Theodore Herzl, the visionary who founded Zionism, was an assimilated Jew, who did not consider Palestine the optimal choice for a resurgent Jewish nationalism.
When the British offered to him a homeland in East Africa (today’s Uganda), he accepted and proposed it to the Sixth Zionist Congress in Basle in 1903. After bitter recriminations, the Congress […]

The Flag of Mexico is rich with historic symbolism. The tricolors of green, white and red with the coat-of-arms centered in the white middle stripe were adopted by Mexico following their independence from Spain during the War of Independence in 1821.
There have been changes to the flag during history but the coat of arms […]

Simon Bolivar (1783-1830) is a Latin American folk hero, revered for having been a revolutionary freedom fighter, a compassionate egalitarian and a successful politician. He is credited with the liberation from Spanish colonial yoke of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, a country named after him. Venezuela’s new strongman, Hugo Chavez, renamed his country The […]

The Pentagon was completed in 16 months. It was built on a swamp and on the area of the old Washington airport. Trucks hauled some 5.5 million cubic yards (4.2 million cubic meters) of junk and soil and dumped it in the marshes. The building’s foundation rests on 41,492 concrete piles.
The purchase of land […]

Many of us remember the oil shortages of the late seventies. They caused more than just the inconvenience of occasional gasoline rationing. Several elderly people actually died in the New York City area because of a lack of heating oil. Some people thought it would only get worse, and we would run out of oil […]

“‘Unbounded’ morality ultimately becomes counterproductive even in terms of the same moral principles being sought. The law of diminishing returns applies to morality.”
Thomas Sowell
There’s a story about Robespierre that has the preeminent rabble-rouser of the French Revolution leaping up from his chair as soon as he saw a mob assembling outside.
“I must see which way […]

With the exception of Watergate, there has never been a scandal more egregious and with wider implications than the Teapot Dome affair during the presidency of Warren G. Harding. It involved the secret leasing to private companies of oil-containing tracts owned by the Navy, mainly in Wyoming and California.
“Domes” are natural reservoirs of crude […]

The American Revolution was a civil war between Loyalists to the British crown (aka Tories, about one fifth of the population), supported by British expeditionary forces, and Patriots (or Whigs) in the 13 colonies that constituted British North America.
About 20-25% of the populace in the colonies - c. 600,000 - were blacks. About one […]