Below The Beltway

Glenn Reynolds reviews Ron Paul’s The Revolution: A Manifesto:
The main shortcoming in Paul’s book, as with his candidacy, is in the follow through, the transition from critique to action. Although he does include a chapter entitled “The Revolution,” about reducing the size of government, it’s a pretty skimpy plan. Were we to see a Ron […]

Imagine if, in a split-second, every piece of technology that you depend upon stopped working. Not just televisions, computers, and cell phones. Add in cars, trains, and anything based upon electricity or the internal combustion engine. To make things even more interesting, let’s add in firearms and gunpowder too.
What kind of world would result, what […]

The Collected What If ? is nothing less than a comprehensive look at some of the most important turning points in history. And, once you get started considering the possible ways in which history could have turned out drastically different, it’s hard for the imagination not to start running wild.
With contributions from some of the […]

Through three novels, Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen have told the story of a Civil War that might have been. It started with Gettysburg, where Robert E. Lee withdraws from the field of battle in Pennsylvania and forces the Army of the Potomac to fight a battle on his terms, with devastating results. Then, in […]

Continuing the counter-factual history of the Civil War that they started with Gettysburg, Newt Gingrich and William Forstchen came up with another literary hit out of the park with the second volume of their trilogy, Grant Comes East.
When the last volume ended, the Army of the Potomac had been decimated at Union Mills, Maryland and […]

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team Of Rivals: The Political Genius Of Abraham Lincoln is, on it’s face, an ambitious undertaking.
Not only does it tell the story of America’s 16th President, it also tells the story of the men who were his main political rivals for the Republican nomination in 1860 and later became the core of […]

For the most part, the biographies that have been written about Ronald Reagan in the years since he left office have suffered from one of two defects. Either they have been overly critical and dismissive and failed to grasp the truly revolutionary aspects of the Reagan Presidency, or they have been overly worshipful, something more […]

The Election of 1920 is unique in American history. Never before had so many men who either had been, or one day would be, President vied for the office at the same time.
But for an untimely death, Theodore Roosevelt would have been the presumptive Republican nominee and, given the political conditions of the time, probably […]

Recent American history has seen some fairly contested, highly partisan Presidential elections. In 1992 we saw the most successful run by a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1916 1912. In 1996, we saw Republicans fresh off an historic take-over of Congress convinced they could defeat a sitting President. In 2004, the race between Bush […]

You don’t have to love Shakespeare’s plays to find Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs And Coded Politics of William Shakespeare both interesting and enjoyable. In fact, it almost helps if you come to the book with little more than a passing familiarity with the plays themselves and, certainly, no familiarity with the countless books, […]