Strikingly traditional and patriotic, "Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero" is truly a film for all ages. It is at first surprising that it was a box-office flop when it premiered in 2018, in the 100th anniversary year of the end of the Great War it depicts, despite generally positive reviews by critics and moviegoers. But [...]
Ngo Dinh Diem, the first President of South Vietnam, and JFK were both Catholics, though Catholics of very different persuasions. Landscape The assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was one of the landmark moments and one of the most remembered events in twentieth-century history. The assassination of President Diem of Vietnam [...]
Those young men did not die at Normandy to establish an American empire. Instead, for perhaps the only time in history, soldiers came to fight and to die to liberate others and to save a civilization from tyranny. It was an act of magnanimity, of selflessness, for which all the European victims of the Nazis [...]
These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war. On June 6, 1984—the 40th anniversary of D-Day—President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech to an audience of D-Day veterans and world [...]
Saul Bellow's protagonist Artur Sammler is both witness and survivor to the central event in his own time: the attempt on the part of Hitler and his henchmen to eradicate European Jewry. But even though the novel takes place in a different time and place, behind those contemporary times are the ghosts from that World [...]
Today I honor the men and women of the United States military who have sacrificed their lives while doing their duty to the Republic. For them, and their families, I ask God to bless them and keep them. On this Memorial Day do we remember what should not have been? Only the West’s soul is more [...]
“Memoriae Tuae” Martis nec gladius, belli nec ignis impiger Vivum momentum unquam memoriae tuae consumet Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory* Patrick Doyle wrote "Memoriae Tuae" as part of his score for the animated film, Sgt. Stubby: An American Hero, a 2018 computer-animated adventure film [...]
State-sponsored murder was the primary fact of the twentieth century—not the rise of democracy or the liberation of peoples, as many have been taught, but the devastating horrors of the gulag, the holocaust, and the killing fields. It was in June 1996 that I picked up a book that, for all intents and purposes, changed my [...]
The sharp focus on Mrs. Verhagen gives “The Winged Watchman,” Hilda van Stockum’s novel about a Dutch family during World War II, such power. The close-up tasks of the women are just as heroic as the tasks of the men who often fought to protect their loved ones. Who knew a great war story would [...]
The American Revolution began at dawn on April 19, 1775, when 700 Redcoats commanded by Major John Pitcairn confronted 200 Lexington militia on the town green. The militiamen, consisting of almost all able-bodied men sixteen to sixty, supplied their own firearms, although a few poor men had to borrow a gun. During the first six [...]
Our modern urbanised arrangement of vast groups of human beings—in which the city is master and the country servant—organized through tokens (money) rather than through realities—are undeniably the proximate occasion of war. Old Principles and the New Order, by Vincent McNabb, O.P. (224 pages, Cluny Media) “Jesus…seeing the city wept over it saying: If thou [...]
The narrative of a North-South divide in American History is a powerful, yet problematic one. However, closer metaphysical inspection of both regions uncovers a series of considerable similarities and ironic connections between the Puritans of New England fully embodied in Jonathan Edwards, and the Presbyterians of the Old South fully embodied in James Thornwell. Their [...]
Abraham Lincoln never was a doctrinaire; he rose from very low estate to very high estate, and he knew the savagery which lies so close beneath the skin of man, and he knew that most men are good only out of obedience to routine and convention. Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks [...]
No episode in the American past is more susceptible to such manipulation—manipulation rather than debate—than the Civil War. On the historical question permit me to be blunt and unequivocal. There can be no doubt that slavery was central to all that divided the northern and the southern states, and that slavery was ultimately responsible for [...]