History isn't linear: It's more like a spiderweb than a progression of singular events through Points A, B, C, and so on. Take World War II. For a long time, historians have been trying to learn just how much America knew about what was going on in Nazi Germany, and a U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum project to document newspaper headlines of the era — and going back to the 1930s — makes it pretty clear that there were enough warning signs that "Why didn't the U.S. get involved sooner?" becomes...
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Every history class teaches that it was the attack on Pearl Harbor that finally got the U.S. involved, but here's the thing: Hitler and Nazi Germany declared war on the States before the U.S. government could issue their declaration. Hitler's play came four days after the attack on American soil, and as The Wall Street Journal explains, it came amid opinions vastly underestimating what the U.S. — relatively fresh out of the Great Depression — was capable of.
World War II was like a spider's web of human suffering, with Nazi Germany as the vicious spider at its center, scrambling for control. That spider was finally squashed, so to speak, on April 30, 1945. As the Red Army overran Berlin's last defenses. Adolf Hitler — then, perversely, the most influential man in the world — swallowed a lethal dose of cyanide and shot himself in his bunker. The rest is history.
Herbert Hoover remains one of the better-known presidents of the United States, though not for the reasons a head of state would wish. Fairly or unfairly, the voting public held him responsible for the Great Depression, a stigma that remains attached to his name — even after decades of historical research has put the economic downturn and his efforts to fight it into context. Those relief efforts were stymied, in part, by Hoover's own ideological inflexibility and his poor political skills. His shortcomings as leader in an economic crisis were compounded by his bitterness in defeat. Incensed that Franklin Delano Roosevelt would not heed his advice on the Depression during the transition, Hoover called his successor a "madman" (via The Washington Post) and his New Deal policies "fascistic" (per the UVA Miller Center).
When we're taught history lessons in school, the earth shattering events of World War II are often framed as a battle between forces of freedom and …
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