On August 25, 1914, in a spate of disorder, shots rang out from the Belgian town of Louvain, instigating its German occupiers to launch a frenzy of looting and destruction. Crazed soldiers butchered civilians, ransacked buildings, and finally burned the town…

On the eve of the German offensive against France in August 1914, Kaiser Wilhelm confidently asserted to some departing troops, “You will be home before the leaves have fallen from the trees.” The German monarch was known neither for his…

Republicans have greeted Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts with the sort of relief expressed by Winston Churchill when he learned that Pearl Harbor had prompted America to finally enter the war; for the first time in years, he “slept the…

“This is not funny, this is serious stuff!” intones a flock of furrow-browed politicos about that well-dressed couple who conned their way into a White House shindig. Yes and no, in that order, because some of us think this…

Presidential comparisons that greeted Barack Obama’s election ranged from the sublime to the transcendent. He was variously described as the second coming of John F. Kennedy, a re-embodiment of Franklin Roosevelt, and even a budding Abraham Lincoln-a sort of…

New administrations normally inspire commentators into rummaging through a thesaurus to extract that single phrase or word that is apposite to the times. Instead musing about a reincarnation of The Square Deal, The New Deal, The Great Society, or the…