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Full title: Top YouTube Historians, Led By ‘The Great War’ Host, Are Teaming Up To Recap World War II, Day By Day **** Since 2014, historian Indy Neidell has hosted weekly episodes of The Great War, a web series that recaps World War I by discussing in real time the events that happened 100 years ago. At the show’s current point, the United States has joined the war and its preparing to send its manpower to the Western Front. By the end of next year (spoiler alert), the war will reach its conclusion, and Neidell will have to find a...

An online friend “Miss Marple” notes the similarities between the thuggery in Ferguson, Missouri and the depredations of the Middle East’s jihadi wild packs: I read a book by the historian Barbara Tuchman [A Distant Mirror. The Calmitous 14th Century] which theorized that the Hundred Years War was caused by a culture that was adolescent, because so many older people had died during the Black Plague. All of the nobles and rulers at that time were in their late teens and had not much guidance from older, calmer heads. That idea has remained with me ever since I read the...

Unless we read and understand history we lack sufficient knowledge to avoid repetition of its worst events. Barbara TuchmanMultiple tips of the hat to NEO at Nebraska Energy Observer for calling my attention to this video of which I had previously been unaware. Is the video one hundred percent faithful to Barbara Tuchman's book titled Guns of August? Videos rarely if ever are and this video goes well past August of 1914, the first month of the war, and the events leading up to it. Still, it presents her theses reasonably well.It's an hour and forty minutes long -- shorter than...

Reviewing Barbara W. Tuchman: The Guns of August, The Proud Tower in the Times Literary Supplement recently, Robert Zaretsky noted that one of the ways to assess the aims and success of her 1962 Pulitzer prize–winning book is to consider “its influence on a man whose job it was to respond to present pressures: President Kennedy." Much has been made of the influence The Guns of August had on Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis—and for good reason. Kennedy himself made a point of referring repeatedly to the lessons of Tuchman’s book (which had been published just a few months...