Fredric Smoler

Frederic Smoler has been teaching literature and history at Sarah Lawrence College since 1987, focusing on intellectual and literary history in Europe. He is the Adda Bozeman Chair in International Relations. In addition to his contributions to American Heritage, Smoler also writes for First of the Month, The Nation, and The Observer.

Articles by this Author

A Great Naval-Combat Artist, November/December 2006 | Vol. 57, No. 6

David Fertig wonderfully captures a bygone age of naval warfare.

The Century of American Airpower, November/December 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 6

Powered flight was born exactly one hundred years ago. It changed everything, of course, but most of all, it changed how this nation wages war.

Tank, October 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 5

Where Berlin and America Meet, April/May 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 2

Our common history isn’t all pleasant, but seeing it firsthand is deeply moving.

To Plan A Trip, April/May 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 2

The Shah Always Falls, March 2003 | Vol. 54, No. 1

The soldier-historian-novelist Ralph Peters looks at how the world has changed in the past decade, and finds that America is both a hostage to history and likely to be saved by it.

Fighting The Last War, and the Next One, November/December 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 8

Our government called the terrorist attacks on our country an act of war and replied with a declaration of war on terrorism. What can history teach us about our prospects in such a war?

National Economic Threat, September 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 6

The Fourth Great Awakening, July/August 2001 | Vol. 52, No. 5

A NOBLE PRIZE-WINNING ECONOMIST AND HISTORIAN SAYS WE’RE IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF AMERICA’S MAJOR PERIODS OF REFORM.

Losers' Resentments and Obsessions in Alternative History, September 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 5

THE BEST OF TODAY’S ALTERNATE HISTORY ISN’T LIKELY TO CHEER YOU UP. BUT IT CERTAINLY WON’T BORE YOU.

The Holocaust And Kosovo, July/August 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 4

National Memory’s Role in the Balkans

Military Aircraft, May/June 1999 | Vol. 50, No. 3

Is America a Paradise Lost?, February/March 1998 | Vol. 49, No. 1

Have Americans slid backward since the sunny, prosperous years after World War II, as so many feel? To find out, an English-born historian compares our recent past with earlier times, and, in the process, learns something about our likely course into the next century.

Nations Rarely Go to War for Economic Reasons, February/March 1997 | Vol. 48, No. 1

Donald Kagan, a historian of the ancient world believes that, in every era, people have reacted to the demands of waging war in surprisingly similar ways, and that, to protect our national interests today, Americans must understand the choices that soldiers and statesmen made hundreds and even thousands of years ago.

“We Had a Great History, and We Turned Aside”, October 1993 | Vol. 44, No. 6

A long-time Republican-party insider and close student of its past discusses how the party has changed over the years, for better and for worse, and where it may be headed.

The Radical Revolution, December 1992 | Vol. 43, No. 8

For years, people have argued that France had the real revolution and that ours was mild by comparison. But now, a powerful new book argues that the American Revolution was the most sweeping in all history. It alone established a pure commercial culture that makes America the universal society we are today.

The View From The Future, November 1992 | Vol. 43, No. 7

What Should We Teach Our Children About American History?, February/March 1992 | Vol. 43, No. 1

The fiercest struggle going on in education is about who owns the past. Passionate multi-culturalists say that traditional history- teaching has brushed out minority ethnic identities. Their opponents say that radical multi-culturalism leads toward national fragmentation.

Are We Really Going the Way of the British Empire?, May/June 1991 | Vol. 42, No. 3

Those who believe that America’s power is on the wane look to the example of Britain’s shockingly quick collapse. But the similarities may be less alarming than they seem.

What Does History Have to Say About the Persian Gulf?, November 1990 | Vol. 41, No. 7

What the past tells of America’s role in the current crisis is sometimes contradictory, but always worth listening to.

The Secret of the Soldiers Who Didn’t Shoot, March 1989 | Vol. 40, No. 2

Slam Marshall, who is regarded as one of our great military historians, looked into the heart of combat and discovered a mystery there that raised doubts about the fighting quality of U.S. troops. But one GI thought he was a liar…

Wall Street Jokes, July/August 1988 | Vol. 39, No. 5

VINTAGE 1929 Gallows Humor from the First October Catastrophe

The Strategy of Survival, July/August 1988 | Vol. 39, No. 5

A life-long student of military history and affairs says that nuclear weapons have made the idea of war absurd. And it is precisely when everyone agrees that war is absurd that one gets started.

"WEB ONLY STORIES" BY THIS CONTRIBUTOR

Murder, Adultery, and Abraham Lincoln

Julie M. Fenster’s latest book interweaves Lincoln’s work on a lurid criminal trial with the evolution of his thought regarding slavery. Until the year 2000, when a three-DVD set became available and anyone could examine the surviving records of his every case, the details of Abraham Lincoln’s law…

2007-11-08

The Confusing Moment When Israel Was Conceived

The significance of Lord Balfour’s concise note has been disputed almost since the day he wrote it. Ninety years ago today, on November 2, 1917, Arthur James Balfour, the British foreign secretary, sent to Lord Rothschild, an influential figure in the British Zionist Federation—a group advocating…

2007-11-02

Why England Is the Key to Understanding the United States

Mead dissects the Angles to find out why they’ve become so influential in world affairs. Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, is what is nowadays called a public intellectual, which means someone who writes and talks…

2007-10-30

Michael Chabon’s Strange America

The new novel turns Alaska into a Jewish non-homeland. Michael Chabon’s wonderful new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union(HarperCollins, 432 pages, $26.95), is a fusion of two forms of genre fiction that novelists with literary reputations as good as his don’t normally work in. It is a novel of…

2007-06-26

What Do Yesterday’s Wars Tell Us About Tomorrow’s Wars?

A top military historian explains why armed conflict isn’t what it used to be. The Changing Face of War: Lessons of Combat, From the Marne to Iraq, recently published by Presidio Press (320 pages, $25.95), is either Martin van Creveld’s seventeenth book or his twentieth, depending on who’s…

2007-06-05

Why the Civil War Was Fought, Really

Was it just about slavery? A historian provides an answer. A great many Americans still debate the origins of the Civil War in the same terms as a century or more ago. People say the war was not “about” slavery; it was about economics, or “states’ rights,” or elemental Southern nationalism. Those…

2007-05-03

History and War: An Interview With Eliot Cohen

Eliot A. Cohen The new counsel to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talks about the uses of history, in Iraq and everywhere else wars are fought. Up to a point, Eliot A. Cohen’s curriculum vitae looks like that of many high-flying American academics: a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. at Harvard, academic…

2007-03-12

A Hard Christmas at the Bulge, 1944

A new book tells a grim but heroic story. In the fall of 1944 the Allies had every reason to hope that the war in Europe would be over by Christmas, but on December 25, 1944, American troops found themselves stuck behind a new German line. On December 16, 30 German divisions, 10 of them armored…

2006-12-25

The Men Who Won World War II in the Air

An Eighth Air Force B-17 in a raid on Marianburg, Germany, in 1943. (National Archives) My father was an infantryman in World War II; his brother-in-law was a ball-turret gunner on a B-24. A few years ago my father invited his brother-in-law to a reunion of his infantry division. “I thought you…

2006-11-28

How Good Was the Good War, Really?

Were scenes like the one shown on the book’s cover really necessary? People used to call World War II the Good War, meaning that America’s role in it was morally unambiguous. They did so especially when contrasting it with Vietnam. But more recently, with the rise of what might be called the…

2006-11-27

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