The view that there are limits to the powers of rulers traveled with the colonists to New England, where the relationship between church, state, and … - Thomas E. Ricks

It is a cliché, and a bad one, that generals try to “fight the last war” – that is, do what worked the last time out. That does not give them enough credit. Rather they tend to fight the war they would like to fight or the one they expected to fight. But neither of those responses is usually sufficient. The foremost task of a general is to understand the nature of the war he or she faces – which often turns out to be a third way, neither the one preferred nor the one expected.

spent “a Clowdy morning” reading Charles Rollin’s Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, which is basically an introduction to education by the rector of the University of Paris.68 Rollin was even better known for his Ancient History, which was published in French in sixteen volumes from 1730 to 1738, with the first translation into English appearing a year after that. It, along with his later work on Roman history, soon became what one historian terms “a principal medium through which they [colonial Americans] learned about classical heroes.”69 Adams thought Washington had gotten most of his knowledge of the ancient world from that text,

War. In 1901, he graduated from the Virginia Military Institute, where he marched before Stonewall Jackson’s widow. He soon joined the Army, which then was recovering from its low ebb of the 1890s, the decade when the frontier officially closed and the last of the Indian wars ended. The Army expanded rapidly in the wake of the Spanish–American War of 1898, almost quadrupling in size to 100,000. As part of that growth, George Marshall received his commission. In this newly energized force, he stood out as a young officer. Marshall was temporarily posted to Fort Douglas, Utah — originally placed on a hillside overlooking Salt Lake City to keep an eye on Brigham Young’s nascent and hostile Mormon empire.