Misunderstood Moments

By the Editors

This Editor’s Note appears in the new Winter 2026 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future issue.

“I skate to where the puck is going to be.”

That’s how hockey star Wayne Gretzky characterized his craft. Historians’ craft differs. A historian might say, “I skate to where the puck once might have been.”

“Skating back” is what the Coolidge Review does. And we don’t want to find only politically acceptable kinds of history. The puck we seek is evidence—even evidence that challenges what we thought, or what teachers said.

This is not to say that historians, or magazine editors, can ever conduct their hunts entirely objectively. But to succumb to the notion that history is already “all known” is laziness. Lazier still is to assume, as Howard Zinn did, that ­history is by nature a “political act.” Only for ideologues. 

The Winter 2026 issue of the Coolidge Review represents the results of our latest puck hunt. We’ve come up with a few surprises.

Take the Soviet Union’s industrial growth in the 1920s and 1930s. Kremlin propaganda touted that as the miracle of Soviet socialism. Many Westerners accepted the claim. But as Arthur Herman reveals, it was American capi­talists who turned the Soviet Union into an economic power.

Or consider the Revolutionary War. It wasn’t all Bunker Hill, Saratoga, and Yorktown. Accounts typically elide three crucial years of fighting, Alan Pell Crawford shows.

You might think of the 1950s as the epitome of American prosperity. Not so, says economist John Cochrane. Misconceptions also rule when it comes to taxes, as you’ll see in pieces by Phillip Magness and Brian Domitrovic.

Cara Rogers Stevens peels back the layers of Thomas Jefferson’s drafts to reveal that the Founder’s views on emancipation were more complex than we knew. 

When it comes to history, don’t settle down on your couch with a conventional storyline. Get out on the ice yourself.

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This Editor’s Note appears in the Winter 2026 issue of the Coolidge Review. Request a free copy of a future issue.