Gerald R. Ford took office at a time when “we didn’t need to look into the future but assure ourselves we had one.” And though biographer Richard Norton Smith argues that Ford was not a visionary, he did recognize the “long-term consequences of a public sector growing faster than the private economy that sustained it.” [...]
Because of the extraordinary valor shown by so many young men on that distant beach, America stood singular and tall in the saddle. It was her finest hour and for that at least we must be grateful. General Mark W. Clark, whose Fifth Army led the capture of Rome in June of 1944, was the [...]
Shut your eyes as you listen to “Scheherazade,” and the mind fills with vivid images: a turbulent ocean, eighteenth-century clipper ships with billowing sails, sailors and dashing sea captains saving the day. Musical colors and textures alert you, seduce you: the booming, ominous tones from the brass section (a tyrannizing Sultan) and the sweetest, most delicate violin [...]
To Andrew Carnegie, equality meant a way of being, a condition that shaped the soul of the individual and thereby the soul of a people or nation. Equality not only unleashed the energy of the American people so that they would become the most prosperous in the world, but it shaped their moral condition, it [...]
Christopher Dawson radically revises our sense of the continuity of Western culture. For the ordinary educated consciousness, what happened in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman order tends to be a blank page labelled “the dark ages.” But as Dawson makes clear, there were heroic continuities, an enormous effort on the part of [...]
John Randolph of Roanoke, one of the great exponents of the Southern political tradition, knew that what was proper to any state government was the preservation of the received order. The duty of the citizen of the commonwealth was to resist any legislative or constitutional changes to the received order, and to grant a broad [...]
The erosion of history is the first necessary step to the left’s transformation of the foundations of culture and society—a transformation that sees an ahistorical all-powerful government replacing all other traditional civic institutions. A recent report of the National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed a dramatic fall in history test scores among eighth graders. Given [...]
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, [...]
We did not discard most of the image of reality from the Middle Ages. The lovely whole image was smashed like stained glass under the hammer of zealots, but later people recovered fragments and used them to create the world in which we live. C.S. Lewis wrote a book of profound scholarship, The Discarded Image, [...]
The Medieval Church culturally unified Christendom through a common language, Latin, and a common liturgy, tying men together with other men of their own time, but also with the whole communion of saints. Petrarch, ca. 1350, first employed the term “Medieval” to argue that his time (ca. 1350) had advanced beyond the so-called “dark ages.” [...]
Orestes Brownson so esteemed New England people, customs, and institutions that they dominated his writings and fit at the heart of his political ideas. The danger of majoritarian tyranny hangs over republics. The dilemma of constituting a virtuous republic while also restricting interests, sects, and factions’ use of unchecked political power possessed eighteenth century American [...]
Seashore towns once played the same conservative role as American farms did, but by the end of the twentieth century, man took to coercing nature in order to protect his ocean playground. The Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of the United States serve as a home to the Union’s great cities and to a majority of [...]
Historical awareness can deliver us from both crushing despair and sophomoric narcissism just by placing our own situation in the context of broader human experience. Scholar Allan Bloom famously wrote, “Failure to read good books… strengthens our most fatal tendency—the belief that here and now is all there is.”[1] “Our most fatal tendency”... given the [...]
The indomitable Jane Austen has no love for “Bloody” Mary, but it’s intriguing and amusing that she sees her in the light, or should we say the shadow, of “Bloody” Bess, who would be her successor. There is no denying Jane Austen’s status as one of the greatest novelists of all time. Her works are [...]