. Car l'issue d'une guerre ne dépend pas toujours du nombre de combattants, de la connaissance du terrain, ni même de la stratégie des chefs. A l'analyse tactique ou géopolitique, Hanson oppose une théorie quelque peu iconoclaste : la victoire, sur le champ de bataille, tient â la cristallisation de valeurs économiques, politiques et culturelles. Ce sont l'individualisme, la démocratie et le rationalisme qui firent plier, en maints endroits, les armées ennemies. Ce fut aussi l'Occident qui accoucha des conceptions les plus radicales de la guerre : la guerre "juste" ou la guerre d'anéantissement, par exemple. A travers le récit de neuf batailles décisives (Salamine, 480 av J.-C ; Gaugamèles, 331 av. J.-C ; Cannes, 216 av. J -C ; Poitiers, 732 ; Tenochtitlan, 1520-1521 ; Lépante, 1 571 ; Rorke's Drift, 1 879 ; Midway, 1 942 et Têt, 1 968), Hanson explore les multiples facettes d'une suprématie guerrière inégalée. Profondément polémique, cette histoire de la " supériorité " occidentale permet de lire en filigrane son envers le plus sombre : le cannibalisme politique et religieux des Européens au fil des siècles.

Les grandes batailles qui ont fait l'Occident

Carnage et culture

Argues for the study of the Greek classics in education

Bruce S. Thornton

Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age

Bonfire of the Humanities

Second World Wars

War and History, Ancient and Modern

Father of Us All

Stirring portraits of five commanders whose dynamic leadership changed the course of war and history.

How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost - From Ancient Greece to Iraq

Makers of Ancient Strategy from the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome

This book claims that agrarianism was the first cause of the classical Greek achievement, that the family farm was the most fundamental thing the Greeks invented, and productive of most of their other inventions and discoveries.

The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization

The Other Greeks

Everyone has been taught that the Greek city-state is the ultimate source of the Western tradition in literature, philosophy, and politics. For generations, scholars have focused on the rise of the city-state and its brilliant cosmopolitan culture. Now Victor Hanson, the author of several studies of ancient warfare and agriculture, has written a book that will completely change our view of Greek society. For Hanson shows that the real "Greek revolution" was not the rise of a free and democratic urban culture, remarkable as this was, but the historic innovation of the independent family farm. The heroes of his book, therefore, are what he calls "the other Greeks" - the neglected freehold farmers, vinegrowers and herdsmen of ancient Greece who formed the backbone of Hellenic civilization. It was these tough-minded, pracitcal, and fiercely independent agrarians, Hanson contends, who gave Greek culture its distinctive emphasis on private property, constitutional government, contractual agreements, infantry warfare, and individual rights. Hanson's reconstruction of ancient Greek farm life, informed by the hands-on knowledge of the subject (he is a fifth-generation California vine and fruit-grower), is fresh, comprehensive, and totally absorbing. But his detailed chronicle of the rise and tragic fall of the Greek city-state also helps us to grasp the implications of what may be the single most significant trend in American life today - namely, the imminent extinction of the family farm. Since Thomas Jefferson Hanson points out, American democracy has been though to depend on the virtues that have traditionally been bred on the farm: self-reliance, honesty, skepticism, a healthy suspicion of urban sophistication, and a stern ethic of accountability, which, as the Greeks teach us, have always been the core values of democratic citizenship. Hanson rightly fears the consequences for American democracy when the family farm disappears, taking with it our last links to the agrarian roots of Western civilization.

The Family Farm and the Agrarian Roots of Western

Other Greeks

A collection of articles and essays written in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, looks at the terrorist attack, the war on terrorism, and their significance in terms of wide-ranging historical, social, and cultural context.

What America Learned from September 11 and the War on Terrorism

An Autumn of War

In this sweeping and deeply imagined historical novel, acclaimed classicist Victor Davis Hanson re-creates the battles of one of the greatest generals of ancient Greece, Epaminondas. At the Battle of Leuktra, his Thebans crushed the fearsome army of Sparta that had enslaved its neighbors for two centuries. We follow these epic historical events through the eyes of Mêlon, a farmer who has left his fields to serve with Epaminondas-swept up, against his better judgment, in the fever to spread democracy even as he yearns to return to his pastoral hillside. With a scholar's depth of knowledge and a novelist's vivid imagination, Hanson re-creates the ancient world down to its intimate details-from the weight of a spear in a soldier's hand to the peculiar camaraderie of a slave and master who go into battle side by side. The End of Sparta is a stirring drama and a rich, absorbing reading experience.

Victor Davis Hanson

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