The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775–1777 by Rick Atkinson. Henry Holt and Co., 2019. Hardcover, 800 pages, $40. Reviewed by William Anthony Hay Epic conflicts that punctuate American history have profoundly shaped it. The Civil...
God against the Revolution: The Loyalist Clergy’s Case against the American Revolution by Gregg L. Frazer. University Press of Kansas, 2018. Hardcover, 320 pages, $35. Reviewed by William Anthony Hay Historians over recent decades have put considerable effort...
The King and the Catholics: England, Ireland, and the Fight for Religious Freedom, 1780–1829 by Antonia Fraser. Nan A. Talese, 2018. Hardcover, 336 pages, $30. Reviewed by William Anthony Hay Often the most contentious political issues of one era cease being issues at...
WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY While traveling with Tsar Alexander and the allied army campaigning against Napoleon as Britain’s ambassador in 1813, the Earl of Aberdeen remarked that “the heroes we read of at a distance with respect dwindle into minor figures at a near...
The Habsburg Empire: A New History by Pieter M. Judson. Belknap Press, 2016. Hardcover, 592 pages, $35. The Habsburg Monarchy has long been seen as an outdated empire doomed to fail. To the Central European societies it sheltered before 1914, it may have had a cosy...
The book’s defense of McCarthyism also fares even better over half a century after its publication, as the opening of the Soviet archives gave Americans far more information than the authors had in 1954 and made abundantly clear not only the reality of Soviet infiltration of the…
Today, we know so much more about the communist infiltration of our government and society in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s than William F. Buckley, Jr. did in his early career. Yet, it turns out that Buckley and his allies were closer to the truth about domestic communism than their…