The age of Pericles was also a time of famine, pestilence and atrocity: a ‘Thirty Year Slaughter.’ In order to understand the lesson this offers for civilization, one must try to feel it as the Greeks felt it, and reflect it as they did. In this dual task, Victor Davis Hanson once again demonstrates that his qualifications are unrivalled.
—Christopher Hitchens

by Victor Hanson

When the trumpet sounded, the soldiers took up their arms and went out...

Amazon.com’s Best of 2001

Many theories have been offered regarding why Western culture has spread so successfully across the world, with arguments ranging from genetics to superior technology to the creation of enlightened economic, moral, and political systems. In Carnage and Culture, military historian Victor Hanson takes all of these factors into account in making a bold, and sure to be controversial, argument: Westerners are more effective killers.

by Victor Davis Hanson

DESPITE ITS STATUE OF LIBERTY, recitations of Emma Lazarus’s poetry, and melting-pot imagery, America has always struggled with issues of immigration-mostly when it was a...

by Victor Davis Hanson

A small masterpiece of style and scholarship.
—The Economist

[Hanson’s] vivid style and meticulous combing of the ancient literary, archaeological, and epigraphical sources have produced a near masterpiece of historical imagination and reconstruction... . Masterful and gripping.
—Journal of Interdisciplinary History

by Victor Davis Hanson, John Keegan

Hanson, for those who somehow have missed him until now, is a professor of Classics at California State and also is a part time farmer, both of which have contributed to his writing as a military historian. As a classicist, Hanson is well versed in the sources in their original Greek, and as a farmer he understands how agriculture affected the experience of the Greeks at war.

by Victor Davis Hanson

In the beginning here there was nothing...

Hanson relates the life stories of his farmer neighbors, writing that their way of life will likely soon disappear, thanks in part to a federal system of agricultural subsidies that favors large-scale, industrial farm corporations over individual “yeomen.” This is a sobering and eye-opening book.

by Victor Davis Hanson

On first glance, The Soul of Battle appears to be three different books: biographies of two well-known generals—Sherman and Patton—and one who is virtually unknown today, the ancient Greek leader Epaminondas. Yet Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor and author of The Western Way of War, makes a compelling connection between these three men. They were “eccentrics, considered unbalanced or worse by their own superiors” who led democratic armies on missions of freedom.

by Robert B. Strassler (Editor), Victor Davis Hanson (Introduction)

Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing...