Just finished reading a fascinating book, “The Men Who Lost America” (Yale University Press, 2013), by Andrew Jackson O’Shaughnessy, a history professor at the University of Virginia. He deftly explains how the greatest military juggernaut of the age lost the American War for independence to a neophyte Continental Army and bands of rag-tag citizen militia rebels, while the colonies
at one point teetered on the brink of bankruptcy and despair.
I want to rework the book as, “The Men Who Lost the Contest for Safety,” using themes from O’Shaughnessy’s 466 pages to underscore the human foibles that history proves to be rather difficult to alter or eliminate. Let’s see how many foibles you can relate to. (By the way, it’s hard not to read this book and think of how the U.S. “lost” Vietnam despite military superiority and found it hard to hold on to its gains in Iraq and Afghanistan.)