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 [...]
We are lesser people for the disappearance of our architectural heritage. If Edmund Burke was correct that “to make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely,” then historical preservation takes on the same importance as land conservation. Both are inheritances to be held against the bulldozers of economic development. Salem Depot [...]
Sentimentalism—the rule of individualistic emotion—ends by destroying not only the good and beautiful emotions of the individual, but also the individual himself and the society in which he lives. In the late 1980s I was a minister in the Church of England, when the entire denomination was embroiled in a debate about women’s ordination. Much [...]
The essence of America isn't characterized by four centuries of racial subjugation but by the 247-year-long persistent and often heroic struggle by Americans of every race and creed to live up to our highest ideals. This ideal continues to inspire countless individuals, both domestically and internationally. Juneteenth stands as a symbol of this enduring inspiration. [...]
Jon Lauck's "The Good Country" is an extraordinary book, a celebration of the good, the true, and the beautiful as well as a revelation of the deepest flaws in American history. One comes away from reading it with immense energy to follow its creatively conservative paths. The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, [...]
If we approach history through the lens of a twenty-first-century secular liberal, we will necessarily see history as a series of events that conform to the labels and forms of secular liberalism. We will be limited in what we see in the past and, thus, necessarily limit what we can propose for the future. In [...]
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 [...]