Victor Davis Hanson

The Spartans

WHAT WILL our invasion of Iraq unleash? Our greatest challenge may be not the elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction but the subsequent reconfiguration of the Middle East. What happens inside Iraq on the day Saddam Hussein is gone will reveal American intentions, capabilities, and…

The Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land by Conevery Bolton Valencius Basic, 384 pp., $30 We often envision frontiersmen and settlers mostly as impoverished immigrants who went west to find wealth, cheap land, or escape from the law, creditors, and…

The Savage Wars of Peace Small Wars and the Rise of American Power by Max Boot Basic, 384 pp., $27.50 WHEN WE THINK of our wars, what come naturally to mind are the great conflicts, the landmark battles, and the intrepid names: the Revolutionary War and World War II, Gettysburg and Iwo Jima, Grant…

The Culture of Classicism Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780-1910 by Caroline Winterer Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 272 pp., $45 I USED TO leave graduate classes in Latin and Greek composition at Stanford on Fridays to drive home to the San Joaquin Valley to help on our grape…

In the Shadow of the Garrison State

Out of about one million Bachelor of Arts degrees awarded each year, only six hundred are in classics. About one classics major graduates in America each year for every four or five classics professors -- and for every twenty journal articles written annually on ancient Greece and Rome. When…

Keith Windschuttle

The extraordinary success of the PBS documentary series The Civil War lay in Ken Burns's ability to bring out the tragedy in that bloodbath. His film was a relentless chronicle of how good men butchered good men over the institution of slavery, with an omnipresent and anguished Lincoln, consumed…