History: Modern History 
Essential
Areopagitica
By John Milton: "Milton’s famous defense of freedom of speech. It was a protest against Parliament’s ordinance to further restrict the freedom of print. Milton issued his oration in an unlicensed form and courageously put his own name, but not that of his printer, on the cover."
The Tide in the Affairs of Men
By Milton Friedman and Rose D. Friedman: "The aim of this brief essay is to present a hypothesis that a major change in social and economic policy is preceded by a shift in the climate of intellectual opinion. The intellectual tide is spread to the public by all manner of intellectual retailers: teachers and preachers, journalists in print and on television, pundits and politicians. "
Economic Freedom and Peace
"Since before the time of Thucydides, states have used wealth to acquire more territory and to dominate the affairs of their neighbors. Understanding the reasons that the powerful countries of today are less prone to dispute than their predecessors is critical to maintaining the peace and to extending its benefits more broadly."
The History of the Origins of Representative Government in Europe
By François Guizot: "Guizot reflects on the principles, goals, and institutions of representative government in Europe from the fifth to the reign of the Tudors in England."
Lectures on Modern History
By Lord Acton: "These are the lectures given by the great English classical liberal historian, Lord Acton, in the academic years 1899-1901 at Cambridge University. It is a survey of modern history from the rise of the modern nation state to the American Revolution. The book also contains his “Inaugural Lecture” of 1895."
Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of Our Time
By Ludwig von Mises: "Examines and compares prewar and postwar economic conditions and explicates Mises’s theory that each country’s prosperity supports rather than undercuts the prosperity of other countries."
Recommended
Crying Wolf: Are we all fascists now?
By Michael C. Moynihan: "To anyone that has attended a political demonstration, trawled a blog, or attended a Western university in the past half century, the scattershot use of 'fascist' will ring familiar. And almost as clichéd as accusing an ideological opponent of fascist sympathies is the accurate observation that such charges often demonstrate an utter lack of understanding of just what qualifies as fascist, other than 'someone I vehemently disagree with.'"
Everyone in Favor, Say Yargh!
By Joanna Weiss: "Long before they made their way into the workings of modern government, the democratic tenets we hold so dear were used to great effect on pirate ships. Checks and balances. Social insurance. Freedom of expression. So Leeson, an economics professor at George Mason University, will argue in his upcoming book, The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates."
The Lie About Where Che Lies
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa: "It is not surprising, of course, that Che Guevara's remains are a myth. Everything about this modern saint is a myth -- his love of justice, his romantic disposition, his goodness."
What FDR Had In Common With the Other Charismatic Collectivists of the 30s
By David Boaz: "When economic crisis hit — in Italy and Germany after World War I, in the United States with the Great Depression — the anti-liberals seized the opportunity, arguing that the market had failed and that the time for bold experimentation had arrived."
Alexis de Tocqueville
A site about the life and work of Alexis de Tocqueville, one of the great modern political thinkers and an inspiration to classical liberals ever since. This site gives detailed biographical information as well as images and text in English and in French.
Petraeus, the Surge & History
"Many have repeated the claim that Iraq is Vietnam all over again. History never repeats itself exactly, so no example is perfect. But the American surge in Iraq bears a striking and little-noted resemblance to the Germans' ill-fated offensive in the last year of World War I."
'Knowing' Industrial Pollution: Nuisance Law and the Power of Tradition in a Time of Rapid Economic Change, 1840 – 1864
Experience shows that Common Law and Private Property Rights can be an alternative to top-down regulation on air pollution. In this essay, Christine Meisner Rosen examines nuisance law "from the perspective of an environmental historian who is interested in how people made sense of industrial pollution problems in the past."
The Common Law: How it protects the environment
"The purpose of this PERC Policy Series paper is to show, by examining specific cases in American and English history, that strong legal traditions enabled ordinary citizens to protect their air, land, and water, often against politically potent parties."