This website is the result of an unexpected journey – while I am not formally trained in history, I realized that my education in general US and World History had some pretty large holes in it. My first entry point was realizing that I knew next to nothing about World War I (or “the Great War” as I learned some called it).
To address this shortcoming, I decided to read a book about this period of history. That turned into many books on the subject which then started me thinking about the fact that there were other conflicts that the United States was involved in that I was equally hazy / ignorant about. So I decided to start moving forward from World War I and read up on World War II, Korea, Vietnam.
I then realized that I had started in the “middle” and decided to go back and pick up other major conflicts that I had skipped over. Specifically, I read books on the Spanish American War, the US conflict in the Philippines, then the American Civil War, the Quasi War and finally the American Revolution. This non-linear travel through these conflicts started building a sense that there was a pattern I was just beginning to glimpse – something that bothered me.
I have a rule that if I start reading a book, I finish it and there were two books in my life (to my “great shame” <grin>) that I had violated that rule with. One was “The Silmarillion” by J.R.R. Tolkein (those who have tried to read it might share my pain here – I tried numerous times and bombed out after a couple of chapters). Another was “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” by William L. Shirer (I described that as a 1,000 page newspaper article from my early attempt to read it).
Well, I knocked out both of these books (The Silmarillion is actually really good as an audio book while you are working out it turns out) and after reading and appreciating Shirer’s work, I realized what this pattern was that I was beginning to sense – I was seeing in current events, striking similarities to things that led up to the start of World War II in the Weimar Republic of Germany and eventually what became the Third Reich.
The purpose of this site therefore is to take each of these similarities and explore them. I am (perhaps naively) planning on leaving comments turned on and hoping to spark a discussion – I don’t claim a monopoly on understanding these topics and certainly am not trained as either a historian or a political scientist. I predict that at some point, if people engage with this content, that I will have to eventually start being a bit more draconian in terms of moderating comments, but perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised.
I look forward to bringing you along on this journey with me and hope that in the end, we have a better understanding of how we got to this point in history and perhaps take some lessons from what has already happened to avoid making some of those same mistakes again.