David Hume’s History of England was one of the most successful literary productions of the 18th century. It became a classic in his lifetime and was published continuously down to 1894, passing through at least 167 posthumous editions. The young Winston Churchill learned English history from an abridged edition known as “The Student’s Hume.” Yet...
“If you were to judge as I do, you would not readily place your neck under a foreign yoke.” —William Wallace As we approach the millennium, Celtic nationalism threatens to rip apart the United Kingdom. After nearly 250 years of English-imposed centralism, the Scots are reasserting their cultural identity and using it as the foundation...
Why did the Americans win and the Jacobites lose? The classic answer is that the Americans represented the future, a future of liberty, freedom, secularism, and individualism. The Jacobites were the past, reactionary and religious, the products of a hierarchical society motivated by outdated dynastic loyalty. This difference was supposedly reflected in their military methods,...
Bill Clinton and Richard Cobden, a 19th-century English anti-Corn Law crusader, have more in common than consonants in their surnames. As economic internationalists, both trumpeted commerce as the panacea for attaining world peace and prosperity. In their own ways, both bear responsibility for the new international economic order which rests on the twin foundations of...
As if we needed more proof of the threat to national sovereignty, there comes John Gardner’s latest “James Bond novel,” SeaFire. Gone is Ian Fleming’s wonderful cast of characters. The drab but lovable Q has been replaced by a woman nicknamed Q’ute; the admiral M has been replaced by a committee of bureaucrats; a primping...
Americans who hoped that the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child would be stuffed in a drawer with its predecessor, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, got a jolt in February when Mrs. Clinton announced (at the funeral of UNICEF director James Grant) that the Convention...
I came by my lifelong interest in foreign languages and cultures honestly. Mv grandfather, Andrew Jackson King, Jr., migrated to a Hispanic-populated area of the Territory of New Mexico in 1906. Acquiring a small ranch, he hired some (Spanish-speaking) Basque shepherds and raised sheep—for a while, that is, until one morning he discovered that both...
If radical Afrocentrists have their way, soon all schoolchildren will learn—as some are now learning—a version of ancient Mediterranean history that gives credit for the Greek achievement to the ancient Egyptians. The Afrocentrists contend that what most people have learned about the origins of Western civilization is untrue. According to them, the ancient history we...
Long before ethnicity became the focus of studying neglected groups and cultures—the black, Judaic, Chicano, and feminist counterpart to “We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it”—leading intellectuals such as Simone de Beauvoir, in feminist studies; Harry A. Wolfson, in Judaism as part of the Western philosophical tradition; Eugene Genovese and John Hope Franklin, in...
When Virginia Governor George Allen recently attempted to return the curriculum of his state’s public school system to a solid grounding in Western and American history, his plan, greeted with howls of indignation from the National Educational Association and their minions in the state legislature, was soundly defeated. “It would set us back to the...
“Those is the niggers that was f–kin’ with my sh-t.” “I knew that nigger was one of the niggers I could rely on.” The first speaker was a twenty-something “homegirl” from the projects, the second a drunk in his late 30’s. Both were riding on New York’s A train on different days and at different...
During the early 1920’s, 30 years after he had written his famous essay on the significance of the frontier in the nation’s history, the great American historian Frederick Jackson Turner published two other works on the democratizing role of what he termed the “section.” Sections, Turner wrote, “serve as restraints upon a deadly uniformity. They...
Some folks have been kind enough to notice my absence from these pages, and a few have been even kinder and expressed regret at it. The fact is that my wife Dale and I are working on a book. It will be called 1001 Things Everyone Should Know about the South, and we hope to...
On January 6, 1816, Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to his state legislator, Colonel Charles Yancey. As we might expect, Jefferson’s letter contains reflections of general interest on many topics, ranging in this case from the dangers of a large public debt and paper money to the advantages of beer over whiskey. Near the end...
The classical argument in favor of free immigration runs as follows. Other things being equal, businesses go to low-wage areas, and labor moves to high-wage areas, thus effecting a tendency toward the equalization of wage rates (for the same kind of labor) as well as the optimal localization of capital. An influx of migrants into...
The phrase “America’s Christian Heritage” might irritate any hearers who do not want to be classed as members of the tribe that first received its name in Antioch (Acts 11:26). But wait: we recognize that one does not have to be a member of the family to be remembered in a will, nor be of...
One of the strangest rituals in the United States Senate is the annual reading of President Washington’s Farewell Address. The chore of recitation usually falls to a freshman nonentity eager to curry favor by performing what is regarded as a drudge task. The chamber is empty, save for the classical remnant: New York’s Senator Moynihan...
I am as grateful for this award as I am surprised by it, and I certainly did not see it coming. Obviously, it cannot be easy to feel worthy of an award bearing the name of T.S. Eliot, and so probably I ought to say that I am grateful, but unconvinced. The etiquette attendant upon...
The breach that opened between the serious and popular arts during the early years of this century has so widened over subsequent decades that the current “postmodern” era is characterized by a kind of cultural schizophrenia. While visual images bombard us through the media, the graphic arts have increasingly evaporated in performance and conceptual art....
“All that matters now is poetry In which the feeling is the thought.” —from “Paysages Legendaires” When writing about the poet Peter Russell, it is hard to know where to begin. First, there is the matter of his prolificness, and the sheer vastness of his oeuvre: Russell, who describes poetry as being “dangerously near the...
In the mindless babble that passes for political debate in the United States, nothing means what it appears to mean, particularly those key words “liberal” and “conservative.” For political purposes the latter seems to have demonized the former. But has this really happened? Americans tend to be divided by race, religion, and class. The idea...
The feminist movement, it has just been learned, was actually concocted by men. Specifically, a small group of planners meeting in 1962 set in motion the developments of the next 30 years concerning men and women. These men acted in a selfish spirit of personal aggrandizement. The heretofore secret minutes of their planning group are...
“The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of women’s rights,” wrote Queen Victoria in 1870 to Sir Theodore Martin. “Woman would become the most hateful, heartless and disgusting of human beings, were she allowed to unsex herself.” Pausing only to add “fanatical” and “idiotic” to Her...
Writing her column the other day in a London newspaper, a feminist confessed that the women’s movement that started some 25 years ago had “spluttered to a halt.” Many a middle-aged feminist nowadays will tell you the same thing. The young, they will say with an air of regret, meaning their daughters and the friends...
SCENE; Administrative conference room at a major university. Five grim-faced faculty members sit around a long table and stare at THE ACCUSED, who sits at one end, apart and alone. He is well dressed, young middle-aged, nice looking but not particularly handsome. Each member of the COMMITTEE has in front of him or her a...
“How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.” —Neville Chamberlain Persons with roots in Central and Eastern Europe know that to speak with minimal competence about that part of the world...
In August, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan announced that the capitol of the country would be moved several hundred miles north, from the green city of Almaty, where the presidential palace stands against a background of snow-capped mountains, to the bleak and windy steppes of north-central Kazakhstan, to the present city of Akmola. The official...
The fate of Kosovo, Serbia’s troubled province, has in recent years received a good deal of attention in the world press, usually in connection with the actions of Serbia’s president, Slobodan Miloševic. A somewhat obscure communist until he became head of the Serbian Communist Party in 1986, Miloševic went to Kosovo in April 1987 to...
Whenever you hear the New World Order crowd whining about the obligation of the “international community” to come to the rescue of a “multiethnic democracy” threatened by “nationalism,” get ready for Uncle Sam to be dragged off on a fool’s errand. This term, “multiethnic democracy,” the prime exemplar of which is supposedly the United States,...
Throughout our legal history we are familiar with incidents of jury-tampering, the act of buying off or frightening one or more of the 12 men good and true called upon to decide a case. This is done to predetermine a verdict, usually to assure a “not guilty.” We have heard of vicious gangsters, corrupt union...
“If men were angels,” James Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” Or, “if angels were to govern men, no controls on government would be necessary.” Madison believed that men are about as good as they can ever be, and since no angels are available to rule, we need checks and balances. Thomas Jefferson added...
“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” —The Second Amendment Like a recidivist criminal free to strike at will, the United States Congress slashed the Bill of Rights last year, tearing through the widely ignored Second...
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively or to the people.” —The Tenth Amendment Following the passage of the national gun ban wrapped in pork, Representatives Gingrich and Gephardt congratulated each other for their bipartisan cooperation and remarked...
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the retreat of Leninist forces within the empire, hosannas have rung out in the Western world. “The Cold War is over, the Cold War is over,” the leaders of the West have exclaimed, and demands to turn swords into knitting needles have filled the air. At every...
World War II has been over for 50 years now. Most veterans of that war, myself included, have long put the war behind them, their sacrifices and achievements dimmed by faltering memories and the passage of time. Few people remember, including some veterans, the names or numbers of the old outfits, their combat records and...
Frankly, we were skeptical when first contacted by Peter Shaw, Ph.D., a genial, tweedy, professorial type carrying a somewhat foxed and dog-eared manuscript boldly titled “My System.” It outlined, he claimed, a comprehensive solution to the leading social problems of our era. Despite appearances, the man was hard to dismiss, especially given his claim that...
Every society has its mythology, its particular set of heroes and monsters. In North America over the last decade, the figure of the demon or monster has come to be represented by the serial killer, an image that is now quite ubiquitous in popular culture. In a typical chain bookstore, a B. Dalton or Waldenbooks,...
Imagine the devastating effect, even on the mass of young black men who successfully resist the temptation to violence, of Gwen Guthrie’s song Ain’t Nothin’ Coin’ On But The Rent: Boy, nothing in life is free / That’s why I’m asking you what can you do for me / I’ve got responsibility / So I’m...
We have heard many debates recently about the undermining of moral and cultural traditions in contemporary America, a trend sometimes epitomized by the phrase “political correctness.” Conservatives often issue dark warnings about the ills that befall a society that cuts itself off from its roots, though few go so far as to predict total destruction,...
Nobody, except the New York Times and its worldwide allies, questions the right and duty of Catholic bishops to raise their public voice on moral issues, and on social issues intertwined with problems of a moral nature. Admittedly, pastoral letters, monita, even encyclicals sound rather hollow today, like trumpets in the desert, laments in a...
When I was in Catholic high school, some 15 years ago, even as the last of the marble altars were being pulled out of America’s churches, the ornate wooden confessionals uprooted in favor of plywood-and-plexiglass “reconciliation rooms,” one devotional custom persisted from centuries before, in the undershirts and blouses of the Vinnics, Patricks, and Marias...
In the “nihilistic politics of the 1990’s,” warns a newswriter for the Wall Street Journal, “party loyalty counts for almost nothing.” The writer means obeisance to the two major parties, which the civics books imply are ordained by God to rule us. In fact, America needs a breakup of this two-party system, which looks more...
“Extremist” is a word that may conjure up images of hooded Klansmen crowded around a burning cross or of Black Panther separatists or kooky 60’s “revolutionaries.” Or perhaps images of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao come to mind. There is a supposition that those who are commonly called “extremists” are unreasonable, irrational, perhaps crazy, and quite...
On July 7 Chronicles sent freelance writer Jim Christie to interview Jerry Brown in Oakland, California. Ask any Democratic Party insider in California about Jerry Brown, and he will usually say Brown is one of three things; an embarrassment, a flake, or a jerk. The institutional meanness, the state party’s party line, toward the former...
Our great-great-grandfathers, if they were American voters, enjoyed greater opportunity to change policy with their votes than we do today. It is a paradox that as the number of Americans permitted to vote has increased over the past century, the power of those votes has diminished. Many legislators and judges, in their hearts, do not...
The deluge of statements, articles, and books on Russia in these turbulent (for Russia) times comes as no surprise. What surprises is the ingratiating and monotonously uncritical terms of discourse in which American opinions about Russia are couched. Many of these terms date back to the Soviet era. No country in Europe has ever generated...
The use of NATO military strikes against the Bosnian Serbs, at the urgings of the Clinton administration, camouflages for the moment a rift that has occurred in the Western alliance. Sooner or later recriminations over “who lost Yugoslavia?” are certain to come. And though it may be a while before historians render a verdict, there...
After three decades in which the term “liberal Democratic media” has come to seem an almost complete redundancy, many students of American journalism today are no doubt stunned to learn that, prior to the 1960’s, this nation’s printed press was regarded by most prominent liberals and Democrats as a bastion of conservatism and Republicanism. When...
Why is there no adversarial press in the United States? Why do the media seem so afraid of news stories that threaten to embarrass or destroy governments? These questions may seem curious in a society that prides itself on freedom of the press and where the media are often criticized for excessively negative criticism of...
I take a certain amount of gleeful satisfaction—the Germans call it Schadenfreude—in the schisms and divisions that seem increasingly to bedevil the American right. The pitched battles between neoconservatives and paleoconservatives, between libertarians and authoritarians, and, of late, between social conservatives of the fundamentalist Christian persuasion and traditional economic royalists who care much more about...