Christmas memories reflect the senses. We recall what and who we saw: parents and siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, many of whom are no longer with us and gives the season a tint of melancholy. We think of family gatherings, church services, the long drives home and back, a lovely meeting or [...]
The pursuit of ideological history always ends with the installation of a new elite, a new ruling class, a new set of exploiters. Instead, historians should practice good history and humane learning, avoid the temptations of ideology and “relevance,” and defend the universities. In 1969, the American Historical Association broke down into hostile wings, one [...]
There is a Tory tradition in America that runs against the grain of establishment Liberalism, embracing home, hearth, community, family, church, nature, and the moral realities of everyday life, and opposed to individualism, unlimited free markets, libertarianism, secularism, and the rootless loneliness of global modernity. This tradition comes from within America, not without. One day [...]
Sherrard Billings, one of the three founders of Groton School—and the American Mr. Chips—did his part to develop good and wise habits among the “Grotties.” Through his own life of suffering, he taught them to how to live, pursue the truth, love the good, and pass on wisdom. The Groton School The New [...]
Franklin Pierce’s suspicions reflected a tension within the antebellum Democratic Party in relation to slavery—how can we reconcile an advocacy of democratic decision-making with the existence of transcendent moral values, the Constitution with the Bible? On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which [...]
Thomas Gold Appleton was Boston’s Bohemian Tory, the merry wit of the “Athens of America.” He evinced a joyful Tory sensibility that disdained class consciousness, rejected the conception of liberty as the absence of restraint, critiqued fashionable ideas of equality and democracy, and believed the best life was loyalty to people and places. In the [...]
Historiography is not an exchange in the marketplace but a fight on the battlefield. It has a particular point of view on the past and punishes opponents; it is power politics masked as tolerant neutrality. The Left—like those behind the 1619 Project—understand the stakes and are fighting to maintain their legitimacy. It is time the Right [...]
Richard Henry Dana, Sr. was acutely conscious that he was a man out-of-step with the antebellum ethos, an American High Tory in an era of rising democracy. Yet Dana was not some grouchy obsolete curmudgeon, and his withering critiques of America often hit their mark, exposing the weaknesses of liberty, democracy, and equality and bullishly [...]
Richard Henry Dana Sr.’s career followed a trajectory from romantic ardor, to disillusionment, to an embrace of traditionalism and social order. His life demonstrates that New England bore a rich Tory counter tradition of law and letters, not a monoculture of Whig and Republican industrialists, social reformers, and transcendentalist dreamers. Lucretia Mott listened with horror. [...]
President Warren G. Harding “died twice, for there was his physical death, and then the death of his reputation.” But in reality, he was a man of achievement, and his two-and-a-half years in office boasted more accomplishments than other presidents have achieved in four. The revisionist scholarship of the past several decades has slowly seeped [...]
As the clock struck midnight to begin 2020, talk of a new “Roaring Twenties” began in earnest. This portends a wave of retrospectives, historical, fictional, and sensational. One of these will inevitably be Prohibition, the outlawing of the “manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors” or their import/export into the United States and its territories. [...]
Stephen Douglas’s faith that democratic self-government on the American frontier would create a spontaneous order of lawful and virtuous communities, especially in the face of divisive issues like slavery, was disastrously misplaced and played a significant role in starting the Civil War. The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed 165 years ago this past spring, and as cannons [...]
Anne Hutchinson bewitches most college students. When analyzing her trial transcripts, with her clever and sarcastic repartee with Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop and the Puritan ministers, they come to admire her greatly. Whiggishness creeps into their interpretation of her words and actions, seeing her as a harbinger of contemporary liberty. They believe that the [...]
James Henry Stark was a historian and defender of the Loyalists in an age of high reverence for the American Revolution. Stark’s unhappiness at the public presentation and textbook renderings of the Revolution seethed for years, until finally in 1910 he published “Loyalists of Massachusetts” to settle the debate. In March 1910, the wealthy Boston [...]