Americans transcribed the Edenic myth and heralded the supremacy of the New World over the Old. Yet, many could not suppress the fear that they were already losing their sense of purity, innocence, and power, and would in time come face to face with the disappointments of history, the sorrows of the human condition, and [...]
Americans have long mistrusted intellectuals, nowhere more so than when intellectuals have had access to power. There is considerable irony in this apprehension, for the Founding Fathers were themselves men of intellect and learning. Refined and erudite, many were well and widely read in history, politics, law, and science, and applied their knowledge to solving [...]
It requires no special genius to observe that the American political system has become dysfunctional. Although never fond of those who sit across the aisle, Democrats and Republicans have rarely vilified and demonized each other as they now do. Long regarded as the essence of American democracy, compromise has become all but impossible. This partisan [...]
(Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join Mark Malvasi as he examines corruption and The Godfather trilogy. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher) America, that bright, shining land of freedom, opportunity, and progress, is irredeemably corrupt. It is in the hands of debased and hypocritical politicians, judges, businessmen, and their [...]
From Adam and Eve to Eddie Cochrane, from earning your daily bread by the sweat of your brow to the summertime blues and beyond, work has always been the scourge of existence. A recent essay in The Atlantic suggests that Genesis is about to be reversed and the curse lifted. According to Derek Thompson, humanity, [...]
I have a recurrent nightmare. I dream that I never had the opportunity to teach the history of the West. I invariably awaken drenched in a cold sweat, wondering how my own intellectual development would have been stunted had I not been compelled to explain to undergraduates the accomplishments and failures, the complexities and tensions, [...]
M.E. Bradford Ideas about property, language, and memory established the contours and parameters of M.E. Bradford’s Southern inheritance. In Bradford’s thought, property, language, and memory were linked in defense of what his mentor, Donald Davidson, characterized as “the great vital continuum of human experience to which we apply the inadequate term ‘tradition’….”[1] The [...]
“America is hard to see,” wrote Robert Frost, not least because there is a duality to the American mind. Americans have long exalted freedom, often depicting themselves as its unique beneficiaries. At the same time, they have more than once altered the meaning of freedom and have just as often disagreed among themselves about its [...]
While recuperating from a knee and shoulder injury, I used my forced idleness to read two very different English writers: the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon and the twentieth-century mystery novelist John Buchan. Despite the gravity of his magisterial Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Mr. Gibbon, it turns out, shared at least one assumption [...]
Most Americans today, as has been the case for the past 150 years or so, are neither economically nor politically free. They are, instead, servile, prime subjects for abuse and manipulation, because most depend on a wage or a salary. Americans have long mistrusted great power, which they regard as the enemy of freedom. They [...]
The fear, anxiety, and rancor that dominate contemporary politics would be inconceivable without reference to the New Deal, for the 1930s and early 1940s marked the last time Americans engaged in substantive deliberations about the nature and future of their country. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he promised to undo as much [...]
America is the land of progress, speculative, contingent, pragmatic, experimental, traditionless. An American conservatism, accordingly, is oxymoronic, blundering, graceless, and embarrassing in a society devoted to change and forgetful of the past. “The storybook truth about American history,” began Louis Hartz in The Liberal Tradition in America, is that the country “was settled by men who [...]
Paul Lake’s vision of the American future is conceivable, and may yet prove accurate, but it is also unlikely. Two more realistic possibilities, short of an American Götter-dämmerung, are the resurgence of a truculent bigotry or the decline of national cohesion. Neither prospect bodes well for the fate of the United States. Few books invite [...]
March 1, 2012, marked the 175th anniversary of William Dean Howells’s birth. In 1912 400 eminent writers, journalists, editors, social reformers, university presidents, and public men, including William Howard Taft, who had altered his schedule to attend, crowded Sherry’s restaurant in New York City to celebrate Howells’s 75th birthday. From England, Thomas Hardy and Henry [...]