Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, An Imperial Diadem challenges the dominant historical narratives about that war, a war which saved the institutions but buried the ideals of the Enlightenment. Now, three generations worth of accelerating change have brought us to a historical disruption point of the kind that rewrites the past to capture the future. In the battle for the future, might a classical liberal understanding of the war help revive the Enlightenment's forgotten ideals? Might it provide lessons for our times? That is the intention and hope of this book. Mark David Ledbetter is the author of the four volume work America's Forgotten History. Volume five is projected for publication in 2022