It is necessary for President Vladimir Putin to restore his previous and proper focus on what it means to be Russian in the twenty-first century. At the heart of this healthy focus is the absolute necessity of Russia separating herself psychologically from the Soviet Union. On January 27, 1945, advancing Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz concentration [...]
Thomas Gold Appleton was Boston’s Bohemian Tory, the merry wit of the “Athens of America.” He evinced a joyful Tory sensibility that disdained class consciousness, rejected the conception of liberty as the absence of restraint, critiqued fashionable ideas of equality and democracy, and believed the best life was loyalty to people and places. In the [...]
“Beware the Ides of March!” As it does every year, this March fifteenth affords us the opportunity to contemplate the recurrent patterns of history. Yet what exactly was the pattern exhibited on that infamous day? […]
Though rooted in a certain time and a certain place, elements of John Winthrop’s teachings are timeless, and, whether we agree with him completely or not, we should recognize him as an important and imaginative conservative of yesteryear. Between 1629 and 1640, roughly 21,000 Puritans (and servants) immigrated from England (especially East Anglia) to New [...]
Ancestry.com and 23andMe are brilliant modern genealogical tools. They are connected to various databases around the world, including the National Archives, and can fill in gaps of genealogical history. But genealogy is more than a collection of digitized documents and records; it is listening to stories at the dinner table, digging through dusty scrapbooks, and [...]
The “end” of the end of history is not necessarily something that we need fear or mourn. Rather, it is an affirmation of what many conservative thinkers have long recognized about human nature: that comfort and ease, however sweet, do not long satisfy; that above all we hope to be part of a story that [...]
In late January, the San Francisco Board of Education declared that schools named after such people as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, and even Dianne Feinstein would be renamed. They said that such people were problematic and had ties to a variety of racist incidents. […]
Having lost both their identity as a people and their assurance of a better future, Americans suffer a profound uncertainty and desperation from which they cannot easily free themselves and from which they may not soon recover. I. Americans like to think of their country as unique. For a time it was. Americans were the [...]
We need a culture in which the truly good figures of our past are not canceled because they did not talk in the same way as we do about moral and social issues. We also need a culture in which local and state figures are considered just as important as those on the national level. [...]
Not only was Francis Fukuyama wrong about China, but it’s beginning to appear that he was wrong about us as well. The obvious fact that China is not becoming more Madisonian is only half of the story. The other half is that the United States is threatening to become less Madisonian and much more like [...]
“The Heart of Culture” traces the success of Western education, rooted in the very nature of Western civilization as a historical “clash and combination” of Greek culture and Judeo-Christian religion. It is the perfect book for parents, teachers, and administrators who are dissatisfied with modern education but don’t know why. The Heart of Culture: A [...]
From the beginning of their friendship, Franklin D. Roosevelt could not see Joseph Stalin as anything other than an ally, an anti-imperialist and proto-democrat, representing all that was modern and rational and equalitarian. Robert Nisbet concludes that Roosevelt’s arrogant blindness was the key to Soviet mischief. World War II—especially the European theatre—intrigued Robert A. Nisbet [...]
Robert Nisbet was greatly influenced by his professor Frederick Teggart and his many ideas. Teggart was a brilliant scholar and historian, one of University of California Berkeley’s most successful lecturers, and “an impressive stretcher of minds.” “I have met no one since then who has approached him in range, diversity, and depth of knowledge,” Robert [...]
A society beset with historical amnesia is a dangerous one. History in the 21st-century academy has been warped into “social studies,” where the past is studied through the lenses of sociology and psychology. We conservatives need to promote a society that understands that studying the past as it happened is vital to the success of [...]