The Second Battle of Marathon

Huffington Post

Evaggelos VallianatosAdjunct professor of environmental analysis, Pitzer College

Posted: 03/01/2013 4:31 pm

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/evaggelos-vallianatos/the-second-battle-of-mara_b_2792476.html

The Second World War was the most destructive and bloody conflict of all times. Large and small countries fought bitterly to the end, killing millions of humans and causing immense devastation of both nature and societies. To some degree, WWII was also a holocaust of civilization.

Victor Davis Hanson: Shrinking wealth is real enemy

Sunday, Feb. 17, 2013 | 12:00 AM

Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?

http://www.fresnobee.com/2013/02/16/3177493/victor-davis-hanson-shrinking.html

Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure -- and who gets the most of both -- more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization.

Sima Qian: China's 'grand historian'

By Carrie Gracie

BBC News, Beijing

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19835484

Speaking truth to power has always been a high-risk strategy in China. Its rulers tend to prefer flattery, and writers who forget this do so at their peril. China's "grand historian" - 2,000 years ago - was one of many who have paid a terrible price.