1128 search results for: Forgotten%252BHistory

All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I walk into a crowded room wearing a...

His is probably the most hated name in American history. Other villains—Benedict Arnold, Aaron Burr, Alger Hiss, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—today evoke merely the esoteric passions of the antiquarian or the interminable controversies of partisans. Only Joe McCarthy has given his name to an enduring term of political abuse, and in American politics today there...

The house is barely six months old, but it has already begun to settle. Loose steps creak, doors hang, and cracks appear along the baseboards. If I were a carpenter, as my father was for 40 years, or knew enough of such things, I would have built my own house, as he did. But I...

Having been invited to address the topic of manners, I can only do so with a certain embarrassment, for I have been known to have behaved deplorably. Indeed, I was once even called “reprehensible” by a woman of repellent aspect, remotely connected with education, but, all things considered, I felt more honored than not. I...

In February 1941, the world was at war. Nazism and fascism ruled virtually all of Europe and parts of Africa. Imperial Japan was poised to conquer much of East Asia. Joseph Stalin still controlled the world’s largest land mass, although Hitler was soon to shake Stalin’s throne. That year, Pitirim A. Sorokin, born in 1889,...

“The Anglo-Saxon carries self-government and self-development with him wherever he goes.” —Henry Ward Beecher For almost exactly 30 years, Kevin P. Phillips has been cranking out some of the most interesting and provocative works of political analysis written since World War II. In 1969, The Emerging Republican Majority argued that American politics runs through periodic...

In the midst of the ongoing brutal war in Gaza, there is something disturbingly dishonest and self-abasing about Americans claiming Israel’s military is “the most moral on Earth.”

A story long popular in London tells of a foreign visitor losing his bearings while walking along Whitehall and politely asking a passerby, “Excuse me, sir, which side is the Foreign Office on?” Hearing the visitor’s accent, the Brit despairingly replies, “Yours, probably.” This story comes to mind when we read the histories of Western...

Frustration Joyce Carol Oates: Mysteries of Winterthurn; E. P. Dutton; New York. When it’s literary gee-whiz time, people like Isaac Asimov — the man who produces books, stories, and essays the way that McDonald’s cranks out Big Macs, fries, and Cokes — are trotted out. In the face of Asimov, many literate persons, most of...

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...

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...

1959: I was eight years old. Had someone told me I would one day own and operate a bed-and-breakfast, homeschool my kids, and possess a laptop that allowed me to write instant letters to far-away friends or read newspapers from England, such predictions would have boggled my mind. “Homeschool,” “laptop,” and so on were words...