When we think of “the faith and the South” we tend to think of Protestantism in general, and perhaps the Southern Baptists in particular, especially in terms of the so-called Bible Belt. There is, however, much more to...
We see that the creation of one's own opinions is to a large degree a community affair. According to James Bryce, the individual has a powerful role in crafting a nation’s political discourse, but can only be involved in doing so if they act in concert with others....
Editor's Note: The following is the conclusion of Professor Forrest McDonald's 2002 address to the last class he taught as a regular member of the faculty at the University of Alabama—known as "The Speech." Dr. McDonald retired thereafter...
What George Washington and George Marshall have to say to us has to do most of all with the ethical claims of the virtue of duty. Teachers would ably fulfill their calling if they convey to their students their conviction that civil society is best understood and...
Forrest McDonald demonstrated that the historian above all must be a pragmatist who looks at the reality of the past as it was, who gets his hands dirty by putting in long hours of research, who makes sense of vast quantities of data, and who then communicates...
Standing with his father as they watched the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775, eight-year-old John Quincy Adams must have wondered in amazement at the bloody and brutal nobility of it all. And, what must he have thought...
The breaking waves dashed high
On a stern and rock-bound coast,
And the woods, against a stormy sky,
Their giant branches tost;
And the heavy night hung dark
The hills and water o'er,
When a band of exiles moored their bark
On the wild...
In a season of disharmony, discord, distrust, and disorder, it is often painful to stop, to pause, and to give oneself distance enough to consider what must be recognized as good, and true, and beautiful, even in what...
To a very great extent, it was the Anti-Federalists, through their rhetoric and writings, who kept alive the spirit of localism and salvaged the great ideal of limited government inherited from the Revolution...
The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America,...
The document entitled “To the Honorable the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, A Memorial and Remonstrance” is a jewel of republican rhetoric. Nor has this choice example of American eloquence gone without notice. And...
George Washington was acutely aware that he had become a legend in his time, a true myth, and he recognized that the presidency made possible the institutionalization of the role he had been playing. That is to say, he endowed the presidency with the capacity—and the awesome...
Thomas Jefferson’s glowing appraisal of the average person’s moral impulse and acceptance of Lockean social-compact theory as the best basis of an operative political philosophy naturally led him to another of his key political principles: federalism...
Asked...
Collected Letters of John Randolph of Roanoke to Dr. John Brockenbrough, 1812-1833, edited by Kenneth Shorey (157 pages, Transaction Books, 1988)
Planter, statesman, orator, and diplomat, John Randolph of Roanoke (1773-1833) stands out as...
James Iredell’s careful apologia for the American cause—a teaching which he developed in a series of essays and public letters written from 1773-1778—clearly contains a foreshadowing of what he thought should be in a constitution for the United States...
