Those young men did not die at Normandy to establish an American empire. Instead, for perhaps the only time in history, soldiers came to fight and to die to liberate others and to save a civilization from tyranny. It was an act of magnanimity, of selflessness, for which all the European victims of the Nazis [...]
Mahler’s Second Symphony was an attempt to confront the shock of mortality, to bring both composer and audience face to face with their own triviality and inconsequence. At the same time, the fearful image of the cavernous void presented Mahler with an opportunity, not to find, but to create meaning amid an otherwise purposeless existence. [...]
I. Preliminary Observations A knowledge of history provides a decent understanding of human nature, well-wrought standards of judgment, and the perspective necessary to make vital comparisons with the past that bring the present into sharper focus. In recent years, academics, journalists, and politicians have sounded alarms to signal mounting threats to democracy. I take such [...]
By the early decades of the twentieth century, at the very moment when physicists were dismantling formerly irrefutable truths about nature and the universe, science had become the foundation of the American faith in stability, order, and progress. Darwinian science had confirmed that the advent of the United States marked the apex of human evolution. [...]
Ridley Scott’s film is a vast oversimplification of a complex historical reality. Therein lies the danger. Like a mind-altering drug, the film provides a convenient shortcut that saves the audience the time and trouble of thinking for themselves. Filmgoers, of course, need not become experts in Napoleonic history. But Scott might have done more to [...]
No episode in the American past is more susceptible to such manipulation—manipulation rather than debate—than the Civil War. On the historical question permit me to be blunt and unequivocal. There can be no doubt that slavery was central to all that divided the northern and the southern states, and that slavery was ultimately responsible for [...]
The irony of Jefferson's conception of a republican future for the United States was that the establishment and maintenance of a simple, peaceful, agrarian republic required an aggressive foreign policy that virtually ensured conflict with other peoples and nations. I. Like most of his contemporaries, Thomas Jefferson believed that republican government was, at best, fragile [...]
Was the fall of Rome suicide or murder? Did the Germanic tribes walk over a corpse or did they contribute to its demise? I. Continuing for more than 200 years, from approximately 27 B.C. to A.D. 180, the Pax Romana was among the most stable, prosperous, and peaceful periods in history—certainly in the history of [...]
Nearly seventy years after the publication of Romano Guardini's "The End of the Modern World," the rot has advanced too far to entertain any serious prospect of restoring a Christian social order in which, as Guardini insisted, “faith will maintain itself against animosity and danger” and “man’s obedience to God will assert itself with a [...]
Russian warlord Yevgeny Prigozhin, the the head of the Wagner Group, advanced on Moscow when the government refused to address his criticisms of the war effort in Ukraine. There is an obscure episode in Russian history that provides a revealing, albeit imperfect, analogue to this recent event: the so-called Kornilov Affair of 1917. For twenty-four [...]
Propelled by delusions and united by hatred, growing numbers of Americans believe that political violence is justified, necessary, and even at times desirable. If we no longer can, or care to, adhere to the dictates of civility and reason, then we will have surrendered control of our destiny and will become the authors of our [...]
Literary scholars have long interpreted “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” as a fable of populism, but it is more than that: It is a celebration of consumer culture as the the very meaning of America, this bright and shining land where men and women are happy to deceive themselves into believing a fairy tale, which, [...]
The Modern Jazz Quartet rebelled against convention. To the extent that it was possible to do so, they came to live musically and socially in a world of their own making. That act of independence and creativity, at once defiant and healing, was the substance of their protest. I. One afternoon a few weeks ago, [...]
Historical consciousness and the attendant self-knowledge show what man has become, what he has made of himself, not only through his deeds but also, and more importantly, through the contemplation of what he has been. Together these insights potentially constitute the foundation of a new humanism, encouraging us to turn backward and inward rather than [...]