“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school . . . ,” Paul Simon mused in a popular song some years ago. Simon, of course, was in high school long before multiculturalism, Afrocentrism, Outcome-Based Education, bilingual education. Heather Has 17 Mommies, Holocaust Studies, and assorted therapeutic group gropes and mass...
626 search results for: Forgotten+History
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It’s Hard Times, Cotton Mill Girls
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,...
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Polemics & Exchanges: May 2024
Chronicles contributors and readers tussle over Japanese culture, slavery, and NATO!
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New Criticism, Old Values
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...
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The Most Patriotic Conservative
I first encountered the name Samuel T. Francis in 1984, when Joe Sobran thrust a nondescript-looking little book, published in typically amateurish format by the University Press of America, into my hands and asked my permission to review it. (I was, in those days, the literary editor for National Review.) Its title was Power and...
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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...
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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...
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Beyond the “Other Victorians”
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...
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Biden Pins His Hopes on Abortion
Democrats are desperate to make the election a referendum on Dobbs. Trump is right to refuse to resist that.
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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...
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Aaron Wolf, Memory Eternal
Remembering the significant contributions of former Chronicles executive editor Aaron Wolf on the fifth anniversary of his passing.
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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...
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Cold War, Warm Friends
The legacies of every war include controversy regarding its origins, its prosecution, its conclusion, and its material and political results. In the case of World War II, John Lukacs argues that among its major legacies was the Cold War, whose cause was the rigid division of Europe agreed upon by Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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. ...
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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.
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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The Grandfather With the Tear-Gas Foundation Pen
Hard by the railroad station at the Michigan town of Plymouth there stands a bungalow so huge as to be almost majestic, now a kennel for well-bred poodles. There I was born, in 1918. The house—which belonged to my grandfather, Frank Pierce—was one of the earliest of prefabricated dwellings, purchased from Sears, Roebuck, and Company,...
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The Revolution in Civil Rights Law
It has been nearly 30 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By banning discrimination in employment and public accommodations the law was meant to minimize the role of race in the daily lives of Americans. Its result has been the opposite. The doctrine of “disparate impact” has had the astonishing...
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More Human and More Tragic
An associate and I were waiting for a flight to Washington, D.C., flying out of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, in the fall of 1996. I spotted another waiting passenger in the lounge and made a bet with my partner, a native New Yorker, that the man was a fellow Texan. My partner took the bet, and...
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Crime Could Be the Election’s Decisive Issue
Trump’s campaign should take a page from the successful 1988 campaign of George H.W. Bush and make the facts on crime stick to Harris and Walz.
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Two Oinks for Democracy
In the year 2000, many conservatives, with or without holding their noses, turned out to vote for George W. Bush. One of the Republicans’ strongest selling points during the campaign was Governor Bush’s oft-repeated declaration that his administration would not engage in nation-building experiments. After eight years of President Clinton’s busybodying in the Balkans, where...
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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.
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The Lessons of Grenada
“To conquer tumult, nature’s sodin force, War . . . was first devis’d.” —Sir William D’Avenant Grenada’s Communist interlude has become the subject of an intense postmortem by scholars of varying ideological hues. Historically, the small island is destined to be a symbol of the Reagan years. However much the US intervention of October 25,...
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Repudiating the National 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...
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His Land, His People
“Dickinson was, in truth,” writes William Murchison, as much philosopher as writer, a man to whom God had imparted the gifts not merely of expression but also of examination and reflection. Among the large fraternity active in the cause of independence, he gave place, intellectually, to no one. That being indisputably the case, Dickinson’s inclusion...
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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...
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How Do You Know?
How much is actually known and not just supposed or imagined? A lot more, surely, than it is fashionable to think, at least in the world that moral and literary theorists seem to inhabit. So much more, that it is easy to forget how much by which we interpret the world and its texts is...
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Homesick in America
“Darlin,’” she said, “I’ll get that. Go ahead and take it.” She was a weathered-looking woman with mousy light brown hair drawn back in a bun and the plain, honest look of one of those faces you see in Depression-era photos from the Dust Bowl, faces that don’t smile—they are just themselves, making the best...
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What We Wish Donald Trump Would Say to Prime Minister Netanyahu
A transcript of the conversation Donald Trump ought to have had with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his visit to Mar-a-Lago.
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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...
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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...
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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...
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The Meaning of Decadence
When people speak of a society being “decadent,” they commonly understand decadence in terms of standards of personal behavior and the sense of morality, or want of it, that behavior expresses. For conservatives, personal morality begins with sexual morality grounded in revealed religion; for liberals, with what they call an “ethical” approach to human relations...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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The Future of Politics
It is a healthy and encouraging sign when politicians don’t know where they’re going because they have no idea what’s coming next, which pretty much describes the state of politics in the West today. Among the various political groupings, only liberals know where they wish to go—and that is simply where they’ve been going for...
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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,...