VDH 2024
Victor Davis Hanson
Historical Tours
2024 SPEAKER BIOS
Victor Davis Hanson, Bruce Thornton, & Tom Conner
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.
Hanson was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California (1992-93), a visiting professor of classics at Stanford University (1991-92), and alumnus of the year of the University of California, Santa Cruz (2002). He received the National Humanities Award in 2007, and the Bradley Prize in 2009.
Hanson is the author of some 170 articles, book reviews, and newspaper editorials on Greek, agrarian, and military history and essays on contemporary culture. He has written or edited twenty books, including Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern(2010); Makers of Ancient Strategy: from the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (ed.) (2010);Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (1983; paperback ed., University of California Press, 1998); Carnage and Culture (Doubleday, 2001); A War Like No Other (Random House 2005);The Western Way of War (Alfred Knopf, 1989; 2nd paperback ed., University of California Press, 2000); The Wars of the Ancient Greeks (Cassell, 1999; paperback ed., 2001); and Mexifornia: a State of Becoming (Encounter, 2003).
Bruce S. Thornton grew up on a cattle ranch in Fresno County, California. He received his BA in Latin from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1975, as well as his PhD in comparative literature-Greek, Latin, and English-in 1983. Thornton is professor emeritus of classics and humanities at California State University, Fresno, and a Research Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He is the author of 11 books on a variety of topics, including “Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization”; “Plagues of the Mind, the New Epidemic of False Knowledge”; “Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in and Impoverished Age” (with Victor Davis Hanson); “Decline and Fall: Europe's Slow Motion Suicide”; “The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America,” and “Democracy’s Danger and Discontents, The Tyranny of the Majority from the Greeks to Obama.” His numerous essays and reviews on Greek culture and civilization and their influence on Western Civilization, as well as on other contemporary political and educational issues, have appeared in both scholarly journals, magazines, and online publications. He has lectured at numerous colleges and universities and at venues such as the Smithsonian Institute, the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the Army War College, and the Air Force Academy. He also is editor of the Hoover Institution’s recently published book, “Cage Fight: Civilian and Democratic Pressures on Military Conflicts and Foreign Policy.”
Tom Conner
William P. Harris Professor of Military History at Hillsdale College. Conner (B.A. Elizabethtown College, M.A. Ph.D., University of North Carolina) taught Western heritage and European history at Hillsdale College for 26 years. He has lectured throughout Europe on the sites of the World Wars since 1979. He is also the author of "War and Remembrance: The Story of the American Battle Monuments Commission."