Russia’s leaders are flawed, inclined toward violence, and covetous of power—but this doesn’t make them much different from the leaders of every other nation-state. On March 10, 2014, American ambassadors from across the globe descended on Washington for our annual conference: a few days to forget about the day-to-day hassles of running embassies and coping [...]
Automated and impersonal, American society, Andrew Lytle feared, was coming to be peopled by the rootless masses ensnared in dreary, routine, unimaginative, and irrelevant occupations—a society of interchangeable parts and interchangeable men. This condition was the very antithesis of the Christian economy. I. By the 1930s, Andrew Lytle thought the signs of impending disaster everywhere [...]
Relishing a challenge, the following is a snapshot in a thousand words of the full panorama of two thousand years of English history. I am currently writing a series for Crisis Magazine in which I put the great works of literature in the proverbial nutshell. The idea of the series is to distill and encapsulate [...]
I’m fascinated by time—its past, its present, its future, its moments, its transcendences. Time, as we’ve all experienced, moves quickly at points, and agonizingly slow at other points. There is something quite mystical about the nature of time and something truly mystical in the relationship of time to eternity. A few months ago, the history [...]
The War of 1812 remains one of America’s least understood wars. Beginning with its rather banal title, most histories dismiss it as simply the growing pains of the early republic. Yet, this is unfair not only to the men and women who waged the war, but it’s also dangerous if one wants to understand the [...]
America from the beginning encouraged a broad and generic religiosity, yet allowed for the free practice of specific religions. Indeed, the historic creeds were implanted, took root, and flowered in America. This has created a certain tension, in which the religions risk losing their identity in favor of a vague national consensus. Commentators have long [...]
History is full of surprises. One such surprise is the manner in which the secularist cataclysm of the French Revolution prompted a religious revival across the Channel in England. It was indeed ironic that the new spirit of absolute religious intolerance in France following that country’s Revolution of 1789 prompted a new spirit of relative [...]
We know where, when, and how the famous song "America" ("My Country, 'Tis of Thee") came to be written. But what led Samuel Francis Smith, a young Baptist divinity student, to choose the words he did to go with the tune in front of him? Why was a person in training for Baptist ministry writing [...]
Franklin Pierce’s suspicions reflected a tension within the antebellum Democratic Party in relation to slavery—how can we reconcile an advocacy of democratic decision-making with the existence of transcendent moral values, the Constitution with the Bible? On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which [...]
Always a liberal and never a leftist, historian Richard Hofstadter’s over-arching theme in explaining twentieth-century America was what he termed “status anxiety,” which seems to be an effort to explain too much with too little. Richard Hofstadter: Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Uncollected Essays, 1956-1965, edited by Sean Wilentz (1047 [...]
Valkyrie is a 2008 thriller film directed and co-produced by Bryan Singer and written by Christopher McQuarrie and Nathan Alexander. The film is set in Nazi Germany during World War II and depicts the 20 July plot in 1944 by German army officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler and to use the Operation Valkyrie national emergency [...]
Andrew Nelson Lytle—novelist, dramatist, essayist, and professor of literature—extolled the order of the family, which by the 1930s he thought all but spent, precisely because it was rooted in the very concept of divine order that the modern world had decried and rejected. As patriarchy deteriorated, as acceptance of divine supremacy vanished, the family languished, [...]
One of the most pernicious mistakes in thinking about history is to consider adjacent historical periods as diametrically opposed to each other and to paint an exaggerated contrast between them. In doing so, we fail to see the organic continuity of history, the way that periods and movements overlap and interact. The result is a [...]
Everything worth conserving is menaced in our generation. Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination. A friend of mine, whom we shall call Miss Worth, fell [...]