Category: View

It is usually difficult to choose only one author who is essential to the study of a particular subject.  When it comes to the history of the frontier West, however, the choice is easy.  Ray Allen Billington stands alone above all.  He is the sine qua non of any course on frontier history.  When reading...

Intellectual historians commonly group Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, William Robertson, and David Hume as the four greatest 18th-century historians.  If limited to only one of these authors, we would do well to begin with Hume.  For one thing, Hume is the only thinker in history who has achieved world-class status as a philosopher and as an...

In 1939, a short, fat Englishman named Alfred Hitchcock arrived in Hollywood at the invitation of David Selznick.  Impressed by Hitchcock’s work in British film, Selznick thought he would be perfect to direct Rebecca, starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine.  Things did not go well.  Selznick was among the most overbearing of Hollywood producers.  He...

You may have riches and wealth untold; / Caskets of jewels and baskets of gold. But richer than I you will never be— / For I had a mother who read to me. —Strickland Gillilan Perhaps more than most I wax nostalgic for the 50’s, which was not a decade but an era that began...

Over the years, John McCain has acquired a reputation as a maverick Republican.  Independents and even some Democrats who loathe George W. Bush’s foreign-policy record seem to believe that McCain would be a significant improvement.  In several GOP primaries earlier this year, most notably those in New Hampshire and Michigan, nearly one third of voters...

It is difficult to imagine, but there was a time when pundits in Washington were tagging John McCain as the ultimate unneoconservative Republican figure whose nationalist yet pragmatic approach to foreign policy was being viewed with suspicion by your average global democratic crusader—not to mention the members of what Pat Buchanan described as Israel’s Amen...

John McCain does not like the Russians.  Nearly 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, with Soviet-style communism safely tossed into the dustbin of history, Senator McCain loves to scare us with the Russkie boogeyman.  Take, for example, this excerpt from his “An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom,” published in the November/December 2007...

A great many economists and politicians contend that the absence of trade inevitably leads to armed conflict.  Thus, in the interests of national security, they insist on virtually unlimited trade and castigate those who favor its restriction as proponents of autarky—a term that few understand yet most agree to be negative, isolationist, and perhaps even extremist....

It may be hard for us in the United States to imagine that food could ever be scarce here.  We may worry about avian flu and mad cow disease, and about the general safety of our increasingly mass-produced food supply, as from time to time some Americans sicken or die from tainted meat or spinach. ...

Jack Bauer is an American hero—of sorts.  He tortures suspects.  And executes them.  And decapitates them.  “I’m gonna need a hacksaw,” he famously declared after dispatching a pervert who knew the men behind a planned nuclear attack on Los Angeles. If you have never watched the television program 24, you should try it for two...

Probably the last thing that would have occurred to New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer on his way to meet “Kristen” in Room 870 of D.C.’s Mayflower Hotel was that both he and the Emperor’s Club VIP were under FBI surveillance for federal crimes—prostitution and a financial crime called “structuring.” Traditionally, the enforcement of criminal law...

For most of American history, federal law enforcement consisted only of U.S. marshals serving in the territories of the West.  Their legacy is decidedly mixed.  Many were appointed purely for their political connections, and graft and corruption were not unusual.  The first U.S. marshal for Colorado Territory was accused of embezzling federal funds.  The third...

I cannot remember the occasion, but I will not forget the voice—female, authoritative, and poised—that intoned a dismissal of the so-called yuppies as follows: “They oversee the distribution of toilet paper!”  I was a bit thrilled by the superior attitude, being even then no young upwardly mobile professional myself.  I thought about the matter and concluded...

Twenty-eight years ago, in the summer of 1980, I moved to Guadalajara, Mexico, to take a job teaching English and journalism at a university there.  The job ended just as soon as it began: On the first day of classes, the university, a private institution with connections to the country’s thriving neofascist movement and, thence,...

I have never been able to get it through my thick skull that one’s identity, culture, and national sovereignty should not stand in the way of making money.  For whatever reasons, I have always had a real attachment to my name, my family, my people, my place, my way of life.  I have never felt particularly...

Although the American frontier was officially closed 118 years ago, Americans remain in thrall to its mythic spell and the romance of the American West.  Europeans have always viewed our cultural obsession with condescension, though they themselves—the Germans and the Italians especially—are hardly immune to its allure.  (On my first visit to the Grand Canyon...

Westerns have never enjoyed much of a highbrow audience or much literary distinction.  Many people tend to sneer at the traditional form, because it seems to represent something obvious and a little dumb.  As one of my students responded to my discussion of western historical fiction as a viable and valuable category of popular culture,...

For most of the 19th century, the American West was a fairly tranquil place.  The myths of Hollywood and the wishful thinking of certain revisionist historians notwithstanding, throughout the region, for every gunfighter there were a hundred stockbrokers, and for every outlaw, ten-thousand farmers.  The West was urban as much as rural, settled as a...

Some time around 800 b.c., Homer put the heroic tales of the Achaeans into lyric form: battles, expeditions, adventures, conquests.  The tales were inspiring, heroic, tragic, triumphal.  Greeks recited Homer’s iambic pentameter for centuries; so, too, did we as schoolchildren—as inheritors of Western civilization.  We Americans, however, also have our own Homeric Era.  While the...

In this age when the foundational idea of American federalism has become all but defunct and the concept of states’ rights still has the whiff of Jim Crow about it, it is difficult to see how either individual states or regions can have any significant influence on the federal government—even if they had legislatures interested,...

Ideology is an intellectual pathology that has gripped the West for about three centuries.  At times, we have been told that ideology is at an end.  This was said after the close of World War II, when the most ideological age yet, the Cold War, was just beginning.  After its collapse, some 50 years later,...

Can an entire culture “be converted”—i.e., turn away from entrenched patterns of selfishness and self-indulgence and replace them with patterns of altruism?  Can an entire society begin to act in accordance with the Second Great Commandment, “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matt. 22:39 KJV)?  So fundamental a change in orientation cannot be commanded...

Most Americans in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries believed in the public expression of religious sentiments as surely as they believed in publicly proclaiming their patriotism.  Such expression was not merely their right; it was their duty.  Indeed, religious faith was part of the “given” of any political debate, the common ground upon...

Since its publication in 1930, I’ll Take My Stand has never been out of print, and each succeeding generation produces new disciples, though sometimes with a slightly different take on the original document.  In recent years, some have seen in the Agrarian critique of industrial America a precursor of Al Gore’s Earth in the Balance...

Social conservatives have long argued that radical individualism—the essence of modern freedom—is corrosive to family and community life, and, if left unchecked, can even lead to civilizational collapse.  But another, perhaps more damning, charge today is that individualism is bad for the environment.  This seems paradoxical, as modern man sees himself as the quintessential environmentalist...

Edward Abbey never met a controversy he didn’t like. Philosopher of the barroom and the open sky, champion of wilderness, critical gadfly, fierce advocate of personal liberty, Enemy of the State writ large: For 40-odd years, Ed roamed the American West, a region, he wrote, “robbed by the cattlemen, raped by the miners, insulted by...

Back in February, music historian J. Lester Feder published an article in the American Prospect entitled “When Country Went Right.”  As Feder would have it, country music wasn’t always as “conservative” as it is today.  Once upon a time, it seems, country music was a left-leaning, “populist” American art form.  Then Richard Nixon, taking his...

Historians tend to make the same argument: The South lost the Civil War because its economy was agrarian rather than industrial, with too few munitions factories to supply Confederate troops with weapons and too few textile mills to clothe them.  According to these same historians, the postbellum sharecropper system proved to be an economic disaster,...

A reporter once asked Tyrone Power if he thought his next movie would be a hit.  “That depends,” Power replied, pointing to his face, “on how many close-ups of this make the final cut.” Another case of celebrity vanity?  Perhaps, but I prefer to think Power was on to something essential about the nature of film. ...