Ralph Raico [send him an email] is Professor Emeritus in European history at Buffalo State College and a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He is a specialist on the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and the rise of the state. He is the author of The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton. His latest book is Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal. You can study the history of civilization under his guidance here: MP3-CD and Audio Tape
These are boom times for histories of World War I. Like its sequel, though to a lesser degree, it seems to be the war that never ends...
By Ralph Raico ∙ August 29, 2014
The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by Christopher Clark, HarperCollins, New York 2013, 697pp. The question of the causes of the outbreak of the First World War—known for many years during and afterwards as the Great War—is probably the most hotly contested in the whole history of historical writing. At the Paris…
By Ralph Raico ∙ September 1, 1989
“Speaking truth to power” is not easy when you support that power. Perhaps this is the reason why so few Western historians are willing to tell the whole truth about state crimes during this century. Last fall [1988 —Ed.] the Moscow News reported the discovery by two archaeologist-historians of mass graves at Kuropaty, near Minsk,…
By Ralph Raico ∙ January 1, 1995
The year 1898 was a landmark in American history. It was the year America went to war with Spain – our first engagement with a foreign enemy in the dawning age of modern warfare. Aside from a few scant periods of retrenchment, we have been embroiled in foreign politics ever since. Starting in the 1880s,…
By Ralph Raico ∙ May 28, 2016
In 1783 the treaty ending hostilities between Great Britain and its rebellious colonies along the eastern seaboard of North America was signed in Paris. For their part the English proclaimed that, “His Britannic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations …” – there followed the rest…
By Ralph Raico ∙ February 18, 2016
Leon Trotsky. By Irving Howe. Viking Press, 1978, 214 pages. Leon Trotsky has always had a certain appeal for intellectuals that the other Bolshevik leaders lacked. The reasons for this are clear enough. He was a writer, an occasional literary critic — according to Irving Howe, a very good one — and an historian (of…
By Ralph Raico ∙ November 25, 2015
These are boom times for histories of World War I. Like its sequel, though to a lesser degree, it seems to be the war that never ends. Works keep appearing on issues once considered settled, such as the “Belgian atrocities” and the reputation of commanders like Douglas Haig. Last year, Cambridge published a collection of…
By Ralph Raico ∙ September 4, 2015
Read Part one of this paper here Embroiling America in War — Again In September 1939, Britain went to war with Germany, pursuant to the guarantee which Chamberlain had been panicked into extending to Poland in March. Lloyd George had termed the guarantee “hare-brained,” while Churchill had supported it. Nonetheless, in his history of the…
By Ralph Raico ∙ May 23, 2015
Churchill as Icon When Professor Harry Jaffa proposed that Winston Churchill was not only the Man of the Twentieth Century but The Man of Many Centuries,[1] he found that many agreed with him. I did not. Personally, Man of Many Centuries sounds absurd. Was Winnie greater than Bismarck, than Washington or Jefferson, than Isaac Newton…
By Ralph Raico ∙ March 10, 2015
The most spectacular episode of Harry Truman’s presidency will never be forgotten but will be forever linked to his name: the atomic bombings of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, and of Nagasaki three days later. Probably around two hundred thousand persons were killed in the attacks and through radiation poisoning; the vast majority were civilians,…
By Ralph Raico ∙ November 30, 2014
I’ve just watched for about the third time the 1962 film, The Longest Day, a great action movie on the Allied invasion of Normandy. Among its several pluses: an all-star male cast, including a young Sean Connery, as well as a brief segment starring a seriously good-looking woman bearing a strong resemblance to Sophia Loren….
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