It was in 1942 that John Crowe Ransom coined the phrase “The New Criticism” by publishing a book under that title, a book about the most respected literary critics of the first half of the century, notably T.S. Eliot, LA. Richards, William Empson, Yvor Winters, and R.P. Blackmur. But actually, he was criticizing the critics...
609 search results for: Forgotten History
Where the South Meets the West
Oh, I’m a good old Rebel, That’s just what I am. And for this damned Republic, I do not give a damn! I’m glad I fought agin it, I only wish we’d won, And I don’t want no pardon, For anything I done! —Maj. James Randolph, CSA Not long ago, Texas Gov. Rick Perry...
A Forgotten Document
A few months after the close of the American Civil War there was a brief but intense and interesting correspondence between Lord Acton, the European historian of liberty, and General R.E. Lee, hero of the defeated Confederacy, on the issues of the war. In the course of this correspondence Acton commented that Appomattox had been...
The Lone Ranger’s Legacy
After serving for more than three decades on the U.S. Supreme Court, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died on Saturday, September 3, at the age of 80, having lost his battle with thyroid cancer. With Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s recent announcement of her retirement, there are now two vacant seats on the Court. Just over a...
Darwinian Liberalism
A brief article in The Spectator (May 19) by Fredrik Erixon speculates that President Emmanuel Macron of France, generally considered a liberal centrist énarque, seems to be reconsidering his position following the anniversary of his first year in office. Faced with the continuing rise of the right in Europe, the rebellion of Chancellor Merkel’s conservatives...
Remembering Warren G. Harding
Harding was a consummate conservative governed by humility, kindness, and charity for all: principles that guided him in both his personal life and his political career.
Tradition and Justice
“We have forgotten the origin of morality in fact and circumstance.” —Wendell Berry Alasdair MacIntyre is our most relentless tracker of the crisis of the liberal regime. In After Virtue, he recounted the history of the triumph of “emotivism” in ethics. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? he has begun the process of pointing the way...
The Fall of the House of Utter
“Arrogance and boldness belong to those that are accursed of God.” —Saint Clement of Rome After the end of the Cold War, reasonable people might have expected the United States to withdraw from her many foreign commitments and become a normal country again. Yet the opposite has happened. Rather than dissolve, NATO has expanded. Instead...
George Garrett Talks
This interview took place on September 18 and 19, 1985, at Garrett’s house in Charlottesville, not far from the University of Virginia. It is a sizable stone house, rented, with most of the available wall space covered with hastily erected brick-and-board bookcases. Not quite settled yet, Garrett and his wife, Susan, joked about how they...
Fascism, Real and Imagined
A personal and national narrative of resistance to globalism Twenty years ago I somehow managed to get my act together and get out of Paris, where I had haunted a cheap hotel for a year in the wake of the death of Princess Diana like the ghost of the Marlon Brando character in Last Tango...
Europe’s Other Terrorists
The recent attack on New York City’s World Trade Center has once again reinforced in Western minds that terrorism is a purely Middle Eastern phenomenon, and that terms like “Palestinian,” “Shi’ite,” and “Muslim fundamentalist” are virtual synonyms for “terrorist.” There is no room here to discuss the damage that such a view has had on...
A Place to Stand
The names are legendary; the tales of heroism, a part of our heritage as Texans and Americans. Houston, Crockett, Bowie, Travis: All, save William Barret Travis, were nationally known figures before they came to Texas, which was then considered Mexican territory. Sam Houston had been governor of Tennessee, a protégé of Andrew Jackson, a war...
Free Speech Is Under Attack On the Nation’s Campuses With Too Few Willing to Defend It
The following article by Allan C. Brownfeld is reprinted with permission. Free speech used to be highly valued, particularly on the nation’s college and university campuses. Academic freedom demanded a respect for a diversity of views. During the Vietnam War years, this writer taught at the University of Maryland. The campus was alive with debates...
Books in Brief: The Forgotten Slave Trade
The Forgotten Slave Trade: The White European Slaves of Islam, by Simon Webb (Pen and Sword History; 208 pp., $39.95). In America, public discussion about slavery—when it doesn’t devolve into BLM activists burning cities or congressmen bending the knee—is premised on important but erroneous assumptions: only blacks have been enslaved; black slavery was racially motivated; discussion...
Getting the Scoop
“All we want are the facts, ma’am.” —Sgt. Joe Friday Not long ago I was sorting through old papers for disposal. I came across a clipping saved for some forgotten reason. On the reverse was this headline: “NAACP Chief Says More Assistance Needed.” This headline might have appeared in my hometown paper today (though I...
Lepanto: A Category of the Spirit
There are days and places in history when time seems to stand still and, in the space of a moment, the fate of future centuries is decided. At dawn on October 7, 1571, the spectacle would have made a strong impression on anyone who looked out at the waters breaking upon the straits that join...
Bork v. Bork
Two of the most vilified judges in US history have probably been Judge Robert H. Bork and Chief Justice Roger Taney. Both gained notoriety early in their appointments by demonstrating their willingness to fire opponents of a domineering President’s policy (Taney, when in the Jackson administration, fired directors of the Bank of the United States...
Racial Integrity
“You only have I known among all the families of the earth.” —Amos 3:2 The early chapters of the Bible present two major stories of judgment: the Deluge and the Tower of Babel. The first, the story of the dramatic “liquidation” of the vast majority of the human race, has no parallel in recorded history,...
The War Years
World War II seems both near and far away. In one sense, it seems like only yesterday that I was 17 years old, in uniform, and in Georgia and California. In another sense, that period is ancient history. We have traversed a century or more in human experience since the early 1940’s. The conflict was...
Witnessing at The Hague
All history is to some extent contemporary, but none more so than that analyzed, interpreted, and sometimes constructed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) at The Hague. ...
The Boomers’ Bogus View of World War II
Using history, memoir, and popular culture as sources, Elizabeth Samet highlights the contrast between the concrete realities of World War II and its subsequent transfiguration in American memory since the 1990s.
James Branch Cabell
In a 1956 essay, Edmund Wilson wrote: “Cabell is out of fashion.” Withdrawing his dismissal of James Branch Cabell, Wilson gave him a critical accolade—and his generosity was praiseworthy. For by 1956, Cabell was not only out of fashion but virtually forgotten, though he was not alone in this. Most of his contemporaries, more or...
What We Are Reading: 3/1/2022
This history of World War II should occupy an eminent position in any collection of studies on that conflict; it is a comprehensive treatment of its subject that stands head-and-shoulders above most of the stream of books issued since its publication in 1989. I reread it recently and have consulted it frequently. For many years, John Keegan...
The Italian Counterrevolutions of 1799
Who says that conservative historians have to be old, hoary-headed men unable to produce anything innovative? A young Italian scholar named Massimo Viglione is proving the contrary with his two latest books, Rivolte dimenticate (Forgotten Revolts) and Le Insorgenze—Rivoluzione e controrivoluzione in Italia, 1792-1815 (Uprisings-Revolution and Counterrevolution in Italy). Viglione is a Catholic researcher in...
What Is Paleoconservatism?
Paleoconservatism is the expression of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, a sense of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture—an identity that is both collective and personal. This identity is missing from the psychological and emotional makeup of leftists of every stripe—including “neoconservatives”—and is now disavowed by mainline conservatives of the Republican...
Let’s Go Poland
Conversations with those who have traveled throughout the Eastern Bloc reveal that group tours, not solo travel, are the rule rather than the exception. For a hefty fee, vacation moguls will relieve the prospective tourist of three major brain drains: consular relations (visas), hotel accommodations, and transportation. Group tour-guides will provide the serious history enthusiast...
On Russia
I agree with Professor W. Bruce Lincoln (“The Burden of Russian History,” March 1994) that Russia’s economic and political system is prone to break society into two parts: “them,” those responsible for making decisions and managing the country, and “us,” the simple people deadly indifferent to everything that doesn’t touch them immediately—i.e., high politics. I...
Repudiating the Debt
In the spring of 1981, conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives cried. They cried because, in the first flush of the Reagan Revolution that was supposed to bring drastic cuts in taxes and government spending, as well as a balanced budget, they were being asked by the White House and their own leadership to...
Capture the Flag, Part II
We have it on good authority that the peacemakers are blessed, and that’s only fair, because we sure catch hell in this world. Not long ago I suggested that most Southerners who display the Confederate flag are not bigots and got some hate mail to the effect that only a bigot could believe that. Last...
On Politics and Race
Now that Samuel Francis’s two-part installment on his “Rise and Fall” appears complete (April and May 1996), it’s time for the readers of Chronicles to hear the rest of the story. What he did not disclose was the nature of his blatantly white supremacist writings that appeared in a newsletter called American Renaissance. In the...
The Reign of Grantham
“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.” —T.H. Huxley Media commentators covering David Cameron’s incumbency as Tory leader have remarked—often gleefully—on how unpopular Cameron’s Labour-like policies are with the “traditional right.” By this, they mean the Thatcherite rump of the party (probably still the numerical...
New Blood
The modern age has known many false prophets who have challenged the moral and spiritual beliefs of the Christian faith. Although churchmen have not always been vigilant in defense of traditional religion, one institution able to resist the secularizing trends of the 19th and 20th century has been the Catholic Church. But it has not...
On Anti-Orthodoxy
James Jatras has attempted to define the nature and cause of anti-Orthodox sentiment among opinion-makers in the West in his February article “Pravoslavophobia.” There is certainly a degree of prejudice in the mundane sense of a bias based on ignorance, and this is compounded by the tendency of journalists and politicians to frame the complexities...
Old Progressives Don’t Die
Surprisingly enough, in many ways journalist and commentator John T. Flynn was a typical progressive. Long a figure of prominence on the American right, he was not politically active in the time of Woodrow Wilson, whose domestic policies he much admired. He did, however, first gain prominence as a muckraker denouncing the financial chicanery of...
Rise of the Alt-Left: After This, the Deluge
Images of those traumatized by the election of Donald Trump are indelible. I mean specifically the sight of empaneled experts, red-eyed, choking, and stuttering as they said things like “CNN is now prepared to call the state of Wisconsin for Donald Trump.” Or of rainbow mobs of sign-wavers in urban centers declaring (absurdly and solipsistically)...
Diagnosing the Right as Pathological
While President Joe Biden was supposed to turn down the temperature and restore normalcy to our political life, rhetoric from those in power increasingly echoes with dark references to “homegrown terrorists” and “extremists” emerging from a process of radicalization. For months after the inauguration, the ruling class maintained Washington, D.C. as a fortress city, complete...
Answering Islam
Americans find it difficult to understand the Islamic threat. It is not just that they have made the mistake of listening to presidential speeches on the “religion of peace” or dulled their wits reading the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. The fault does not lie exclusively or even primarily with American schools,...
Political Art and Artful Politics
We speak as readily of the art of politics as we do of the art of cooking or writing, and what we have in mind in each case is what the French call savoir faire. This sense of “art” claims excellence for the activity of which the term is predicated, and since to know what...
Franklin Pierce and the Fight for the Old Union
If Franklin Pierce is remembered at all today it is as an inept, do-nothing President whose only accomplishment was to sign the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. Historians generally cite this bill, along with the 1857 Supreme Court decision in the Dred Scott case, as evidence of the aggressive designs of the South to extend slavery...
History Lessons
As I write I have in front of me a number of statements, articles, and conference projects—and more are coming to my attention almost daily—indicating what amounts to an invasion of Eastern and Central Europe by Western zealots, do-gooders, investors, gurus, and sharks. They emanate from American and West European offices, banks, institutes, universities, and...
The Fortune Teller
“I don’t want to be married any longer.” “What does that mean?” “What I said.” “You don’t love me.” “I don’t love anybody.” “You loved me. Or said you did.” “Nobody’s responsible for what they said twenty-five years ago.” “I love you.” “I wish you wouldn’t.” “Am I so tough to get along with?” “Not...
Film Rose, Film Rouge, Film Noir
“All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun.” —Jean-Luc Godard In 1947, an executive director of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals deplored the “sizable doses of communist propaganda” in many films of the day. Leaving aside the question of whether “American ideals” could be identified—much...
To Be Or Not to Be Western Civilization
Shakespeare and the Idea of Western Civilization, by R.V. Young, is an invaluable defense of Shakespeare against modern anti-Western critics.
Beautiful Losers
When T.S. Eliot said that there are no lost causes because there are no won causes, he probably was not thinking of American conservatism. Nearly sixty years after the New Deal, the American right is no closer to challenging its fundamental premises and machinery than when Old Rubberlegs first started priming the pump and scheming...
Updike’s Grandfather
“Our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never be cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it cannot live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish.” —President James Buchanan, 1860 A poll of American historians, not long ago, chose James Buchanan as “the worst”...
Angels From the Time to Come
Certain moments in a good story possess a quality that is logically very strange indeed, and that renders them often haunting and unforgettable. Consider Dorothea’s choice of Ladislaw as her lover in Middlemarch: the logic of fiction would dictate that Dorothea should pair up with Lydgate, who is a heavyweight like her, and if after...
The Fall of Lord Blackadder and Lady Manolo (of Blahnik)
Mark Steyn once told me a revealing story about Conrad Black’s “conservative” Canadian national newspaper, the National Post. It seems star columnist David Frum had ventured this evaluation: “The Post has a problem. It was started to save Canada, but Canada isn’t worth saving.” Ah, the authentic voice of the Canadian neoconservative! Or, as English...
New World Disorder
The Berlin wall may not be the only casualty of the Soviet Union’s disintegration. Recent elections in several European states have given evidence that nationalism is reemerging as the dominant political force in the West. Of course, “nationalism,” which in the broadest sense includes any assertion of tribal or national identity, is already the spark...
A Society That Has Forgotten How to Sing
When words have lost all their musical and poetic power, ultimately they lose all of their power to pierce to the heart of reality itself.
Enemies Right and Left
“Liberalism is too often merely a way of speaking.” —Oscar I. Janowsky Until the day he died in April 1964, John T. Flynn insisted that he was a liberal. Once, that self-designation had not been controversial. This was a man who, as a member of the New York City Board of Higher Education in the...