1115 search results for: Forgotten%2BHistory

“After all, money, as they say, is miraculous.” —Thomas Carlyle The economics profession, like many other branches of the social sciences, long ago had to decide whether to adopt positivist methods, as if its objects of study were organisms of constant and predictable motion, or to account for the infinite variety in human affairs by...

“I came to cast fire upon earth; and would that it were already kindled!” —Luke 12:29 In order to mark the 15th anniversary of Pope John Paul II’s election to the Papacy, Italian Radio and Television commissioned Vittorio Messori to conduct a live television interview with the Pope. It must have seemed a good idea...

Ever since the cinéaste Nino Frank first used the term in France in 1946 (he never said he invented it), there has been considerable controversy about the meaning of “film noir” and various attempts to define it, some more or less authoritative. The essential arguments have been usefully collected in Silver and Ursini’s Film Noir...

        “The pure products of America go crazy.” —William Carlos Williams The go-to-hell attitude, unique features, and deceptive talent by which we know Robert Mitchum (1917-1997) were the product of his heredity and experience. His father was a Scotch-Irish South Carolinian with some Amerindian blood—he died young in a railroad accident. His...

To call something “Victorian” is, in left-liberal parlance, to say that you don’t like it.  The fact that hardly anything routinely called “Victorian” accurately characterizes the era of Queen Victoria’s long reign, from 1837 to 1901, is one of the great historiographical tragedies of the 20th century.  Thus, when a large number of African bishops...

That imperial anthem, the hymn of the U.S. Marine Corps, is today somehow an obscure exercise.  The halls of Montezuma? The shores of Tripoli?  Our gum-popping, Gucci-schlepping youth can no more respond to its referential difficulties than could the Ivy League-credentialed savants of the War Party.  What’s more, the pseudopatriots would be shocked to know that...

Between the eighth and sixth centuries B.C. there appeared the polis, the Greek city-state, an elusive entity which nurtured and defined ideals still central to Western European views of all that is “civilized.” How did the Greeks, up until then an unimportant and generally poor folk on the margins of Mediterranean society, manage this miracle?...

“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...

“If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled.” —Robert Burton Who now reads Alfred Kinsey? Almost no one. Who now remembers the great media event set off in 1948 by the publication of his “monumental” book of 804 pages on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male? Most Americans over 40 probably do, while...