Conservatives should be troubled by Thomas West's claim that America has always been liberal and that the only historical discourse available today is that same liberalism. Vindicating the Founders: Race, Sex, Class, and Justice in the Origins of America, by Thomas G. West (211 pages, Rowman and Littlefield, 1997) Thomas West has written a courageous [...]
What unites all people essentially and what gives all people their inalienable dignity, and the rights that follow therefrom, is their essential humanity… There can be no doubt that we are living in a racially-charged climate. The problems associated with the relations between the races seem to dominate the debate in all areas of our [...]
Last year, I decided to take my teenage sons on a trip across the country. We traveled in our motor home, starting in our home state of Utah, visiting sites of historic significance along the way. I am not a historian, but on this trip I discovered that left-leaning benefactors doling out large grants have [...]
With the time and manner of his death Abraham Lincoln, as leader of a Puritan people who had just won a great victory over “the forces of evil,” was placed beyond the reach of ordinary historical inquiry and assessment. Through Booth’s bullet he became the one who had “died to make men free,” who had [...]
Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle. Contrary to most Liberals, new and old, it is nothing less than sophistry to distinguish between equality of opportunity and equality of condition. I Let us have no foolishness, indeed.* Equality as a moral or [...]
Thomas Fleming argues that the Civil War was both a triumph and tragedy. Though it brought an end to slavery, it did so at the expense of some of 850,000 American lives—an unnecessary and regrettable sacrifice for which a small group of people was ultimately responsible. A Disease in the Public Mind: A New Understanding [...]
I want to suggest two big lessons that we today might learn from the Civil War: The first concerns how to recognize when moral evil threatens to become increasingly intractable, even to the point of overwhelming the good. Sitting at my desk in Louisiana the other week, where it was already as hot as it [...]
As the world grapples with fearsome Ebola Fever, we have been through something similar before. Last time it was stemmed in Colonial America by a black African slave and his owner, a firebrand, evangelical, white clergyman. Onesimus was a slave, owned by the Puritan polemicist and renowned preacher Cotton Mather (1663-1728). Beyond Black Studies Departments, [...]
Robert Carter III of Virginia stands as the personification of the inconvenient truth that emancipation, even on a large scale, was entirely feasible in the United States, at least at the turn of the nineteenth century. “It seems to me a historian’s foremost duty to ensure that merit is recorded, and to confront evil deeds [...]