N.B. This is a piece I wrote in the early 1990s. I had forgotten completely about it until I came across it by accident today (Wednesday, August 22). It was my first attempt at a dissertation proposal, and I wrote it for one of my favorite graduate school professors, Dr. Russell Hanson. He probably doesn’t remember me, [...]
Based around a loose alliance of similarly-minded persons, conservatism sought to defend the Platonic good, true, and beautiful in the second half of the twentieth century, believing it necessary to promote a proper anthropology of the human person. More of a way of thinking, a set of guiding principles, or a habit of being than [...]
In the opening to his lengthy 1939 academic lecture to the University of St. Andrews, Professor J.R.R. Tolkien warned that those who entered myth did so at great peril to themselves and to the very realm of myth itself. That realm, Tolkien stated, is wide and deep and high and filled with many things: [...]
Happily, a thing of beauty showed up in my mail (real, tangible mail; not email) last week—Issue 1 of Volume 1 of a new journal, Anamnesis. Subtitled “A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Places, and Divine Things,” the journal features penetrating and intelligent articles by James Matthew Wilson and Ted McAllister and book reviews [...]
Huddled in a room at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, a group of academics listened to the last of several presenters, Frederick Jackson Turner, read his paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward,” the young [...]
One of my favorite things in life is to arrive at a symphony performance early. How amazing is it to watch the individual members of the orchestra take their respective seats and begin tuning their individual instruments. Each person does just this without command or direction. Each, however, knows her or his place, and each [...]
Since 1991, a new conception of Indian-white relations, known as the “middle ground,” has slowly emerged in Indian and western American historiography, challenging the old and New Western History and Indian history paradigms. The relations between Native Americans and white settlers—the middle ground—served as a gigantic trade zone in which culture became the economic goods [...]
In the American tradition, the idea of secession—or, more politely and with less emotional and tainted baggage, disunion—runs very deep. If the soul was once the Constitution, America’s body is nearly corrupt beyond redemption, would it not be best to find a healthy body for the soul to thrive? I think those of us who [...]
The colonies were “not only under different governors, but [had] different forms of government, different laws, different interests, and some of them different religious persuasions and different manners,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a British audience in 1760. Ethnicity, religion, geography, economic systems, political systems, and degrees of freedom and servitude divided the population against itself. [...]
One may find four fundamental tenets to republicanism rightly understood. First, for a society to be effective, men must behave virtuously. Second, men must use the gifts that nature or God has bestowed upon them. Typically, republican thinkers believed the best economic activity for man was agricultural. Third, republicans must be independent and armed, willing [...]
As we celebrate the 236th anniversary of the passage of the Declaration of Independence (the signing would have to wait until August 2, 1776), it’s very much worth remembering what form of government the Founders hoped to establish in America. We were founded unquestionably as a Republic with the writing and passages of the Articles [...]
BBT, English Electric. Forthcoming, September 3, 2012 An Interview with Greg Spawton We’re in the middle of perhaps the largest revival of progressive rock—that form of rock music which pursues the artistic and the mythic—since the genre became somewhat suspect as overblown and over-the-top in the second half of the 1970s with the [...]
Though deeply flawed as a person, Crazy Horse’s struggle was the fight of an Imaginative Conservative as he defended tradition, home, and family against nationalism, militarism, and progressivism. Our whole Indian policy is a system of mismanagement, and in many parts one of gigantic abuse. —The Nation, January 1867. With the end of the Civil War [...]
A huge “thank you” to the members of APL for inviting me to speak this morning. A special thanks to Mike Federici for chairing and to the other panel members. I’ve been corresponding with Dan McCarthy and Mike Church for several years now, but this is the first time we’ve ever actually encountered one another [...]