Editor’s Note: Hunt Tooley, Professor of History at Austin College, will be teaching “The Interwar Years” beginning on January 22 at 5:30 p.m. This six-lecture course will examine the years between the two World Wars and cover the “rebuilding” of the war-torn world, inflation and depression, financial manipulation, neo-mercantilism, and the vast
The First World War was ferocious in its first years. But the combination of sustained and enormous losses of the enormous battles of 1916 and the strains on the home fronts brought the “deeper forces” to emerge, in the words of historian René Albrecht-Carrié. The number of enormous battles—and casualties—across the military theaters in the year
Three quarters of a century ago, on June 22, 1941, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa, an attack on the Soviet Union across a front 3,000 miles long. Barbarossa moved the war into its global stage. It prefigured the final alliance system. It moved the Final Solution to the industrial level of killing. It helped bring the United States into
A hundred years ago, British units (alongside a smaller French force) attacked the Germans on an eleven-mile wide front in Picardy, straddling the Somme River. The attack was the attempt to break through on the Western Front, and in accordance with emerging artillery doctrine and practice, the German lines were saturated with shells for a week in
T. Hunt Tooley is chairman of the department of history at Austin College and an Associated Scholar of the Mises Institute. In this interview with The Austrian , Dr. Tooley examines what we can learn today from the First World War. THE AUSTRIAN: It has now been 100 years since the United States entered the First World War. Was getting involved in
A hundred years ago, the First World War was reaching its crisis. Though we tend to think of the war in terms of stalemate and attrition, the war was a complex web of human activities and human choices that seemed anything but static to most of the millions of participants. An illustration of this idea, in the broadest sense, can be seen in trends
[This is the second post in a series. see Part One and Part T hree .] As the first installment has shown in a general way, the background of the war among Europe and its extensions (Canada, Australia, etc.) is crucial to understanding how the United States would eventually declare war on the Central Powers. More specifics on this issue will
The fiftieth anniversary of the First World War in 1964 felt nothing like the current centennial observances. It is worth asking what has changed. When I was growing up in the sixties in a small town in Texas, World War I seemed as remote to me as the Revolutionary War. Not that the conflict was not unknown to me. In our city park there was a
As a historian, my training is about analyzing the past. Those times I have strayed into predicting the future, I have failed pretty spectacularly (”Yes, class, I predict that the Berlin Wall will not come down in my lifetime or yours!”--Oct 23, 1989). And yet... the installation of the n ew Secretary of State Ashton Carter makes me look a bit
In Planning for Freedom , we find Mises commenting once more on the ravages of World War I as he discusses the Hindenburg Program : had it had time to come to fruition, he suggests, “it would have transformed Germany into a purely totalitarian commonwealth.” Well, the war ended two years later, and the military dictatorship of Hindenburg and
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.
