It premiered in Hollywood and New York – but on June 11, Women of the Gulag, a documentary film based on Paul Gregory‘s book of the same name, came home to Stanford. It got a big audience at Hoover’s Hauck Auditorium, in the new David & Joan Traitel Building, with a splendid reception afterwards. (We’ve written about the film here and here and here and here.)

While the academic study of military history is in a state of sickness unto death in the academy, it lives because of its popularity with the American people. In his terrific essay “Why study war,” Victor Davis Hanson observes:

Hoover Institution fellow Niall Ferguson discusses the most urgent geopolitical challenges of the day.

Late in the evening on June 5, 1944, U.K. Prime Minister Winston Churchill ominously told his wife before they went to sleep, “Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning twenty thousand men may have been killed?”