Neither the past nor the present can be reduced to a simple morality play with unambiguous heroes and villains. This false and superficial understanding of human nature and the human condition has convinced many that American power and decency are, or ought to be, unassailable, and that the continued application of technology will forever sustain [...]
When he retired from public life in 1817, James Madison turned his full attention to averting a demographic catastrophe. He foresaw a time when a majority of the population would be “without land or other equivalent property and without the means or hope of acquiring it.” I. During his presidency, Thomas Jefferson struggled to [...]
"The Blithedale Romance" conveys Nathaniel Hawthorne’s disillusionment with Brook Farm, Transcendentalism, reform movements, and the quest for individual and social perfection. I. Published in 1852, The Blithedale Romance offers Nathaniel Hawthorne’s most trenchant criticism of America.[i] Unlike his more optimistic contemporaries who imagined the advance toward individual and social perfection in the United States, Hawthorne [...]
The debate over whether the United States ought to have used the bomb against Japan is complicated and vexing. Did the United States have to drop atomic bombs on Japan to win the war? Should the United States have done so, even if military necessity dictated? I. The Pacific War German surrender on May 8, [...]
Mercantilism was an attempt to fashion a national economy at the same time that the so-called New Monarchs throughout parts of Western Europe were attempting to construct the institutions of the modern national state. I. The Historical Background Designed to effect a favorable balance of trade, Donald Trump’s economic policies constitute the revival of mercantilism.[i] [...]
More and more Americans, all of them convinced that their side is losing, try to rig the game in their favor. No longer willing to play fair, they want only to win. Born on October 4, 1809 and orphaned at the age of twelve, Robert Cumming Schenck overcame his early difficulties to earn a bachelor’s [...]
The most important element in European foreign relations throughout the 1920s and during the early 1930s was the desire at all costs to avoid another war. There was among European statesmen a widespread conviction that another war would be infinitely more destructive than the Great War had been, and any alternative seemed preferable. 1. Hitler's [...]
The resort to violence has become the characteristic American response to a world that seems to many to lie beyond their control. Almost from the beginning, violence wrote itself into the American story. Violence seems now to be inscribing itself onto the American soul. Although the story has disappeared from the news cycle, Luigi Mangione’s [...]
With his bold pronouncement in the Dred Scott decision that Congress had no jurisdiction over the territories, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney hoped to preempt all political discussion and debate. But he was sadly disappointed, for his majority opinion itself became the focus of a new, and ever more vicious, round of political battles as [...]
Professional historians have no special expertise. In the study of the past, there is no difference between a professional and an amateur historian. If they put their minds to the task, even untutored undergraduates might discover a more profound truth about the past than their learned professor, the limits of their knowledge notwithstanding. Historians All! [...]
Human beings have an emotional and psychological need to convert history into a science, for we have longed to have life and the world make sense. Yet, there are no general laws of history that can give precise measurement to human thought or action. There is for historians only the intelligible disorder of life, the [...]
The tiresome cant about the work ethic notwithstanding, Americans do not celebrate, or even recognize, the dignity of labor. Although they profess to disdain both the idle rich and the idle poor, they do not at the same time esteem those who must work for a living, even as most count themselves among that number. [...]
We are in the midst of a revolution. To be sure, there has been only sporadic violence and chaos in the streets. But there is more sustained violence and chaos in the minds and souls of many Americans, which is where the revolution is taking place. A gradual change, imperceptible at first although still unmistakable, [...]
I see in the resurgence of radical nationalism one of the principle threats to the United States and the world. Nationalism serves the needs and interests of the tribe at the expense, and often to the detriment, of everyone else. I. In 1992 Francis Fukuyama announced the end of History.[i] (The capitalization is essential to [...]