Where I Go: Lithuania’s Vanished Center of Jewish Life

In Vilna, Where Thousands Were Murdered, I Learned How Difficult It Is to Mourn an Absence

I did it all backward. Instead of taking my research trips before writing my book, like any normal historian would have, I’d waited. Only after I had completed my first draft did I finally make my way to Vilna (now Vilnius), the capital of Lithuania during its brief moment of independence in the interwar period.

In June 1941, when German troops overran the country, Vilna was home to 55,000 Jewish residents and 12,000–15,000 refugees from German-occupied Poland. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the spiritual and academic center of Holocaust remembrance, described Vilna …

What Nineteenth-Century Europeans Can Teach America About Peacekeeping Occupations

Rather Than Rendering a Defeated Post-Napoleonic France Dependent, Victorious Allies Sought to Create Lasting Stability

How do you win the peace?

The recent American military occupations in Afghanistan and Iraq highlight the risks of “winning the war, but losing the peace,” to borrow the subtitle …

How William the Conqueror Became England’s Peacemaker

The Norman Was Ruthless in Battle, but His Reign Brought Stability and Rule of Law

Since the publication of my William the Conqueror in the Yale University Press English Monarchs series in October 2016, I have often been asked how long it took me to …

In Europe, Good Wisecracks Make Good Neighbors

How the Seemingly Xenophobic Jokes Europeans Tell About Each Other Bring Them Together

To understand Europe’s humor is to understand its history; satire and politics have long gone hand in hand. Whether in drawings, ballads, or prose, humor has long provided a counterbalance …