The Thoroughgood House (c. 1636) Southeast Virginia is a region rich in history, from the earliest colonial times to today’s modern military. Cape Henry welcomes visitors today, just as it did the Virginia Company colonists in 1607, just before they settled at Jamestown. First Landing State Park commemorates where the colonists first [...]
If you ask those who attended the debate between Sohrab Ahmari and David French at Catholic University who won the encounter, you will get different answers. However, most would agree that the packed event moderated by New York Times writer Ross Douthat did not get to the core of the matter. If you ask [...]
The U.S. Constitution is important, and great, precisely because it recognizes that people and their rights are social by nature, and must remain rooted in their communities if we are to enjoy the benefits of ordered liberty under the rule of law. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity [...]
September 17 is Constitutional Day. The conservative establishment will undoubtedly write platitudes to the Constitution, thus creating the illusion that our government still abides by it. It is true that Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the Constitution was the best-crafted document in the world. But that document crafted by the Founding Fathers and eulogized [...]
This summer saw the resolutions of two high-profile civil lawsuits involving accusations of defamation and libel against two pillars of the media-academic complex. In the suit against hyper-liberal Oberlin College, Ohio state jurors rendered a judgment against their neighbor, the college. In the other case, a lawsuit against The Washington Post, the federal district-court [...]
Prudence takes into account a deeper wisdom about the human condition than can be gleaned from a simple cost-benefit analysis. It understands that human communities are not merely about justice and the Gross Domestic Product, but about love. And sacrificial love doesn’t hesitate to rush in even against the worst odds. Last week I [...]
To introduce a Bill of Rights for the protection of states’ legislative powers was to protect expressly the rights of the people from intrusion by the general government into their liberty. Unfortunately, initial fears about the reach of federal power and the erosion of state sovereignty have come true. A recurrent theme during 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 [...]
I like the idea of celebrating “homo faber”—man the maker or worker. Work is something that is part of our dignity, a triumph of the human spirit. The celebration of work is something desperately needed in our culture today. “Why are we celebrating Labor Day? You don’t belong to a labor union,” one of [...]
For nearly fifty years, we have taught American children that the three greatest determinants in history are race, class, and gender. Virtue is scoffed at; “Great Men” are mocked; and free will is ignored. Should we be shocked—do we even have the right to be shocked—that our press, our culture, and our educators are obsessed [...]
The constitutional inheritance is not merely a gift to be expended or consumed; it is a responsibility to be stewarded. This sense of intergenerational obligation—debts to the past and future—is the most solid and powerful grounding for originalism and respect for constitutional form. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the [...]
George Kennan was—and remains—an important, even compelling, figure in the early history of the Cold War. But these selections from his voluminous and often overwrought diaries reveal him to have been something other than what this honest, if not always moderate, this calm, but not always cool, and detached professional diplomat took himself to [...]
Will we have a recession in the next year or so? I don’t know. As an old joke has it—one that I’ve seen several times in the last week or so—many were those smart enough to have predicted seven of the last three recessions. My question, moral rather than strictly predictive, is whether we [...]
The central moral issue regarding both the atomic bomb and fire-bombings of cities is whether or not civilians play a key role in a ‘total war.’ When an entire society is mobilized for war, who is making the war possible through production of weapons and materials? What’s the line between combatant and non-combatant? One of [...]