I put everything I had to offer on the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick/Geoffrey Ward documentary The Vietnam War into “Notes on the Ken Burns version.” I think the documentary seeks to fix the record in falsity.

In the summer of 1970 in the immediate aftermath of a disastrous spring of rioting by university students, President Richard Nixon decided that a draft lottery would determine the following year’s call up. To the astonishment of university administrators who believed that the students were deeply motivated by moral concerns, the troubles disappeared in the fall.

A leading figure in the Greek War of Independence (1821-1832), Ioannis Makriyannis (1797-1864) lacked both formal education and military training. His desire to record his participation in the remarkable events that secured the freedom of Greece from the Ottoman Empire, and the subsequent chaos that ensued at the conclusion of that struggle, inspired him to write the Memoirs. Makriyannis, therefore, set out to learn the remaining sixteen letters of the alphabet to supplement the eight he had learned as a child to write his name. Not published until forty-five years after his death, it would take more than another half-century for an abridged translation to appear in English (H.A. Lidderdale, editor and translator, Makriyannis: The Memoirs of General Makriyannis, 1797-1864 [Oxford University Press, 1966]).

Hoover Institution fellow Victor Davis Hanson discusses his new book, The Second World Wars, and explains how the war’s ending might have been predictable—and why he decided to go with the plural in his title.