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 ∙ May 23, 2014
Wherever blame for the war might lie, for the immense majority of Americans in 1914 it was just another of the European horrors from which our policy of neutrality, set forth by the Founding Fathers of the Republic, had kept us free. Pašić, Sazonov, Conrad, Poincaré, Moltke, Edward Grey, and the rest – these were…
By Ralph Raico ∙ February 23, 2014
World War One’s direct costs to the United States were: 130,000 combat deaths; 35,000 men permanently disabled; $33.5 billion (plus another $13 billion in veterans’ benefits and interest on the war debt, as of 1931, all in the dollars of those years); perhaps also some portion of the 500,000 influenza deaths among American civilians from…
By Ralph Raico ∙ December 1, 2013
The changes wrought in America during the First World War were so profound that one scholar has referred to “the Wilsonian Revolution in government.”[1] Like other revolutions, it was preceded by an intellectual transformation, as the philosophy of progressivism came to dominate political discourse.[2] Progressive notions – of the obsolescence of laissez-faire and of constitutionally…
By Ralph Raico ∙ April 1, 2013
With the onset of war in Europe, hostilities began in the North Atlantic which eventually provided the context – or rather, pretext – for America’s participation. Immediately, questions of the rights of neutrals and belligerents leapt to the fore. In 1909, an international conference had produced the Declaration of London, a statement of international law…
By Ralph Raico ∙ December 1, 2012
The immediate origins of the 1914 war lie in the twisted politics of the Kingdom of Serbia.[1] In June, 1903, Serbian army officers murdered their king and queen in the palace and threw their bodies out a window, at the same time massacring various royal relations, cabinet ministers, and members of the palace guards. It…
By Ralph Raico ∙ January 1, 1996
Not long ago a German friend remarked to me, jokingly, that he imagined the only things American college students were apt to associate with Germany nowadays were beer, Lederhosen, and the Nazis. I replied that, basically, there was only one thing that Americans, whether college students or not, associated with Germany. When the Germans are…
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