The War That Invented the Modern American Citizen

Lex Fridman opens with the hardest question in a crowded field: how did World War I start? Capozzola, a historian of politics and war at MIT, gives the classroom answer first. A chain of events in the summer of 1914 pulled Europe’s major powers into conflict. Then he offers the version he finds more useful. The war started at least a generation earlier, when a rising Germany poured resources into its army and navy, set off a European arms race, and intensified the scramble for colonial resources in Africa and Asia. By the summer of 1914, he says, the war had in many ways already begun. The shots in Sarajevo were “the match that lights the flame.”

Fighting was already underway before the great powers faced one another. Capozzola points to Africa, North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans: European empires were accustomed to asymmetrical wars against much weaker states. The United States, he adds, had graduated to empire after 1898, when it took former Spanish territories and acquired both formal colonies and the mindset of rule and military acquisition. Empire, in that informal sense, does not always require a map painted in colonial colors.

Historians, he notes, never like the word inevitable. People could have chosen differently in both the short term and the long term. Still, the system of empires in 1914 contained conflicts he cannot see being reconciled without violence. “It didn’t have to be this war, but it probably had to be a war.” He puts the blame on that system, and inside it he assigns the largest share of responsibility to imperial Germany — not because a “sleepwalking” thesis has no evidence, but because that thesis lets everyone too far off the hook.

The four weeks after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand were a stack of ultimatums, secret alliances, and military call-ups. Once troops were being mobilized, no power wanted to be the last one ready. Each government believed it was making a defensive move; each imagined a skirmish or a standoff that diplomats might still tidy up. Diplomacy failed. The skirmish became a massive war. Americans watched from the sidelines, with almost no influence over that summer.

The phase transition, Capozzola says, came in the autumn of 1914. Germany opened with a bold thrust into France, fighting the last war — the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 — and hoping for a lightning strike that would end things quickly. France resisted more effectively than the Germans expected. The battle lines hardened. Then both sides started digging. Trenches that began three feet deep, meant to dodge artillery, became six feet, then ten, then two miles wide, laced with telegraph wire and backed by whole hospitals. Once that front locked, the only remaining idea was to dial the war up to eleven. Massive numbers of troops. Massive efforts. None of it worked.

The industrial revolution of the previous thirty or forty years arrived on the battlefield as machine guns and artillery. The vast majority of casualties came from shelling, not from rifle fire or even machine-gun attacks. In some ways, Capozzola says, the weapons of war were human beings: tens of thousands poured over the top in waves to break the enemy line. It would work for a little while. Holding the ground often proved harder than taking it. Each side would fall back into the trenches and wait for another day.

Britain, France, and Russia came in together in August 1914 because of secret prewar alliances that committed them to defend one another; Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire had their own. Empires, not just national armies, were mobilized — soldiers and raw materials from across the globe. Officers understood the scale of the slaughter very quickly. Civilians did too, even through censorship. By 1917, when the United States decided whether to join, Americans were not backing into the unknown. They had seen photographs, newsreels, injured soldiers, and gory press accounts. They made the choice anyway.

Fridman, who had recently spent weeks in Ukraine, describes what distance does to the mind. A kilometer from the front, an explosion still startles you. In Kyiv, everyone is in the war and it already feels like a movie. Capozzola says the same gap existed on European home fronts, except in Belgium and France where the fighting was in the backyard. Soldiers on leave often resented the luxury they thought civilians were living in. An ocean made that distance larger still.

Could the United States have stayed out? As a military power, Capozzola says yes. It could not have ignored the war completely. The conflict shaped trade, goods, agriculture, harvests, and whether immigrants still crossed the Atlantic to work in American factories. What the country chose in 1917 was a declaration of war on Germany and Austria — a war of choice, kicked off by a sequence of events. Woodrow Wilson had just won re-election in 1916 on a campaign to keep the United States out.

In early 1917 the German high command concluded it was stuck in the trenches and needed a breakthrough. The one big chance was to break the British blockade and start sinking ships on the Atlantic, including American ships. The Germans knew this would draw the United States in. They looked at a small army, a small navy, and a country that on paper was deeply divided, and decided American soldiers would not arrive in time. “They took that gamble. They lost.” French resistance held. American mobilization was faster and larger than Germany expected.

From 1914 to 1917 the American public fought a searing debate that did not break cleanly on party lines: was the war in the national interest, or would American troops become cannon fodder for European empires? The sinking of the *Lusitania* in 1915, then of many more ships in 1917, turned the tide. The congressional declaration was lopsided toward war and nowhere near unanimous. Fridman hears an echo in later votes: once the moment arrives, nobody wants to be the politician who says no, because that looks like weakness.

Capozzola’s larger claim is that World War I defined what it means to be an American citizen. Citizenship, as he splits it, is two things: legal rights and obligations, and a more amorphous sense of belonging — feeling American, loving or hating the country, being willing to die for it. Both were put on the table. People who had never carried passports suddenly needed them. Who counted as a citizen, and what that required, was being defined and enforced.

The image everyone knows is James Montgomery Flagg’s Uncle Sam, finger pointed at the viewer: I want you. It began as a 1916 magazine cover under the heading “What are you doing for preparedness?” while the United States was still neutral. In 1917 it became an Army recruiting poster. It returned in World War II, then as remix and meme. Capozzola treats it as a window into a moment when the federal government was about to make enormous demands overseas, and when mass production and mass media — what we would now call propaganda — were mobilized in a new way. Historians, he insists, should be at least as interested in the people being pointed at. There would never have been global U.S. power without the response that begins here.

One of the first things Uncle Sam wanted was registration for the draft. The Selective Service Act passed very soon after the United States entered the war. All men, first ages 21 to 30, then 18 to 45, had to register; a government agency would select who served. Over the course of the war, 24 million men registered and almost four million served in some fashion. At least half a million never filled out the forms. Capozzola calls the trip to the local post office a tougher demand than the declaration of war itself. Declaring war on Germany is one thing. Filling out the paperwork that lets your own government send you there is another — especially when the federal government had almost no other way to find you.

How do you get 24 million people to register in a divided country? Not from the top down. There were maybe a hundred agents in what is now called the FBI. Enforcement ran through the eyes of everyday neighbors and community surveillance. A significant anti-war movement existed before 1917. Afterward it became very hard to sustain, particularly once the government started shutting down protests. Ordinary people were participating in the building of the war machine with their own hands.

Conscription, Capozzola says, takes aim at the fundamental right of liberty. It demands sacrifice from some, notionally for the protection of all. Even if you opposed the war, you were forced to fight. Small provisions existed for conscientious objectors, but only for those with religious objections to all war, not political objections to this one. Several thousand used those provisions and still faced ridicule, social sanction, and intimidation. Individual freedom and religious freedom were among the first things to go.

Soon after came the Espionage Act, back in the news in 2022 when this conversation was recorded. Capozzola describes it as an omnibus bill with about ten provisions, very few of them about espionage. One key clause made it illegal to say or do anything that would interfere with military recruitment. That clause was used to shut down radical publications and German-language papers. The chilling effect on wartime speech was real. Citizenship after the war now included the obligation to defend the country, to serve, and if asked, to die. When a state makes those demands, people start demanding rights in return: free-speech protections, equality for marginalized groups. Obligations and rights grow in a dynamic relationship. Fridman hears an overreach that taught Americans not to trust concentrated power to drag them into war. Capozzola calls it a rebirth of a tension that has always been there, intensified into its modern form.

The same statute empowered federal agencies to watch other Americans. They were especially interested in anyone obstructing the draft, anyone organizing labor or strikes, and anyone who might have sympathy for Germany — which, in practice, put German Americans under surveillance. The effort began small. Soon every agency was involved: the Treasury’s Secret Service, the Post Office reading mail, the Justice Department mobilizing 200,000 volunteers. Much of it went away after the war. Of all the temporary machinery, the core of the surveillance state is what persisted most fully. By almost any metric — federal budget, federal employees, the standing army — government size skyrocketed. It came down afterward. It never returned to what it had been.

Did World War I give birth to the military-industrial complex? Capozzola splits the question. War profiteering existed, and it was investigated afterward; people worried that the profit motive had played too large a part. The phrase military-industrial complex, though, is about lock-in: military choices shaped by industry, and industry shaped by military objectives. He does not think that lock-in was complete in 1917–18. That is a Cold War phenomenon, two generations of intense footing. Weapons for all the European powers and the United States were generally made by private industry even then, with older federal arsenals as a partial exception.

The metaphor he prefers is a dial versus a ratchet. In World War I the relationship between the military and industry dialed up fast and high, stayed there, then dialed back down. In the Cold War it looked more like a ratchet: it goes up and does not come back. That is the worry in Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address, which popularized the term — not only profit, but the fear that nobody had an interest in stopping the machine, and that an ordinary American had no voice with which to turn it down.

Fridman wonders why speeches like Eisenhower’s are so rare now, and why criticism of war spending so often skips the machinery that pulls a society into conflict. Capozzola says there has not been a sustained American conversation about the defense establishment through the Cold War and after. After World War I, that conversation was on the table: the Nye Committee in the United States, a royal commission in Britain, journalistic exposés, constant talk between about 1930 and 1936 as storm clouds gathered again in Europe. Today those discussions are often pushed to the fringes and framed as conspiracy theory. He wants them reconvened in the twenty-first century.

Asked for parallels with the war in Ukraine, he is cautious. Easy comparisons to 1914 do not really work. If there is a parallel, Ukraine looks more like the Balkan and Mediterranean conflicts of 1911 to 1913 — local wars that later sat inside a much greater one. The lesson for avoiding a World War III that looks like World War I is to keep systems from locking into place and escalating past anyone’s expectations. Nuclear powers make a hot war in the twenty-first century especially frightening. What keeps him up at night is the same fact that should keep citizens of both the United States and Russia up at night. Even in the summer of 1914, he reminds Fridman, a march toward war could still have been different. Leaders need off-ramps, and they need to make those off-ramps possible.

Why does the Civil War still define American identity, alongside the Revolution and World War II, while World War I slips from memory? Capozzola’s answer is that it was a different kind of war: secession, fighting on American territory, Americans against Americans. Lincoln’s relationship to the home front was not Wilson’s or Roosevelt’s. Troops on both sides were raised overwhelmingly by volunteer recruitment organized around communities and states; only about eight percent of Confederate soldiers came in through conscription. Multiple loyalties — to regiment, to militia, to the country they were fighting over — produced a Union nationalism after victory that has shaped the United States ever since. World War I never acquired a comparably clean story about why it had to be fought.

Capozzola likes to say the United States entered the war in April 1917, but Americans entered it right away. Some fifty thousand joined the Canadian or British army. Millions volunteered humanitarian aid. Modern war, he argues, creates modern humanitarianism, and you can see that in the neutrality period. People who wanted the country to stay out still thought about the war, argued about it, and worried that British propaganda, German espionage, and both powers’ attempts to interfere in American elections were already inside the news cycle. A revolution in Mexico added a Western Hemisphere crisis to the European one.

The war that was supposed to end all wars did not. In Germany, defeat produced resentment, recrimination, and what one observer called the brutalization of politics — groundwork for the Nazi politics of hate. In the United States, the failure to win the peace mattered as much as the fighting: Wilson tried to craft an international order, then the country failed to join the League of Nations and stayed on the hook for another generation. In Asia the story is different. World War I was a boom for Japan, pouring wealth into industrialization and militarization; when the military wing took over in the 1930s, it was flexing muscles built in 1914–18.

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Wilson was the central actor, respected and resentfully so by Britain, France, and Italy, who felt they had sacrificed more. Those powers wanted to preserve imperial economic structures and weaken Germany so it could not rise again. The treaty that followed maintained fundamental imperial conflicts, bankrupted and starved Germany, and fed a politics of resentment that made German participation in a European order nearly impossible. Capozzola has little patience for the tidy counterfactual that if Britain had stayed out, or if Hitler had gotten into art school, the century would have been saved. History is multi-causal. Depression-era Europe was unstable; democracies collapsed across Western Europe in the 1930s whether or not they had a charismatic totalitarian at the top. The World War II the world got would have been different without Hitler. That is not the same as saying it would not have been a catastrophe.

Fridman asks about Norman Ohler’s *Blitzed*, which argues that methamphetamine played a large role in the Third Reich and in Hitler himself. Critics say the book takes one variable and makes it explain everything. Capozzola has read it and had the same eye-opening reaction many historians did: why didn’t we think about this? Ohler is not a trained academic historian. Capozzola has no patience for pulling rank; you do not need a degree to write good history. He likes the book as a window, not as a master key. Drugs do not explain the Third Reich. They help you see the people who supported Hitler, the use of mind-altering drugs to keep soldiers on the battlefield, and the extent to which the regime was held together with duct tape by 1940 or 1941 — smoke and mirrors that wartime propaganda on all sides described as more formidable than it was.

Fridman worries that some explanations are sticky. Introduce steroids, and Lance Armstrong’s whole career becomes the drug. Introduce meth, and both military genius and evil fall off the person and onto the molecule. That is dangerous, he says, because it removes responsibility. It also turns Hitler into a monster instead of a human being who got emotional in the morning, hopeful, sad, depressed, angry. The soldier’s lesson is that many leaders are capable of evil. When popular resentment meets the right charismatic figure, the initiation of military conflict is not a singular historical accident. Hitler is not as unique as the monster version implies.

The same openness to non-academic storytellers extends to Dan Carlin’s *Blueprint for Armageddon*, which Fridman calls one of the most compelling popular tellings of World War I. Historians argue with each other, Capozzola says, but he has no patience when they pull rank. University historians depend on local people who record oral histories and save documents. History is a social science and a storytelling art. The first job is to get the facts right, even when the facts are fuzzy; William Shirer’s *The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich* shows how hard it is to stay with primary sources. What Carlin tries to do is make you feel what it was like to be there, often through a single soldier or citizen. Historical imagination, Capozzola says, teaches humility: other people organized their lives differently and made it through. It also teaches a harder thought. Placed in that space and time, you might have done the same things, brave or evil.

The famous line is that those who do not learn history are condemned to repeat it. Capozzola adds the other half: those who do not learn history do not get the chance to repeat it. We are not the first people on the planet to face these problems. Fridman’s analogy is first love and a teenage breakup, felt as the greatest tragedy in the world even though Romeo and Juliet already happened. It is useful to be reminded that the human condition is what it is, at both the individual and the societal scale.

Is nationalism destructive or empowering? Capozzola separates it from patriotism. Patriotism is an emotion, a love of country, and a necessary condition for participating in nationalism. Nationalism, in a world organized around nation-states, is the belief that you are engaged in a common project with strangers, and that you would sacrifice for them — by paying taxes or by going to war. That civic version is the good one. The question is whether you can have it without exclusionary nationalism: hating the other, fearing the other, defining the nation against all others. The United States has a long inclusive tradition worth defending, he says, and an ethnic-hatred version worth fearing. He will not paint too rosy a picture. America has often found it easier to define itself against something — the Cold War, China today — than to say what it is for. That may be human nature. The civilizational problem is learning how to construct competitors that do not produce global war, or how to turn enemies into rivals. You compete with competitors. You fight with enemies.

The lesson he wants everyone to take from the First World War is that human life is not cheap. All the warring powers thought that throwing more men and more matériel at the front would solve political problems with military force. In 1918 one side did win. It did not actually solve any of those political problems. Regular people paid with their lives, and people who had been told their lives were cheap remembered it. That memory reshaped mass politics for the rest of the twentieth century, in Europe and around the world. The death of a soldier or a civilian is not only that life. It is resentment, anger, and hate that reverberates.

Fridman saw in Ukraine the birth, at scale, of generational hate aimed not at administrations but at entire peoples — created overnight, needing decades and institutions to divert. He asks whether the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq priced that in: how many years of hate does one bomb create, even when it hits a military target, and how many of a million people who hate you become terrorists? He does not think the Pentagon had that chart. Capozzola agrees it is the same idea again, military force as a solution to political problems, plus a squandering of goodwill toward the United States.

Can leaders stop war if they get in a room together? Capozzola’s answer is yes, if they understand from the masses that war is something those masses want stopped. The nuclear-freeze movement in the United States and pressure for openness in the Soviet Union brought Reagan and Gorbachev to Reykjavík. Those two men made choices in the room. They were both being pushed, and they knew it. Fans of history, he says, conceive of the past as a meeting of leaders — Chamberlain, Churchill, Hitler, Stalin. Churchill’s “we shall never surrender” worked because it was also a representation of what the British people were willing to do. Leading is a dynamic art: shaping what people want at the same time as knowing you are bound by it.

Capozzola was preparing a course on the history of American presidential elections that would run through 2024. Are we a divided nation? In rhetoric and day-to-day politics, obviously yes. Compared with other periods, nowhere near as divided as people think — the Civil War, 150 years earlier, being the obvious measure. The distinction is not only that Americans have not come to blows. The country is one society, one economy, deeply integrated at home and on the world stage in ways that look nothing like 1861. Political rhetoric will stay extreme. That is not the same as national rupture.

What is different, he says, is partisanship. Political scientists call the current era hyper-partisanship: the two parties have taken fundamentally different positions and moved further apart. That is what people mean when they say the country is divided. The country may not be. The politics are. Fridman suspects even that split is partly an illusion — that most people agree on basics, and that a media and political machine needs a blue side and a red side, down to families breaking up at Thanksgiving. Capozzola thinks the country is figuring that out in real time. A two-party system that is not parliamentary may amplify the effect. Parliamentary countries around the world are producing the same rhetoric of irreconcilable division and the same politics of emotion. Some of that, on television and social media, is not as real as it looks.

Fridman has lived through Bush versus Gore, Obama, Trump, Biden, and the ritual claim that the other side rigged it — Russian influence in 2016, a stranger on an Austin river path insisting 2020 was “obviously rigged.” Capozzola’s position is blunt. The American election system is fundamentally sound and reliable. The time, resources, and precision that go into registration, counting, and certification are crucial to democratic institutions. When someone says “rigged,” left or right, they are looking for one answer to a complex system. On the left that may mean gerrymandering or the Electoral College. On the right it may mean voter security or mainstream media control of messages. In both cases the feeling is articulated as “my vote didn’t get counted.” The deeper concern is “my vote doesn’t count. My voice isn’t being heard.”

Fridman pushes the less comfortable version: close elections, huge financial interests, powerful people, and the possibility of fully illegal manipulation. Capozzola does not deny the history. Interference goes back to the eighteenth century; you do not need Lyndon Johnson’s Texas. Pro- and anti-slavery settlers flooded Kansas in the 1850s to determine an outcome. During Reconstruction the Ku Klux Klan blocked Black voters at the door. The history is not new, and hyper-partisanship makes the incentives feel more existential. When he says the system is sound, he is not trying to be reassuring or to encourage complacency. He is saying this is something Americans have to do and work on, with institutions insulated as much as possible from partisan politics, and with a public that wants elections fair and secure. That includes being willing to lose, whichever party you favor.

Fridman is worried that media and politicians have a huge incentive to split the country as evenly as possible, because anger and a 50–50 race maximize clicks. The cynical version is that the machine will watch democracy burn because the fire itself is traffic. Capozzola says Fridman has depicted the incentive structure with 100 percent accuracy. History then offers a correction: he may be giving the media too much causal power. “The American people are smarter than the media that they consume.” Even people who watch only Fox or only MSNBC know what they are consuming. He does not think media will be the solution, and he does not think returning to three mid-century news channels telling one story is a golden age worth recovering.

Twitter, in his account, has not changed what it means to be an American citizen. It has changed the day-to-day sound of civic life: noisier, louder, more decentered. The paradox is that it is a fundamentally democratic platform, stripping gatekeepers from institutions that had them for a long time, and also not a democratic institution at all. It is a for-profit corporation, and it operates under those principles. The people of the United States, he says, have the authority to regulate or reshape it, and other major media players, as they see fit.

The ban of President Donald Trump is the case that illustrates both sides. Twitter is a platform with terms of service; it concluded that Trump had violated them and blocked him. If you have rules, you have to enforce them. The direct and predictable consequence was a sense among millions of Americans that Twitter had taken a side in politics, or a confirmation of a belief they already held. Unintended consequences, a historian can only say, always exist, and we do not yet know what it means for political figures to be excluded from platforms on those grounds. Fridman, generally against censorship, steels both cases: suppression can turn ordinary support into reverence for a martyr; removing a loud extreme can give calmer voices more relative power. He still calls censorship a slippery slope, especially once Twitter, YouTube, and similar platforms became, during Covid, something closer to the press than to a company. Capozzola seizes a more basic point. In a democratic society, democratic polities should not cede the power to shape conversation to for-profit companies.

Does Twitter have the power to start wars or swing elections? Capozzola’s metaphor is a wave washing away sand: the medium is not itself an actor; what matters is how actors use the platform and how the platform is structured. Fridman is not satisfied. A tweet is a medium plus virality, so a single voice or a single dramatic idea can have a disproportionate impact. That implies a responsibility not to accelerate a voice only because it gets engagement. Capozzola’s historian’s comfort is that this too shall pass. Until it does, the structures of the platform and the algorithm are eligible for scrutiny by democratic institutions. He will not predict 2024 in detail — historians dislike predicting the future — except that it will not be calm. Biden says he will run; the jury is out. Trump does not like to start things he cannot win, and a kingmaker role on the sidelines may appeal. A centrist savior is a widely shared dream that the primary system is unlikely to deliver.

Fridman asks, as a historian, whether he should interview Donald Trump. Capozzola notes a loss that rarely makes the news: when Trump was banned, the account was also deleted. That feed is one of the most valuable sources historians will use to understand the era. Parts were archived and reconstructed; the gap is still a real loss to the record. He is not in the business of saying “don’t talk.” There are painfully few interviews with Hitler or Stalin. A conversation with a living, controversial leader is historically precious and immediately combustible, depending on how it is conducted. The shared challenge for journalists and historians is not to get too close to the subject, not to be used by them. Talking to a living person means triangulating their story with the rest of the record, playing two truths and a lie. Historians get thirty or forty years. Journalists have to do it in a day. Fridman adds that ignoring a leader supported by a huge share of the public is disrespectful to those citizens. He is more worried about the resentment censorship produces than about a good conversation.

A pure democracy, Capozzola says, does not require Mars. The answer is not to flip a switch. People and incentive structures have to be ready. What you can do is experiment, one reform after another: ranked-choice voting and runoffs that may reflect preferences better than picking a single candidate; participatory budgeting over how public money is spent; and, most urgent, a more democratic form of foreign-policy making. In modern American history, decisions about the military and foreign policy have been unusually insulated from popular participation. Technology will not solve that by itself. Technology plus human creativity might. Whether the country gets there before anyone gets to Mars, he does not know. The students in his elections course have lived their entire lives after Bush v. Gore and after 9/11. They take partisanship and contentious elections for granted. They do not remember lots of moderate Democrats and liberal Republicans. The course is a way to find other ways of organizing politics, and a way to reassure them that Americans have been through violent fights over the vote before. Knowledge of history, he hopes, can de-escalate the emotions around a single candidate. From a place of calm, wisdom is easier.

His book *Bound by War* retells a century of American power from the Pacific, especially through the U.S.–Philippine relationship, because the usual stories lean too far toward Europe. He starts in 1898 with the invasion, conquest, and annexation of the Philippines — a defining conflict often misdescribed as merely a war with Spain. It was the first extended overseas American war, the first in what would be called the developing world, and a counterinsurgency whose lessons were repeated in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and after 9/11. The book focuses on Filipinos who served in the U.S. Army and Navy, in a fundamentally ironic position: fighting for the colonial power occupying their country. The irony persists. In global polling, Filipinos view the United States more favorably than people from any other country, including Americans themselves. In 1986, Ferdinand Marcos was overthrown by People Power after a contested and almost certainly rigged election. The Reagan administration, in a personally wrenching choice shaped by emerging neoconservative voices including Paul Wolfowitz, declined to prop up a Cold War ally. Democratization then spread through Latin America, South Korea, and Eastern Europe until, Capozzola says, it hit a wall in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. The lesson he draws is not that freedom works in some places and not others. It is the same dynamic dance between leaders and people. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it does not.

The greatest American president, without hesitation, is Abraham Lincoln: personal leadership, moral character, and the ability to play short games and long games, to work with enemies and block them when he had to. Washington had the statesman’s quality of relinquishing power. Lincoln was better at governing than at getting elected; 1860 was a mess, and 1864, a wartime election, was no sure thing. Are there leaders of that caliber now? Both clichés are true: we are not surrounded by Lincolns, and we romanticize the past. Harry Truman left office with abysmal ratings and looks, in hindsight, like a man who won the long game. Victors write the story. How history will remember Zelensky, Putin, Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, or Clinton is not obvious; it depends on how those nations’ histories unfold. For young people who have never known a world before perpetual contention, Capozzola’s commencement draft is that history teaches you to be more optimistic than your surroundings suggest. It is easy to conclude there is nothing you can do about politics, the person across the aisle, or the planet, and give up. We do not know the winners and losers in the long run. We know the people who give up are always the losers. Human beings are resilient and creative under far harder circumstances than these. Asked for the meaning of life, he says the handoff from historian to clergy covers less distance than it looks. Religious answers often have a historical core: unifying past and present. Even without belief, history is about the shared human condition. The story is not complete if it drills only into the miseries of war and depression. It also needs blueberries and butterflies. Fridman closes with Wilson in 1917 — a war to end all wars — and George Santayana’s 1922 reply: only the dead have seen the end of war.