During the three years after World War II, Germans—facing a ruined economy and wildly depreciating currency—turned to cigarettes as a medium of exchange on a massive scale. Allied occupation authorities strictly forbade this black-market currency exchange, but it literally saved the lives of many German civilians—and inadvertently made many
For a number of reasons, the French Revolution is a kind of Rorschach Test for educated people. One cause of this phenomenon, if I may pile on metaphors, is clearly the blind man/elephant problem. There are so many parts of the Revolution, so many stages, so many protagonists, so many ideas, so many policies—often quite contradictory—that we are
In this article, Hunt Tooley reviews A. James Gregor’s The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century . Tooley, Hunt. “Book Review: A. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the 20th Century .” Journal of Libertarian Studies 16, No. 3 (2002):
The year 2004 marks the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Engelbrecht and Hanighen’s Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry , a book that made it into the general consciousness of most thinking Americans by the mid-twentieth century. The stark language of the title no doubt contributed to its fame. Moreover,
On the morning of November 11, 1918, fighter pilot and leading American ace Eddie Rickenbacker quietly ambled to the hangar of his aerodrome in France. The night before, in anticipation of the Armistice, all Allied flights were grounded. But Rickenbacker was not known as a rule-follower. He told his crew to roll out his SPAD XIII fighter plane
Hunt Tooley was born and raised in Vernon, Texas. He graduated from Texas A&M University and did his doctoral work in History at the University of Virginia, where he received his Ph.D. in History in 1986. He taught at several institutions in the southeast before he came to Austin College, in Sherman, Texas, in 1991. He is Professor of History at
[ This is the third post in a series. see Part One and Part Two . ] In the early sixties, German historian Fritz Fischer famously raised an intense historiographical controversy by asserting, in his book Griff nach der Weltmacht (Bid for World Power) , that Germany did in fact bear the major responsibility for starting the First World War, a
[ Editor’s Note: This is part 4 of a multi-part series . ] In reconstructing the American decision to enter the Great War, the relationship between Colonel Edward Mandell House and his “alter ego,” Woodrow Wilson, is crucial. Robert Higgs has called the Colonel “one of the most important Americans of the twentieth century.” House played the
[ Editor’s Note: This is part 5 of a multi-part series . ] When the war broke out in Europe during the early days of August 1914, President Wilson immediately proclaimed American neutrality. In mid-August, he called for Americans to be “impartial in thought as well as action.” Wilson’s Secretary of State, populist Democrat William Jennings Bryan,
[ Editor’s Note: This is part 5 of a multi-part series . ] On April 6 — a hundred years ago — the United States declared war on Germany. The history of America’s entry into the Great War is complex and profound. It has intrinsic drama, no matter what one’s attitude about the rights and wrongs of U.S. participation in the war--and there have been
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.
