Research

The Limits of Unlimited War: Victory at All Costs to Peace at Any Price, 1943-1973

U.S. HistoryU.S. Foreign RelationsMorality & War

“This is Nazi Brutality”: The Transnational Movement to Remember the Unprecedented War Crime of Lidice

HolocaustCultural MemoryWorld War II

Moral Inflation: American Intolerance for the Human Costs of War After 1945

U.S. HistoryU.S. Foreign RelationsMorality & WarWorld War IICold War

“What Are We Waiting For?”: Aggressors for Peace and the Preventive War Controversy of 1950-51

U.S. HistoryU.S. Foreign RelationsMorality & War

At Home in the World: Historical Theodicies and the Comprehensibility of the Holocaust

HolocaustMorality & War

Feeding Freedom, Rationing Death: Federal Propaganda, Censorship, and the Origins of the “Good War” Myth

U.S. HistoryWorld War IIMorality & War

The Negation of Freedom: Democracy, Tyranny, and the Discourse of Anti-Communism within the Truman Administration

U.S. HistoryU.S. Foreign RelationsCold War

Faith in My Star: Winston Churchill’s Belief in His Own Greatness and Destiny, 1874-1900

British HistoryBiography

Revenge Under the Law: American Commentaries on the Postwar Reprisals Against Collaborators in Liberated Europe

European HistoryWorld War IIMorality & War

Long Live Lincoln

U.S. HistoryBiography

ADVENTURES IN THE ARCHIVES

“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it – information is not knowledge. And history is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it – a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more ‘the past’ than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.”
— Hilary Mantel (1952-2022), “Why I Became a Historical Novelist,” The Guardian, 3 June 2017.