The Latest Breaking News from Thucydides

As a professor of English and a student of the classics, I suggest that the insights and objectivity of a historian who lived nearly 2,500 years ago can bolster our understanding of the country’s current plight.

The second anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection is upon us. And each new revelation about that brutal mob assault on our government raises a host of fresh questions about what transpired in the days prior to January 6, notably who was involved in planning the events of that…

Throughout history, elective wars like the one in Ukraine — armed military conflicts that countries wage without compelling and urgent reasons for action — have mostly failed to achieve their aims. Instead, they worsen the problems they set out to solve and often become the undoing of those who started…

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, as a scholar of ancient Greek literature, I have returned again and again to the Greek historian Thucydides to try understand the historical parallels to the American response to the health crisis.