Short answers, pulled from the story.
Victor Davis Hanson, born on the 5th of September, 1953, is an American classicist, military historian, and conservative political commentator. He is professor emeritus of classics at California State University, Fresno, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the author of widely read books on ancient Greek warfare and Western military history, including Carnage and Culture and The Western Way of War.
In Carnage and Culture, published by Doubleday in 2001, Hanson argues that Western military dominance stems from cultural factors such as consensual government, secular rationalism, individual freedom, and a tradition of self-critique. He explicitly rejects racial explanations and disputes the environmental determinism advanced by Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel.
Hanson received the American Philological Association's Excellence in Teaching Award in 1991, the National Humanities Medal in 2007 awarded by President George W. Bush, the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism in 2002, and the Bradley Prize in 2008. He also holds an Honorary Doctorate of Laws from Pepperdine University, awarded in 2015.
Hanson grew up in Selma, California, in the San Joaquin Valley. He continues to live on a farm outside Selma that has been in his family since the 1870s.
In Who Killed Homer?, co-authored with John Heath and published in 1998, Hanson argues that classical education has declined in American universities and that knowledge of ancient Greece and Rome is necessary for a full understanding of Western culture. Political scientist Francis Fukuyama reviewed the book favorably in Foreign Affairs, while classicists including Joy Connolly at New York University raised significant objections to the authors' treatment of women and their idealized portrayal of ancient Athens.
Hanson worked full-time as an orchard and vineyard grower from 1980 to 1984 before joining California State University, Fresno. His agricultural experience directly shaped his scholarship: his PhD thesis argued that the damage Greek warfare caused to farmland was vastly overestimated, and his book The Other Greeks contended that small family farmers, not aristocrats or philosophers, were the true builders of Greek democracy.