From “Yankee Doodle” to iPod playlists, here’s what American troops read and listened to in every war — and how culture became morale equipment.

ALTHOUGH IT IS beginning to recover, Iraq is still suffering from the wars of the past decades. In 2023 about 45 people a month died violently, according to Iraq Body Count, a Britain-based monitor.

Thomas Ricks is telling his colleagues about the skepticism he encountered when writing his Iraq war book, Fiasco. “When I first started working on it,” he says, “a lot of people said, ‘Why are you ...

In the wake of a full-scale assault on Iran by the United States and Israel, and the kidnapping of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, oil-based theories of imperialism are understandably getting ...