Perhaps prison was the very best place to read the "Inferno." Gustave Doré’s engravings on the overhead embellished my lectures, and I immediately noticed my jump-suited students raptly attentive to his vivid representations of Hell’s punishments. “What happens if you’re guilty of more than one of these?” one sheepishly asked. No one laughed. The department [...]
Humans thrive upon historical continuity and knowing their communities are built with deep roots. But histories based on theories of power dynamics destroy an unseen social glue, leaving behind those who understood their place through a shared history. For those disinclined toward interstate highways, the best way to enter New England is eastward out of [...]
If snow falls where you live – or if in warmer climes, you reach for your jacket – read "Ethan Frome" to mark the season, for winter hangs over the novella. Though many readers regard Edith Wharton's tale as one of a man tormented by the social tyranny of his New England community, it is, in [...]
***** Please join us by making your donation today in celebration of our 15th anniversary. Every contribution—whether $1500, $150, or $15—joins with our labor and prayer to restore the best of Christendom. —W. Winston Elliott, Publisher ***** An Electronic Inklings by Bradley Birzer I remember it well. Fifteen years ago, on a hot, humid summer afternoon [...]
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 [...]
In Whig narratives, the art of history becomes therapy, telling readers that they are good, everything works out in the end, God is on their side, and all moral and material progress leads to them. Tory history, however, tells a different story. For Tories, life is complex, chaotic, often contrary, sometimes ends badly, and demands [...]
The importance of George Ticknor lies in contrasts, which bring into relief another America. As an old Federalist who worked to undergird volatile American democracy with traditions, Ticknor and his Brahmin compatriots “wove a tapestry of conviction and hope, doubt and despair, which became a conservative testament.” In July 1836, a European statesman and an [...]
Charles Eliot Norton is unknown today outside historians of literature or education, but between Fort Sumter and Teddy Roosevelt he dominated Anglo-American literature and Harvard lecture halls. Beginning with optimism, in the years following Appomattox his perspective darkened into fears that American democracy encouraged selfishness, corruption, and the hatred of excellence. In the 1890s, Harvard [...]
Yet more than any other consensus historian, Daniel Boorstin counter-attacked radical New Left critiques. He was unabashedly patriotic, and his books are works of wonderment and curiosity about America, its land, and its people. In 1994, on the PBS program Think Tank, Ben Wattenberg hosted a debate on the topic “Who Owns History?” The impetus [...]
World War One shattered the old political order, its traditional monarchies and aristocracies, and the historical boundaries of nations. The explosion also ejected the population of European nations across the world in a flood of refugees, both the high born and the low. Hundreds of thousands fled before invading armies in Belgium, Russia, Italy, Austria, [...]
No one exhibited Boston’s warm Tory strain better than one of its greatest “quixotic souls,” Helen Choate Bell, who reveled in Boston’s habits and customs, protected its cultural reputation with inquisitorial zeal, and faced the world with impish glee. Helen Choate Bell In the late nineteenth century, a horse-drawn carriage carrying Oliver Wendell [...]
Christmas memories reflect the senses. We recall what and who we saw: parents and siblings, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, many of whom are no longer with us and gives the season a tint of melancholy. We think of family gatherings, church services, the long drives home and back, a lovely meeting or [...]
The pursuit of ideological history always ends with the installation of a new elite, a new ruling class, a new set of exploiters. Instead, historians should practice good history and humane learning, avoid the temptations of ideology and “relevance,” and defend the universities. In 1969, the American Historical Association broke down into hostile wings, one [...]
Sherrard Billings, one of the three founders of Groton School—and the American Mr. Chips—did his part to develop good and wise habits among the “Grotties.” Through his own life of suffering, he taught them to how to live, pursue the truth, love the good, and pass on wisdom. The Groton School The New [...]