The following is a one hour interview by Peter Robinson of the Hoover Institute with three well-known historians: Niall Ferguson, Victor Davis Hanson and Andrew Roberts, recorded in late 2024 Although all three are PhD academics who teach the subject they’re also relative rarities in that they’ve published some fifty books between them aimed at the public, and all three have at least a couple of best sellers in that list.

To the end the topics covered are both current, historical and epistemological:

  • The 1619 project (The USA didn’t start in 1776 but with the importing of slaves in 1619).
  • Churchill is the bad guy of WWII (this sparked by a farcical young “historian” praised by Tucker Carlson even as he merely repeats what Patrick Buchanan wrote thirty years ago).
  • The Cold War (it’s ending and beginnings, as well as blaming the West and especially the US for it).
  • The meaning of history and applying it to today’s events: what it’s for, why do it, and the modern academic rabbit holes historians vanish into.
  • The history of western self-criticism now turning into nihilism and judging it by the present.
  • The university in their careers, including the nihilism and other pathologies, changing since the 1960’s from “speaking truth to power” into calcified support of “experts”, with everything from the arts, popular culture and politics.
  • The utopian ideas from the end of the Cold War – the End Of History – having crashed into reality and whether this means the end of the West.
  • The near future and the fight between pessimism and optimism rooted in 2000 years of Western history that sees both collapses and renewals.