[John G. West is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author of Darwin Day in America.]

There must be something deeply ingrained in the human psyche about going on pilgrimages, for when I had a chance last year to take my wife and two small children to visit New England after speaking at a conference, I jumped at the opportunity.

What could be more worthwhile than showing my family the cradle of American liberty? I especially wanted to visit Plymouth, Massachusetts — the cherished landing place of the Pilgrims and, of course, the site of the first Thanksgiving. What better place to introduce my children to the roots of American democracy?

The answer to that question turned out to be more ambiguous than I imagined.

Our first stop was famed Plymouth Rock, of which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s: “Here is a stone which the feet of a few outcasts pressed for an instant, and this stone becomes famous. Its very dust is...

Nothing is as central to the way the British view themselves as the telling and retelling of their gallant fight against the Nazis. Perhaps the colossal figure of Winston Churchill is taken for granted now, his boozy final years remembered with an indulgent chuckle, his elitist views and nostalgia for Empire taken as a slight embarrassment. But no one pokes fun at the underlying tale: the bull's-eye accuracy of his ignored early warnings about Hitler's intent, the real-time impact of his oratory once he became prime minister, the nation's banding together during the Blitz, the bravery of the pilots who fought the Battle of Britain and the core belief that Britain's stout heart turned the tide against fascism for decades to come.

So it was a something of a shock when a handful of books over the last decade implicated Churchill's government in the cold-blooded killing of the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler—who was long believed to have killed himself with a hidden cyanide...

[Kenneth C. Davis is the author of “America’s Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation.”]

TO commemorate the arrival of the first pilgrims to America’s shores, a June date would be far more appropriate, accompanied perhaps by coq au vin and a nice Bordeaux. After all, the first European arrivals seeking religious freedom in the “New World” were French. And they beat their English counterparts by 50 years. That French settlers bested the Mayflower Pilgrims may surprise Americans raised on our foundational myth, but the record is clear.

Long before the Pilgrims sailed in 1620, another group of dissident Christians sought a haven in which to worship freely. These French Calvinists, or Huguenots, hoped to escape the sectarian fighting between Catholics and Protestants that had bloodied France since 1560.

Landing in balmy Florida in June of 1564, at what a French explorer had earlier...

n March 2001, U.S. Archivist John W. Carlin received a letter from Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the newly inaugurated president George W. Bush. It concerned an important deadline that was looming—one that Bush owed to Richard Nixon.

In 1974, Congress ordered a lockdown on all records kept by the Nixon White House, afraid that the outgoing president would try to wipe out the paper trail of his disastrous second term and chastened by the recent destruction of decades’ worth of FBI files by the late director J. Edgar Hoover’s loyal secretary. That order was expanded four years later into a law requiring that all presidents’ papers—everything from briefings to personal notes and everyday communications between the president, vice president, and their staffers—be handed over to the National Archives twelve years after their terms ended for eventual public release. Ronald Reagan was the first chief executive to whom the Presidential Records Act applied, and his papers were...

[Mr. Gellman is the author of Angler, the new biography of Vice President Cheney.]

Let me just say to begin with that it is flattering and daunting, in more or less equal parts, to talk about my new book on Vice President Cheney with four of its published critics: Jacob Heilbrunn in the NYT Book Review, Steve Clemons in the American Conservative, David Greenberg in Slate and Spencer Ackerman on his Attackerman blog. Paul Mirengoff of Power Line, who critiqued excerpts of the book that appeared in The Washington Post, has also agreed to join this conversation. That's a rare and commendable departure from the norm these days of talking mainly to people who already agree. As a reader, I'd love to see more crosstalk among thinkers across the political divide. I want to thank TPMCafe for setting that example.

It's hard to know where to start a conversation about Cheney. In ANGLER, I make the claim that you can't understand what happened these last eight years...

In 1964, Michael Shaara, a frustrated writer of little-known fiction, took his wife and children on a road trip to the World's Fair in New York. On their way home, they stopped at Gettysburg National Military Park, where a fine statue of Robert E. Lee guards the western reach of the famous battlefield.

The statue marks the area where, on July 3, 1863, Confederate Gen. George Pickett led some 13,000 men out from the shelter of the woods and up the long slope of Cemetery Ridge. Shaara and his 12-year-old son, Jeff, followed the path of Pickett's men, across undulating ground and a fence at Emmitsburg Road. As they climbed the ridge, Michael Shaara told stories to his son. He recounted how Pennsylvanians had done what Lee did not think they'd do that day: They'd fought and died in defense of their state's soil. He spoke of Confederate Gen. Lewis Armistead and Union Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock, great friends before the war, and how they lay bleeding, yards apart, not knowing...

I told an American diplomat in Kabul last month that the British are unconvinced that US policy in Afghanistan makes sense, or that the present Afghan government is sustainable. “Given the record of British engagement in this region over the past two centuries,” the American responded irritably, “I do not think you people are well positioned to give anybody else lectures about how to do things here.”

Touché. Even at the height of British imperialism, when Victorian proconsuls prided themselves on their ability to impose order upon the most unlikely subjects - dervishes and Zulus notable among them - they failed with the Afghans. When Abdur Rahman took over as amir in 1881, he wrote: “The country is in a deplorable condition. Everything which belonged to the state is ruined and requires renewal. The people are...most turbulent and intractable, and devour all they can.” His picture of Afghanistan remains unchanged in the 21st century.

The British have perversely...

[Jonathan Kirsch is the author of The Grand Inquisitor's Manual: A History of Terror in the Name of God, published by Harper One and available on book shelves everywhere as of September 9, 2008.]

Nowadays, we tend to make a parody of the Inquisition, as in the set-up line of a famous Monty Python sketch: "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" But the Inquisition is no joke. An unbroken thread links the friar-inquisitors of the Holy Inquisition to more recent torturers and executioners, including those of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, but the thread does not stop at Auschwitz or the Gulag. Various tools and techniques in the inquisitorial toolbox that were first invented in the Middle Ages were put to use at the Salem witch trials in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the Hollywood blacklists of the McCarthy era, and even the interrogation cells at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Above all, as familiar as it...

According to this review published the other day in the Wall Street Journal, a fellow named Alex Beam has written a book about the Great Books of the Western World, the 54-volume collection of major writings that was published by Encyclopædia Britannica in 1952. I haven’t read the book, so I find it difficult to discern where the review reflects Mr. Beam’s attitude and where it expresses the reviewer’s. One or the other of them, or both, is occasionally a little snarky about the GBWW enterprise.

It is de rigueur in certain styles of journalism or circles of academia to strike a mildly disdainful attitude when discussing Britannica. “Commercial” seems always to be the chief criticism, and it is...