One of the perennial problems in nineteenth-century American history was the so-called “Indian Problem.” And, a problem it was. American whites either idealized or demonized the Indians, usually depending on how far one lived from native tribes. The natives—understandably—did everything possible to protect their own hearth and homes, and many American reluctantly respected them for [...]
Father Thomas Shelley's avuncular presence, his inquiring mind, and his priestly solicitude for me and for so many around me was a potent witness of the goodness of old Catholic New York. Though he always wore clerical clothing in professional situations, there was never anything “clerical” about him, if understood as a sense of superiority [...]
God is a person, not just an idea. When he raises up saints, he does so not to have an ideologue to debate the doubters, but in order to have someone to carry on the work of Christ, who not only preached, but was a living example of what he preached. God raised up Saint [...]
There is only one standard by which any epoch can be fairly judged: In view of its own peculiar circumstances, to what extent did it allow for the development of human dignity? The medieval achievement was so magnificent that it stands with the loftiest moments of human history. The most complete ordering of medieval life [...]
Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee Prophet and brother of the warrior Tecumseh, was an alcoholic and a failure prior to a profound religious experience in the spring of 1805. The Creator, he claimed, commanded him to preach to all Indians, regardless of tribe. They were to abandon white ways and re-adopt traditional native practices. Under the direction [...]
Medieval civilization proved the Bible’s power to incorporate all the tales of the pagans. It was never the goal of Augustine, Jerome, and their successors to save classical literature, although that resulted from their efforts. What they wanted to know was Christ in the Scriptures. Despite the current enthusiasm over classical education, there is little [...]
Avellina Balestri's "Saplings of Sherwood" has as its setting the area surrounding Sherwood Forest during the years when Robin Locksley and Maid Marian were children and later teenagers. This is a truly masterful piece of storytelling and as near to the real or legendary Robin Hood as any of us is likely to get. There [...]
Unsure of Indian country in the West, Joseph Smith headed back east, purchasing land on the Mississippi River, north of Quincy, Illinois, in 1839, where the Mormons did exceedingly well. By 1844, the settlement of Nauvoo had become the largest town in Illinois with more than 10,000 people. Smith was at the pinnacle of his [...]
No one exhibited Boston’s warm Tory strain better than one of its greatest “quixotic souls,” Helen Choate Bell, who reveled in Boston’s habits and customs, protected its cultural reputation with inquisitorial zeal, and faced the world with impish glee. Helen Choate Bell In the late nineteenth century, a horse-drawn carriage carrying Oliver Wendell [...]
Mountain men carved paths into the western wilderness, forging the way for American merchants and settlers who also looked to the West for economic sustenance and personal autonomy. In popular and literary mythology, the figure of the mountain man became a symbol of the independence and power of the individual American in the West. White [...]
Whatever its own stated purposes and desired ends, the French Revolution never sought to better the condition of humanity or even of France. The Revolutionaries, as Edmund Burke stressed, were radicals, seeking civil war not only in France, but also in all of Christendom. The grand Anglo-Irish statesman, Edmund Burke (1729-1797) spent much of his [...]
Despite America’s flawed past, despite the fact that previous generations honored some questionable individuals, our history did not unfold solely within the grid of racism. New England pioneers possessed high ideals of justly ordered freedom, and they carried those ideals west, and in “The Pioneers,” David McCullough is on nothing less than a civilizational mission [...]
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 [...]
In his "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard," Thomas Gray wrote a great, sometimes mystifying and troubling poem, and, where the pastoral impulse is concerned, an admonishing one. No one born after the French Revolution, said the durable Talleyrand, can know how sweet life can be. This sentiment was quoted in his book about Metternich by [...]