The Cost of Liberty: The Life of John Dickinson by William Murchison Few habits of speech and thought inhibit our appreciation of those who created the United States of America more than our tendency to refer to them as “the Founders.” Not that the Founders do not form an identifiable group, and not that they are undeserving of [...]
Lee Kuan Yew Imagine a modern free country in which aspiring politicians, before the most prominent political party lets them run for office as its nominees, must pass interviews and psychometric tests evaluating their knowledge and skill, commitment to public service, humility, honesty and morality. Will America’s Republicans or Democrats dare to try [...]
President Obama has been a strong supporter of programs designed to help families pay for a college education, most notably through the Pell Grant and the Opportunity Tax Credit. However, in the summer of 2013, President Obama announced a new “Plan to Make College More Affordable.” In his speech announcing the plan, the president affirmed that “a [...]
Do some people read Chesterton in a state of continued ecstatic delight at his style? Do they ride the roller coaster of his thought with never a moment of queasiness, or do most people (like me) vacillate between admiration and annoyance? Do others sometimes consider his puns to be punishment, his alliteration ludicrous, and his non [...]
There are many good things to say about Disney’s massively popular movie, Frozen. One of its more refreshing plot twists concerns the heroine’s saving the day through an act of sacrifice for true love—for her sister. Those who expect to read, now, praise for some feminist attempt to show how a strong female character can dispense [...]
"Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump?" — The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, v:3 Two hundred and two years after the foundation of this college, Hampden-Sydney is not yet decadent. That is more than we may say of America's higher learning in general. For the most part, American [...]
The London Daily Telegraph recently ran an article in which a young history graduate recounts the political bias that threaded through all ten years of his education. A major module in his degree course—from a top flight university—was about “the ramblings of John Lennon and Yoko Ono”. The prescribed reading-list of Obama presidency critiques focussed [...]
Professor Stephen Tonsor Back in the 1980s, when I told a friend that I was doing graduate work in history at Michigan, he looked surprised: “But you are conservative, and there aren’t any conservatives on the faculty in Ann Arbor.” “Oh, that’s not true,” I shot back, “I had lunch with him.” Academic [...]
Much of the progressivist contempt for the past is not merely arrogance or ignorance but is a response to a perceived threat, a reaction caused by a fear of the other. The past is a different country, they do things differently there. The past is strange. It is populated by strangers; by foreigners. For those [...]
Is Coke’s multilingual Superbowl commercial another milestone in the progressive march toward multiculturalism? With the exception of playing music together from the written page, perhaps nothing permits perfect harmony among men as much as being able to speak the other’s language. That is not to say that we cannot achieve harmony with others absent a [...]
Hard cake of the clay shore, the lake leeched back, trees tinseled with snakes. From the vantage of our dock, a moccasin beds a dead fish in the cotton of its mouth. […]
It’s hard to avoid it. Sherlock fever is everywhere, and all across the Internet, American viewers are feverishly keeping up with the Third Season of BBC One’s hit television show, Sherlock. In case you’ve been immune to the virus since 2010, the gist of Sherlock is that it is a thoroughly modern take on Sir Arthur [...]
Ronald Reagan was indeed a giant among men, a true Man of the West, and conservatives should rightly and proudly claim him as one of their own. “Very soon, all too soon, your government will need not just extraordinary men—but men with greatness,” Russian dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn said during his visit to the U.S. Capitol [...]
Across the street from my house in Hillsdale, Michigan, rests the body of Ransom Dunn, a historian at Hillsdale College and one of the founders of the Republican Party. I can see his gravestone from my driveway, and I can see my house, rather clearly, from his gravestone. In February, 1854, disgusted with the specious [...]