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Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

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Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

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Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

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Atlas fudged: The war that defined America

The Barbary War was an early indicator of American imperialism that we're still dealing with today

Published July 4, 2026 6:30AM (EDT)

A recent thrift store find has enraptured me and given me insight into the history of America, which feels especially poignant and overlooked as we approach the 250th anniversary of this bizarre, wonderful, terrible country. For a quarter, I picked up a copy of “Atlas of American Wars,” printed in the Year of Our Lord 1986, just a few years before I was born — which means its contents are missing a lot of the American misadventures and atrocities that have spanned my lifetime. Nevertheless, it’s an enlightening read in light of how dramatically war has changed in the last two-and-a-half centuries.

The book serves as an excellent way of looking back at the bloodshed inside and outside the U.S. because it is, as an atlas should be, almost entirely filled with battlefield maps that cover virtually every campaign, large and small, many of which have been largely forgotten. Collectively, they stand as a blunt reminder that war, the dumbest and most vicious human invention, occurs in time and space. I mean, of course it does. But when you see every major turning point in American history spread out like a bloody centerfold, it reduces everything to ant trails, underscoring how pathetic and sad warfare really is, even when we think it’s justified.

Authored by Richard Natkiel, one of Britain’s top historical cartographers at the time who was employed by The Economist for his map-making prowess, “Atlas” of course begins with the so-called French and Indian Wars and follows closely with the Revolutionary War. These are the cluster of conflicts that broke these stolen North American territories out of their colonialist shell and spawned the United States, a nation ostensibly founded on principles of freedom and justice that also became the very imperialist engine it was trying to escape.

Or maybe it never meant to escape at all. No need to untangle the complex hypocrisy here — it’s all laid out in arrows and diagrams. Here is where armies marched and met and killed one another. Here is where the ships spewed their cannons at one another. Here is where the airplanes dropped their bombs. Some of it, probably, was warranted or in the spirited mission of liberty, as some will undoubtedly argue, but far from all of it.

This is American history at its most blunt and abstract, that doesn’t depict the war crimes and barbarism that have colored events like the invasions of Korea and Vietnam, which receive only five and seven pages each of dedication. Centuries of Indigenous genocide are squished into eight pages. Meanwhile, World War II encompasses 69 pages, but to be fair, it covers pretty much everything from the Battle of Midway........

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