Word With A Past: Pyrrhic Victory

Pyrrhus (319 to 272 BCE),  king  of the Greek city-state  Epirus, was a second cousin of Alexander the Great.  He earned a reputation as a successful general in the political chaos of the successor kingdoms that arose from the ruins of his famous cousin’s empire.  A hundred years after Pyrrhus’s death, Hannibal, famous for crossing…

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The Fall of the Ottomans

Last year I spent a lot of time and virtual ink on books about World War I. When the year came to an end, I had to take a breather. But this one was too good to let pass: Western histories of the First World War often focus on the trench warfare on the Western…

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The End of French Algeria

The Algerian Revolution, which lasted from 1954 to 1962, was one of the bloodiest of the anti-colonial wars that broke out in Asia and Africa after the end of World War II. * Algerian resistance against colonial rule in Algeria was nothing new. Abd al-Qadir fought against French expansion in North Africa for fifteen years…

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