It has been said that both courage and cowardice are contagious. This is certainly true, as anyone who has spent time with a group engaged in some kind of enterprise knows well. Courageous or cowardly actions always begin with one man; his example, witnessed by the rest of the group, is like a firebrand thrown on dried kindling. And it has precisely the same effect.
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Why do some businesses do inexplicable things that harm their brands? How is it that they do not appreciate the need to stay loyal to their customers or clients? What are the consequences of these failures? We take a look at how Colt Firearms, an iconic American brand, made a series of decisions in the 1980s and 1990s that caused it grievous harm.
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It will be useful to compare the leadership styles of two wartime American presidents of the nineteenth century. James Madison was president during the War of 1812, while Abraham Lincoln occupied the office of chief executive during the American Civil War. The first of these must be counted a failure as a wartime commander-in-chief, while the second was able to prosecute his nation’s most terrible conflict to a successful conclusion. What qualities enabled one to emerge triumphant, and the other to suffer the indignity of failure, we will now examine.
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There are people who feel starved for direct, real experience. They see themselves as living a lie, and are desperate to fill the void. So they channel their energies into avenues that offer little in terms of real value: “life coaches,” counselors, “nutrition experts,” etc. What they are really lacking is the inner satisfaction that comes from knowing one has had real, direct, and meaningful life experiences.
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It is unfortunate that the War of 1812 is understudied, for it furnishes us modernly with a great many lessons on the consequences of unpreparedness and military ineptitude in defense of one’s homeland. While the Americans scored some notable naval victories during the war, the land campaign remains a dreary record of defeat and flight, relieved only by Andrew Jackson’s impressive, but strategically inconsequential, victory at New Orleans two weeks after the treaty concluding the conflict had been signed at Ghent.
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In September 2023, I was fortunate enough to participate in a webinar to discuss some aspects of Cicero’s On the Nature of the Gods. It really was a great discussion. The participants were Dr. Michael Fontaine of Cornell University, Anya Leonard of classicalwisdom.com, and myself.
You can view the entire webinar here:
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The name of Joshua Barney is unlikely to be familiar with readers. He was, however, one of the principal American naval heroes of both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812. We have not sufficient space here to recount his long and distinguished career as a combatant; but we will relate his daring escape from British captivity during the revolution, as it illustrates his dominant traits of resourcefulness and courage.
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A reader asks a question I’ve never heard before: “How should I pray?” Although it’s not an easy question to answer, I offer some thoughts and suggestions that relate to these points:
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In Gibbon’s history (Ch. 51), there is an anecdote related to the Arab military campaigns in Persia in A.D. 639 to 640. It concerns a nobleman named Hormuzan, who was, we are told, “a prince or satrap of Ahwaz and Susa.” Modern historians have identified him as the governor of Khuzestan, and one of the Persian military officers during the famous Battle of Qadisiyya in A.D. 636. Gibbon apparently extracted this story from the historical writings of Al Tabari or Al Masudi.
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In a letter to Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV in 1361, the scholar Petrarch included the following lines of advice:
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Quintus Curtius 
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