History

How Hitler Could Regret He’d ‘Been So Kind’ in a Letter Days Before His Death 1
- History
- June 12, 2018
In a bunker in Berlin on April 27, 1945, just three days before he’d take his own life—either by cyanide or the pistol (historians still debate which killed him)—Adolf Hitler reflected on his shattered dream of creating a thousand-year Third Reich. As the Red Army encircled the German capital, the 56-year-old Hitler, weary and defeated,
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Ronald Reagan Challenged Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev to ‘Tear Down’ the Berlin Wall 31 Years Ago 0
- History
- June 12, 2018
On this day (June 12) President Ronald Reagan gave what is probably his most famous and influential speech — the “Berlin Wall speech” — at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin, Germany on June 12, 1987. It was in this speech (at about 12:00 in the video below) that Reagan made his famous and history-changing
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How Cicero Created a Movement of Free Thinkers 0
- History
- May 31, 2018
Cicero was a renowned Roman orator, statesman and writer. He was an enemy of one man rule and a self-described constitutionalist. During the turbulent twilight of the Republic he attempted tirelessly to establish a lasting peace in order to preserve his beloved republican government. Following the death of his daughter Tullia and his exile from
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Is Justice a Matter of Truth or Power?0
- History
- May 16, 2018
In the first book of the Republic, Plato shares a conversation between Socrates and Thrasymachus, a Sophist orator, that touches on the nature of truth, justice, and law. “I proclaim that justice is nothing but the interest of the stronger,” Thrasymachus tells Socrates. He continues: “…the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical,
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Ancient Heresies Back from the Dead 0
- History
- May 8, 2018
The decline of the prestige of Christianity raises the question of what will replace it. No culture can live without a philosophy which gives structure and meaning to social institutions and to individual lives. The alternative is nihilism, whose wintry bleakness makes it an unwelcome guest at the dinner table. So what, then? One answer
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What Did Hannah Arendt Really Mean by the Banality of Evil?0
- History
- April 24, 2018
Can one do evil without being evil? This was the puzzling question that the philosopher Hannah Arendt grappled with when she reported for The New Yorker in 1961 on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, the Nazi operative responsible for organising the transportation of millions of Jews and others to various concentration camps in
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