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Jan 23, 2025 | 
hwbrands.substack.com | H. W. Brands
“In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle, a principle which will probably be called a paradox,” wrote G. K. Chesterton in 1929. “There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road.
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Nov 22, 2024 | 
hwbrands.substack.com | H. W. Brands
“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was to debauch the currency,” wrote John Maynard Keynes in 1919. Keynes didn’t cite a specific source. Maybe he thought the adage would sound more threatening coming from the Bolshevik leader than from himself, a disgruntled adviser to the British prime minister at the Paris peace conference. Donald Trump presumably doesn’t see himself as Lenin, being a fan of capitalism rather than a foe.
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Nov 15, 2024 | 
lawliberty.org | H. W. Brands |James Hankins |David Schaefer |Robert G. Natelson
There is a thread of isolationist sentiment that runs through discussions of America’s foreign affairs, and that thread is often woven into the fabric of the nation’s foreign policy. From Washington’s admonition to avoid foreign entanglements, to the Monroe Doctrine, even to the Anti-Imperialist League, Americans have often rejected foreign engagement and opposed American intervention abroad. H. W. Brands’s newest book, America First: Roosevelt vs.
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Oct 17, 2024 | 
hwbrands.substack.com | H. W. Brands
“The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick,” wrote Charles Darwin to Asa Gray, an American botanist. Darwin’s queasiness was caused by the fact that his theory of evolution by natural selection couldn’t explain nonfunctional—or dysfunctional—ornaments like peacock’s tails. Oh, yes it could, said Ronald Fisher a few decades later. Fisher was a British biologist who knew mathematics as well.
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Sep 27, 2024 | 
bookreporter.com | H. W. Brands
In AMERICA FIRST: Roosevelt vs. Lindbergh in the Shadow of War, historian H. W. Brands recreates the debate over America’s role in the leadup to their entry into World War II. While the subtitle suggests that this issue became a battle between two iconic figures, the reality of the narrative is that this struggle included a large cast of characters from all corners of the world. But the focus of the book is on President Franklin D. Roosevelt and American aviator Charles Lindbergh.
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Feb 26, 2024 | 
hwbrands.substack.com | H. W. Brands
If any president ever felt the burden of history upon him, it was Woodrow Wilson. An academic before he had been a politician, Wilson had studied the history of America's government and written extensively on it. Wilson recognized the historic nature of his 1912 election, as the first native of the South—born in Virginia and raised in Georgia before moving to the North as an adult—to win the nation's top office since before the Civil War.
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Feb 24, 2024 | 
hwbrands.substack.com | H. W. Brands
Whether America has reached peak MAGA won't be known until this coming November, at the earliest. If Donald Trump gets elected again, his populist tide might still be rising. If he doesn't get elected, the tide might already be ebbing. In either case, Trump populism won't last forever. What will it leave behind? A look at past populisms can help us guess. The first wave of American populism elected Andrew Jackson president in 1828.
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Feb 22, 2024 | 
hwbrands.substack.com | H. W. Brands
Life had been kind to William Howard Taft. He was book smart but also canny. “I always had my plate the right side up when offices were falling," he later observed. An Ohio judgeship fell onto his plate, and then a series of federal offices, starting with governor general of the Philippines and continuing to secretary of war. In that post he impressed Theodore Roosevelt, who concluded that Taft was just the man to follow him as president.
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Dec 1, 2023 | 
myemail.constantcontact.com | John Bolton |Adam Rowe |H. W. Brands |David Head
Quotes of the Day:"No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."- Edmund Burke"The harshest tyranny is that which acts under the protection of legality and the banner of justice."- Montesquieu“Your hopes, dreams, and aspirations are legitimate. They are trying to take your airborne, above the clouds, above the storms, if you only let them.” - William James1. Crimean partisans reveal enemy division of S-300 systems2.
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Oct 23, 2023 | 
americanheritage.com | H. W. Brands |Wilbur E. Garrett |Elizabeth Becker |Edwin Grosvenor
”I first saw her on October 18, 1878, and loved her as soon as I saw her sweet, fair young face. …” Thus Theodore Roosevelt wrote of Alice Hathaway Lee, the girl he married in 1880 when he was twenty-two and she nineteen—tall and lithe, with curly light hair and “dovegray” eyes; “beautiful in face and form,” he said, “and lovelier still in spirit.…” T.R. wooed her with all the impetuous gusto for which he was later famous, and the wedding took place soon after he graduated from Harvard.
