America Aflame: How the Civil War Created a Nation, by David Goldfield (Bloomsbury Press) Whether or not the American Civil War might have been avoided has long been a subject of debate among historians. Some, like Allan Nevins and Charles and Mary Beard, saw the war as “an irrepressible conflict,” in the words of Abraham [...]
One of the privileges of writing this column is that I occasionally get to meet the composers of the music I review. I had a meeting this past year with a musician with whom I have been in correspondence for some time. Morten Lauridsen, the most frequently performed American choral composer, came to Washington, D.C. [...]
Walk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a trifle west of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to Number 12, Arran Quay. This is a brick building of three stories, which began as a gentleman’s residence, some time since became a shop, and now is a governmental office of the meaner sort—symbolic of [...]
Solzhenitsyn knew that the materialism that shaped the culture of both capitalist and communist societies was ultimately inhuman because of its denial of spiritual values and because it led to serious environmental degradation. Interview of Joseph Pearce by Annamarie Adkins After the fall of the Berlin Wall, some people predicted that global affairs had reached [...]
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 [...]
On numerous occasions, Mortimer Adler wrote about the criteria that were used to determine which books of all the books written in the West would be placed within The Great Books of the Western World. Contrary to confusion and many misstatements I've read over the years, Adler says it was essentially three criteria and they [...]
The idea for this essay came from a question posed during a meeting of the National Association of Scholars, where several of the presentations had decried recent academic movements of the sort led by Marxists, feminists, homosexualists, or Black separatists, and complained of these groups having politicized higher education. Subsequently, a panel discussing the idea [...]
An excerpt from Democracy in America. I had remarked during my stay in the United States that a democratic state of society, similar to that of the Americans, might offer singular facilities for the establishment of despotism; and I perceived, upon my return to Europe, how much use had already been made, by most of [...]
Phil Michelson Don’t quite recall what happened in 1913? The Philadelphia Athletics’ World Series win that year didn’t make its mark? How about this, as I wrote in my book Econoclasts: For all one hears about, say, 1914, 1929, 1945, 1968, 1989, and 2001, 1913 may well be the most important year in [...]
Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, by Peter J. Stanlis. Probably no other American poet has suffered more misunderstanding at the hands of his readers, admirers and detractors alike, than Robert Frost. The range and variety of misreadings of both the man and his poetry are legion: he was simply a nature poet, child of [...]
As a British judge, how would you rule under the forthcoming law allowing homosexual marriage? Winners may become British judges after purchasing a horse-hair wig. 1) Clarissa wants to divorce Arthur because he has been having an affair with Clive. Can divorce be granted? (a) yes; (b) no; (c) yes if Clive agrees to a sex-change [...]
And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second; that second for a third; and so on, till the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery, and to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. [...]
The Imaginative Conservative Bookstore offers books in the tradition of Russell Kirk, T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke, Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, Wilhelm Roepke, Robert Nisbet, M.E. Bradford and Christopher Dawson. We hope you will enjoy the books by those who inspire us to be imaginative conservatives. [iframe_loader src="https://smile.amazon.com/dp/?_encoding=UTF8&node=25" height="1000"] We hope you will join us in The [...]
The human body needs some stressors, and everything organic and complex communicates with the environment via stressors.—Nassim Nicholas Taleb Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, is back with a new book: Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder. He recently sat down with Reason’s Nick Gillespie for an interview. Taleb makes [...]