Twenty-five years ago, almost 3,000 people went to work, got on airplanes, reported for duty, sat down at their desks — and never came home. September 11, 2001 became one of those dates permanently burned into the memories of people old enough to remember it. We remember where we were. We remember what we were doing. We remember the moment we realized something was terribly wrong. Donald Trump was at Ground Zero after 9/11 — but 25 years later, some of the most dramatic parts

The Pentagon is introducing a new history course for students in the Department of Defense Education Activity school system. On its face, there is nothing especially remarkable about that. The course is called Western Civilization to 1500, and Western civilization is obviously a legitimate subject for students to study. The controversy begins when you look at the textbook the Pentagon has chosen, the way that textbook frames Christianity and Islam, and the worldview of the ma

Every authoritarian movement eventually discovers the same thing: controlling the future gets easier once you control the memory of the people. Not just what people believe now, but what they remember, what they’re allowed to discuss, and what future generations are taught to accept as unquestioned truth. History, after all, is not merely a record of events. It’s the operating system of national identity. Truth doesn’t always disappear in flames. Sometimes it vanishes behind

For those of you who don’t geek out on history as much as I do — or who just weren’t around to remember most of these — I want to talk about something that keeps popping up in our national conversation: Regime change. It sounds abstract. Strategic. Clean. But the United States has a long history of attempting to remove, replace, undermine, or collapse foreign governments it viewed as hostile or destabilizing. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it failed. And sometimes it “worked”