Glenn Frank One of our great cultural temptations since the 1960s is to think of songsters as poets. Stephen Foster never claimed to be, nor did Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, or Oscar Hammerstein. Suddenly, in the 60s, the likes of Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, David Crosby and (slightly later) Bruce Springsteen moved up [...]
Brad Birzer was thinking, the other day, about intellectual refugees from Nazi Germany and other parts of Nazi-controlled Europe during the years leading up to and including World War II. He asked me if I knew Gerhart Niemeyer’s story. I told him that I do, from Gerhart’s son Paul’s loving and very competent biography of [...]
I came across this the other day, from the Washington Times: Kids flee football in light of NFL violence, Pop Warner participation plummeting. The author is Nathan Fenno, and I hasten to say that I am the last man in the world to wish to kill the messenger. His article is on the whole fair, although [...]
John Lukacs and Wendell Berry This is the best introduction to the historical craft of John Lukacs. History and the Human Condition does not replace the much longer Remembered Past, a wide-ranging selection of Lukacs’s works also published by ISI Books. But this work, a coda to the author’s career, contains just the right mixture of [...]
In the early 1980s, I became one of six men in the Western World who knew how to tie a bow tie, all by myself, and I did not know who the other five were. I ceased wearing them after a colleague said to me, “John, you look like a…Liberal!” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. had made [...]
I was out driving this morning, doing some errands. A car ahead of me was going about 30 in a 55 speed limit zone, and as usual I was annoyed. Going so slow, I was forced to look around. I saw businesses working, signs that told me where I was. A man who recently bought [...]
The Smart Take from the Strong: The Basketball Philosophy of Pete Carril by Pete Carril Bad shooters are always open.–Pete Carril Dr. Pete Carril is a bit of a snob. I emphasize the “Dr.” because last year Princeton, the school at which he coached basketball for twenty-nine years, awarded him the honorary degree, Doctor of Humanities. I [...]
A few days ago I decided to put together an anecdotal word-picture of what life was like in the United States in 1913, mostly to amuse my grandchildren. My grandfather Willson’s cousin Gertrude was keeping an occasional diary during that period, primarily to record the astonishing changes that seemed to be taking place in every [...]
Every so often, acts of horror and terror come together with days of repentance and fasting and prayer, and force us to consider how great, and how conditional, is God’s creation. February 13th & 14th were the 68th anniversary of one of the cruelest allied acts of World War II, which most Americans still consider [...]
The most recent one, from James Kurth, we at The Imaginative Conservative must take seriously. Dr. Kurth is a veteran teacher and writer, not about the ephemera of American politics (aren’t you sick to death of “pundits” and other self-important journalists?), but about serious matters of national defense, military and strategic affairs, international politics, always [...]
“The ideal classroom is a student driving an automobile with Russell Kirk in the passenger seat.” —Stephen Masty (I made that up, but it’s what he would say) The EarthBOX is a marvelous invention. In a small, controlled environment one can grow vegetables and flowers in great splendor with very little effort. It’s a plastic container equipped [...]
Last week, two of my Twitter friends (and friends of The Imaginative Conservative: @hencole and @Sir_Geechie) were happily discussing the 1965 Russell Kirk piece on Malcolm X; the one Winston graciously posted. After @henrole called it a birthday gift of sorts, @Sir_Geechie replied, “You know folks want narrative not knowledge.” I have found each of [...]
I was driving into our church parking lot the other day, thinking about a nice essay by Douglas Minson on the 79th anniversary of the repeal of Prohibition. I’m sure glad it happened about seven years before I was born. Anyway, it occurred to me that I had completed an anniversary just a few months [...]
The historian Michael Bellesiles tried to usher in the new millennium by claiming that guns were scarce in colonial America and even beyond. The problem was, it was quite easy to show that his research was flawed and his conclusions nonsensical. It wasn’t the first time that a historian with an agenda was found out, [...]