A Curious Little Blog

Those who spend a lot of time around me might suspect that this post is another attempt to drag the Peace of Westphalia into anything and everything, but in this case I am entirely innocent.  The idea of linking Syria and Westphalia had never occurred to me until I stumbled across it on an unrelated search last week.  I found that it was not a new or isolated connection, but one that has been going since the beginning of the Arab Spring and has been raised by several people from different angles. The earliest reference that I have seen (without spending much time trying to ferret out exactly how far back this goes) is this article by Henry Kissinger in the Washington Post nearly two years ago.  He approaches Westphalia from the traditional standpoint of sovereignty, which is kind of depressing because I would hope that people would start getting over that mistake by now, but hardly surprising.  Most other references I have seen link Syria and Westphalia in a simil...

I'm excited about writing this blog entry because I get to spread the word that today is Peace of Westphalia Day. 361 years ago today, representatives gathered in the town of Münster signed two documents, the Treaty of Onsabrück and the Treaty of Münster, that ended the Thirty Years' War. Not many people celebrate this holiday in the way it deserves, with a full day off from work, lots of decadent food, and reading my books on the subject, but I think that will change once I get the word out and people start to realize what they are missing. Okay, I might be a little biased on the subject. Hardly anyone knows what the Peace of Westphalia is or even what century it occurred in, which means I probably could have picked a better subject to pour my heart and soul into writing a book about. Heck, hardly anyone knows that October 24th is United Nations Day -- the U.N. charter was signed on this day in 1945 -- so I can hardly expect its predecessor by 300 years to catch on. Someo...