Walter Fischer, Ph.D.
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About
Ph.D. in International Relations. Retired U.S. Senate adviser on foreign policy, national defense, terrorism, and financial crimes.
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Recent Activity
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Answered a Question in History
One lasting effect of the Cold War is the proliferation of competing centers of power on the world stage. The end of the Cold War meant the end of an era not just in terms of the standoff between... -
Answered a Question in An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” ends with the revelation that Peyton Fahrquhar is dead, victim of the hanging to which he had been condemned by the Union forces... -
Answered a Question in Secession and Civil War
The American Civil War lasted almost exactly four years, extending from the Confederacy’s firing on Fort Sumter in South Carolina on April 12, 1861 and ending with the South’s surrender on April 9,... -
Answered a Question in The Vietnam War
The American war in Vietnam had a long history, beginning with the Japanese occupation of Southeast Asia and extending through the fall of Saigon in 1975. In between, emotions among the American... -
Answered a Question in Ordinary People
In Judith Guest’s 1976 novel Ordinary People, it is revealed during the course of the story that Buck drowned when the boat in which he and Conrad had been sailing capsized. Ordinary People is the... -
Answered a Question in History
Policies and actions taken by the United States during the Cold War, which ran from the end of World War II to the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, included... -
Answered a Question in Letter from Birmingham City Jail
Unlike his more famous and oft-quoted “I Have a Dream” address, King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” written in an impromptu fashion while imprisoned for his participation in a civil rights... -
Answered a Question in History
The Renaissance, running from the late fourteenth century to the seventeenth century, is considered one of the most important periods in European history. Following the travails of the Middle Ages,... -
Answered a Question in The Diary of a Young Girl
Otto Frank and his coconspirators in hiding from the Germans believe that they have the space and provisions to conceal one or two more people. Following a deliberative process, these men decide to... -
Answered a Question in The Other Wes Moore
Army veteran, scholar, and author Wes Moore understood that his life could have taken a very different direction than it ultimately did. A Rhodes Scholar who served in Afghanistan and succeeded in... -
Answered a Question in A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raison in the Sun is about an African American family struggling to exist in a society that discriminates against them solely on the basis of the color of their skin.... -
Answered a Question in All My Sons
In Arthur Miller’s play All My Sons, Joe Keller feels guilty because he carries within himself the knowledge that he was responsible for the deaths of twenty-one pilots during World War II, the... -
Answered a Question in A Tale of Two Cities
There are two main ideas in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. The first idea, or theme, is one of redemption and resurrection. The second involves the failure of revolutionary movements to... -
Answered a Question in Animal Farm
In George Orwell’s allegorical tale of revolution among the animals on a farm, Animal Farm, sleeping in a bed with a mattress is considered a symbol of higher status at odds with the egalitarian... -
Answered a Question in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The toxic environment at the core of Edward Albee's 1962 play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is established and explored almost immediately. The first scene opens with the two protagonists,... -
Answered a Question in History
American military leaders, especially those in uniform (as opposed to their civilian leaders, beginning with the President and the Secretary of Defense) are regularly accused by critics of planning... -
Answered a Question in Animal Farm
The main theme of George Orwell’s Animal Farm is the usurpation of political power by ruthless leaders. The twentieth century saw multiple legitimate revolutionary movements fall victim to... -
Answered a Question in The Cold War
On December 6, 1956, the national water polo teams of the Soviet Union and Hungary faced off in the Olympics in Melbourne, Australia. By the end of the match, the water in the swimming pool was red... -
Answered a Question in When the Emperor Was Divine
In the chapter titled “In a Stranger’s Backyard,” Julie Otsuka describes the family’s return home after their prolonged, enforced stay at the internment camp. Like thousands of other families of... -
Answered a Question in Maus
The theme of mental illness is prevalent throughout Maus I: My Father Bleeds History, Art Spiegelman’s story of his family’s experiences before, during, and after the Holocaust. An emphasis should... -
Answered a Question in History
The risks taken by the leaders of the civil rights movement who engaged in what was called civil disobedience were the same as for those members of the movement who worked in the shadows:... -
Answered a Question in Frederick Douglass
What motivated Frederick Douglass was his infinite belief in the promise of America and his equally strong belief in the impossibility of the America envisioned by the Founders as long as racial... -
Answered a Question in Night
Moishe the Beadle’s fate is left unresolved. Moishe the Beadle serves both as the seminal warning of impending doom and as the central theological presence in the young narrator’s life. Holocaust... -
Answered a Question in History
The contrasts between life in East and West Germany could not have been stark, nor more noticeable to the populations on each side of the Cold War-era divide given their obvious proximity to one... -
Answered a Question in Tony Harrison
Those who followed the violent and irreparable disintegration of the once cosmopolitan state of Yugoslavia understood that the country’s demise had a certain amount of inevitability. Observers had... -
Answered a Question in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
In chapter 20 of Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the author describes a conference in September 1966, fifteen years after Henrietta’s death from cervical cancer,... -
Answered a Question in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
In Rebecca Skloot’s 2010 study of the use and abuse of an African American cancer patient’s cells for research purposes without the knowledge or consent of the patient or the patient’s family,... -
Answered a Question in History
When the era of the British Raj officially ended with India given its independence on August 17, 1947, the problem of maintaining India’s unity, such as it was on that date, became increasingly... -
Answered a Question in Farewell To Manzanar
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir of her and her family’s years in an internment camp during World War II provides important insight into the Japanese American experience and the role of racism in... -
Answered a Question in The Pedestrian
The late science-fiction writer Ray Bradbury had a decidedly negative perception of the evolution of humanity as he projected it into the not-so-distant future. This perception was caused in no... -
Answered a Question in To Kill a Mockingbird
In Harper Lee’s classic of American literature To Kill a Mockingbird, young narrator Jean Louise “Scout” Finch is what was then called “a tomboy,” a girl who enjoyed activities considered more... -
Answered a Question in Contents of the Dead Man's Pocket
Jack Finney’s short story “Contents of the Dead Man’s Pockets” contains several allusions. Allusions in a literary context are defined as references, usually fleeting or indirect, to something—a... -
Answered a Question in Causes of World War II
Each of the events—the fall of France, Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—occurred sequentially in a manner that incrementally pushed the United States... -
Answered a Question in History
Politics were heavily influenced by foreign policy issues during the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. The Vietnam War was one of the defining events—if one can refer to a military struggle that... -
Answered a Question in The Louisiana Purchase
The consequences of the Louisiana Purchase were the enormous growth of the area controlled by the newly established United States of America, control over the economically and militarily important... -
Answered a Question in History
Consistent with the prejudices and stereotypes that defined relationships between ethnicities within the Armed Forces of the United States (this extended to Asian Americans as well), African... -
Answered a Question in A Christmas Carol
Charles Dickens, writing in England in the nineteenth century, would be no stranger to effects of atmosphere on mood. A Christmas Carol is an obvious example of how atmosphere can influence mood in... -
Answered a Question in Literature
A paragraph about the late Georgia O’Keeffe could draw from a large number of sources, including the website maintained by the Georgia O’Keeffe museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. With such a wealth of... -
Answered a Question in The Outsiders
The blue Mustang in S.E. Hinton’s story of boys from the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum competing, often violently, with their more well-to-do counterparts from the more financially... -
Answered a Question in Bob Dylan
The tone of Bob Dylan’s 1962 song “Blowin’ in the Wind,” which was released in 1963 but recorded the previous year, is one of frustration and disappointment. Dylan was an extraordinarily... -
Answered a Question in The Black Cat
There is no dialogue in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat.” Dialogue consists of verbal interaction between two or more people. The narrator of Poe’s story sits alone in a prison cell,... -
Answered a Question in History
American entry into the First World War marked a radical transformation in the nation’s approach to world affairs. While the extent to which notions of isolationism dominated common perceptions... -
Answered a Question in Sonny's Blues
James Baldwin titled his short story “Sonny’s Blues” because this title appropriately captures the dual meaning the author intended. Baldwin’s story is told in the first-person by the titular... -
Answered a Question in Slaughterhouse-Five
Chapter 1 of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is more of a prologue than a cold opening to the book. In this opening to his difficult-to-categorize but seriously surrealistic novel, Vonnegut... -
Answered a Question in Night
Sent to a new camp in Poland called Buna, a place the young Eliezer and his father find themselves the regular target of a sadistic Kapo, one of the Jewish prisoners appointed by the German prison... -
Answered a Question in History
“The City of Refuge” is a short story authored by a young African American physician named Rudolph Fisher. Fisher was a friend and confidant of Langston Hughes, a prominent member of Harlem’s... -
Answered a Question in In the Heat of the Night
The character of Bill Gillespie, chief of police in the fictional town of Wells, South Carolina, in John Ball’s 1965 novel In the Heat of the Night, is introduced in chapter 2. In the book’s... -
Answered a Question in The Most Dangerous Game
As “The Most Dangerous Game” begins, Rainsford is sailing down the South American coast with his companion, Whitney. The two engage in a philosophical discussion about the distinctions between... -
Answered a Question in The Fall of the House of Usher
From the opening of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” to its ending, there is no question that the physical structure, the titular “house,” and its surroundings is a... -
Answered a Question in A Christmas Carol
It could be suggested that there are multiple themes to Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Dickens’s story, of course, is about a miserly old businessman living a solitary life whose every...
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