Author: H. A. Scott Trask (H. A. Scott Trask)

Gavin Menzies, a retired British naval officer and submarine commander, has advanced a startling thesis.  He believes that, in 1421-23, a large Chinese fleet circumnavigated the world and skirted the continents of Africa, South America, Antarctica, and North America.  Before you dismiss his contention as the latest multicultural myth, like claiming black Africa as the...

“America is not to be Rome or Britain.  It is to be America.” —Charles Beard William Kristol boasts that September 11 proves the neocons to have been prophets because, after the Cold War, they alone warned that the world had become a more dangerous place, not a safer one.  He and his crowd cite three...

“Empires are not built in fits of absent-mindedness.” —Charles A. Beard Described by the author as a “venture in contemporary history,” American Empire is also an in-depth study of the post-Cold War foreign policies of the last three presidential administrations, all of which Andrew Bacevich believes sought to preserve and extend an American empire.  Bacevich,...

The U.S. government continues its slow but relentless buildup of military forces in the Middle East, preparing to unleash “Fourth-Generation” warfare against the eighth reincarnation of Adolf Hitler.  Historians and pseudo-historians extol the liberating glories of past redemptive wars waged by God’s instrument on earth.  The Bush administration, neocons, and theocons (and other cons in...

Paul Gottfried has spent a useful career shining his lantern of truth into the dark corners of America’s political consciousness.  In After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (1999), he examined the rise and consolidation of centralized managerial regimes across the Western world.  Gottfried documented what should have been obvious to every educated man:...

What’s So Great About America by Dinesh D’Souza Washington: Regnery; 227 pp., $27.95 Dinesh D’Souza is a classic example of the immigrant imperialist.  Others are Fouad Ajami (professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University), Fareed Zakaria (managing editor of Foreign Affairs and a contributing editor to Newsweek), and Ramesh Ponnuru (a senior editor...

Abraham Lincoln remains the central historical figure in modern America; the only others who can compete with him in their influence on the present and the degree of adulation accorded them are Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Rev. “Dr.” Martin Luther King, Jr.  Lincoln is praised for having accomplished two things: preserving the Union and...

Richard Brookhiser’s biographical study of four generations of the Adams family illustrates once again that the rich and complex history of our country remains a closed book to the ruling class and their literary apologists.  Brookhiser reveals in his introduction that his purpose is to create a usable past: “The United States is formally an...

One of the important lessons of Victor Davis Hanson’s riveting new book, Carnage and Culture, is that the only civilization or culture that can defeat the West is the West.  “In the long history of European military practice,” Hanson writes, “it is almost a truism that the chief military worry of a Western army for...

“Let no one believe that children a hundred years from now in the future of America will not be sick for what our fools and unconscious criminals are doing today.” —Robinson Jeffers Who has not heard David McCullough pontificate on the “greatness” of Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and now John Adams, or watched James McPherson...

        “Slavery is as ancient as war, and war as human nature.” —Voltaire Americans, with their strong tendency to externalize the evil within them and to project it onto others, have been waging crusades to extirpate or crush one kind of evil or another for almost 200 years now. The Pelagian belief...