Professional historians have no special expertise. In the study of the past, there is no difference between a professional and an amateur historian. If they put their minds to the task, even untutored undergraduates might discover a more profound truth about the past than their learned professor, the limits of their knowledge notwithstanding. Historians All! [...]
Could the Duhare of North America have been the descendants of Irish explorers who ventured across the Atlantic long before the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria set sail? Maybe it's the Amish in me, but there’s an ornery streak that delights in eccentric theories, provoking the establishment, undermining the accepted narrative, pondering alternative [...]
Constantino Brumidi’s fresco is less a deification of George Washington than it is a creative recording of his achievements and his legacy for our nation’s politicians. That the U.S. possesses its own rich history in art and boasts a series of internationally acclaimed painters is no surprise. Indeed, a walk through the Art Institute of [...]
The greatness of the American myth is that it is mostly real. Enough of the faux-conservatives, these woke rightists, judging America as not worth saving and smearing our heroes as tyrants or war criminals. On December 3, 2024, James Lindsay, rightish provocateur, revealed that he had “very lightly edited” “several thousand words straight out of” [...]
The creation of Thanksgiving was no uncontested process but a fight emerging from antebellum crises over slavery and American nationalism. In November 1859, a Washington, DC alderman from Capitol Hill violently opposed the mayor’s request to declare a Thanksgiving public holiday. By this point, annual celebrations had become traditional and twenty-five governors already proclaimed the [...]
Human beings have an emotional and psychological need to convert history into a science, for we have longed to have life and the world make sense. Yet, there are no general laws of history that can give precise measurement to human thought or action. There is for historians only the intelligible disorder of life, the [...]
Pioneering priests such as Frs. Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Joseph Projectus Machebeuf are unsung heroes of Christendom, but deserve to be recognized. From Nebraska, from Arkansas, Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein’d, All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern, Pioneers! O pioneers! —Walt Whitman [...]
In the name of God, amen. We whose names are under written… [h]aving undertaken for the Glory of God, and advancement of the christian [sic] faith, and the honour of our King and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia; do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in [...]
Is it too soon to appraise the revolutions of 1989? That year represented the end of an era whose passing few people would be disposed to mourn. On the other hand, history affords no clean breaks. Nine months after the Berlin Wall had been breached, my wife and I found ourselves living in Göttingen, an [...]
Orestes Brownson believed that there must reside a sanction for justice and order which cannot be found apart from religious principles. Without such sanctions, we fight the same battles in political season after political season under the various ideologies intending to make America great again; but only the standards of those “permanent things” taught by [...]
Historical consciousness is to civilized society what memory is to individual identity. Without memory there are no workable rules of conduct, no standard of justice, no basis for restraining passions, no sense of the connection between an action and its consequences. A culture without memory will necessarily be barbarous. I am delighted to be with [...]
The truth is that for all its failings, America has provided more opportunity, security, and freedom to a group of people more diverse than any other nation in history. It is not because America is systemically rotten; but because it is foundationally good. Justice for all calls for those foundations to be defended, not destroyed. [...]
Pope Gregory XVI believed that, even if it were true that immediate spiritual advantages might be gained by revolt, or by the introduction of liberal measures, the shock to the monarchical system involved by such changes would be disastrous to the Church and Society. Revolution and Papacy: 1769–1846, by E. E. Y. Hales (Cluny Media, [...]
There was a time, a far healthier time, when the heroism of those who defended Malta from the Islamic onslaught was lauded by the whole Christian world. Jean Parisot de Valette All saints are heroes, but not all heroes are saints. There are some who have made great sacrifices for Christendom while not [...]