I met Joe Sobran in 1973 when I was working as history editor at St. Martin’s Press and had begun writing for National Review. I don’t remember how exactly, but the occasion must have been one of the open-house cocktail parties at the magazine’s offices at 150 East 35th Street, held every other Wednesday evening...
626 search results for: Forgotten+History
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In Focus
Signals of Strength Charlie A. Beckwith and Donald Knox: Delta Force; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. This warrior’s account will leave its mark above all as hero saga in a land by no means lacking in heroes but oblivious and often antagonistic to their deeds. Nor will it be forgotten as testimony in a vituperative...
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The Coming Belgoslavia?
What was meant to grow separately cannot last long as an artificial whole. This prehistoric wisdom seems to be forgotten by advocates of multiculturalism—which is just a misleading euphemism for polyethnism and multiracialism. The unpredictable side of multiracial conviviality seems to be deliberately overlooked by political elites in multiethnic and multiracial Belgium, a miniscule country...
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A Sense of Place
I was born and reared in a small Michigan town known as the home of both Gen. George Armstrong Custer and the La-Z-Boy chair company, an accident of local history most people in town do not find strange. The juxtaposition of the annihilation of Custer’s forces at the Battle of Little Big Horn with the...
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Jihad’s Fifth Column
No one on the planet, by now, has not heard of the violence that greeted Pope Benedict’s references to Emperor Manuel II and his reflections on Islam. Manuel, invariably (and unfairly) described as “obscure” or “forgotten,” lived in one of those interesting ages of the world that teach lessons to those who are not blind...
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Death on a March Afternoon
Today, the remarkable life of Capt. Francis Warrington Dawson is little more than a footnote in the history of an era that brought an end in the South to Reconstruction and saw the advent of the “Redeemers” and their Conservative Regime. But in the 1870’s and 80’s, Dawson, founder of the Charleston News and Courier,...
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Who Is Pete Schaub?
When Pete Schaub, a business major in his senior year at the University of Washington at Seattle, couldn’t get into an overenrolled business course for the first quarter of 1988, he signed up for “Women 200: Introduction to Women Studies” instead. He was expecting to learn about “the history of women and the contributions that...
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Band-Aids for the Corpse
In 1973 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., published The Imperial Presidency. He argued that the stretching of presidential power by Democrats Roosevelt and Truman had been necessary and benevolent, but that such behavior by Nixon was a dark threat to the commonwealth. Schlesinger’s childishly partisan and superficial tirade was soon forgotten. Time has moved on, and...
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Trump Pulls It Off
He did it. Billionaire reality TV star Donald Trump has pulled off the most stunning upset in U.S. political history. Some of us did not buy the false narrative the media was feeding the public—and understand that the fight is just beginning after Trump’s election as the 45th president, but all of us who have...
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Communitarians, Liberals, and Other Enemies of Community and Liberty
I remember a time when the terms “community” and “virtue” had almost disappeared from philosophical discourse. Working on a doctorate in philosophy at Washington University in the mid-60’s, I took a seminar in ethics from Prof. Herbert Spiegelberg, who had written the definitive history of phenomenology. One day, he observed that philosophers no longer even spoke...
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Bob Mathias
One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. Although plagued by anemia, which caused him...
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The Forgotten Ideology
“Socialism will bring in an efflorescence of morality, civilization, and science such as has never been seen in the history of the world.” —Ferdinand Lassalle Modern American conservatism has been marked by a fascination with ideology. Despite arguments that conservatism is not an ideology or is opposed to all ideology, American conservatives have regularly attempted...
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Bob Mathias
From the August 2013 issue of Chronicles. One of the greatest Olympians of all time, Bob Mathias, is all but forgotten today. He was born in 1930 in Tulare, in the heart of California’s San Joaquin Valley. Robert Bruce Mathias was his name, but everyone called him Bob. Bob had extraordinary coordination from infancy onward. ...
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A Technical Point
The event known as the accident at Chernobyl will be remembered by history for the scarcity of contemporary information about it in the world at large, a degree of ignorance far more remarkable than the event itself. The event, after all, was diagnosed as an accident, which made it interesting to the antinuclear left; was...
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The Quintessential Democratic Politician
What follows is an attempt to portray not the typical statesman, as he repeatedly appeared in the course of Western history up to yesterday, but the average professional politician of our times, the man (or woman) whose chosen trade is to govern his (or her) fellow citizens. Any ruler must somehow be subordinate to the...
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A Few Days in Florence
January 4, 2014 The trip to Florence took a long and unpleasant day. It was cold the day we left, and there was so much snow it required a bit of nerve just to drive to my office to pick up a few things I had forgotten. We caught the bus to O’Hare an...
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The Quintessential Democratic Politician
What follows is an attempt to portray not the typical statesman, as he repeatedly appeared in the course of Western history up to yesterday, but the average professional politician of our times, the man (or woman) whose chosen trade is to govern his (or her) fellow citizens. Any ruler must somehow be subordinate to the...
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The End of Strong Government?
The May 6 general election in England was one of the most eagerly contested in recent history. At stake were 649 parliamentary seats (one vote has been postponed because of the death of a candidate) for which there were almost 4,150 candidates. Also up for grabs were 4,222 local council seats in 164 English local...
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Teddy Wilson and the Swing Era Vocalists
Midway through Billie Holiday’s plaintive 1941 recording of “Jim,” there is a short piano solo barely 25 seconds in length—not even a full 32-bar chorus—by Teddy Wilson. “Jim” is largely forgotten today, but Wilson’s lightly swinging interpretation of the melody is typical of his elegant, rhythmic playing, exemplary for its Swing Era sensibility, and neatly...
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On Outsourcing
As a faithful reader of Chronicles, I was sorely disappointed to see Tom Piatak’s “Outsourcing Our Future” (American Proscenium, May). Mr. Piatak takes the ridiculous but all-too-oft-repeated stance that, when Americans “lose” jobs to overseas workers, America suffers. He appears to have forgotten one of the fundamental lessons of economics: the lesson of comparative advantage,...
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The Forgotten Ideology
“Socialism will bring in an efflorescence of morality, civilization, and science such as has never been seen in the history of the world.” —Ferdinand Lassalle Modern American conservatism has been marked by a fascination with ideology. Despite arguments that conservatism is not an ideology or is opposed to all ideology, American conservatives have regularly attempted...
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Endorsing Demise
There is a distressing history of foreign insurgent groups manipulating U.S. political figures, policymakers, and opinion leaders into supporting their causes. Frequently, that support goes far beyond rhetorical endorsements. On several occasions during the late 20th and early 21st centuries, foreign lobbying efforts have led to U.S. military and financial aid being given to highly...
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Filmlog: Liliom
Frank Borzage may well be the best film director born in the United States, and I haven’t forgotten John Ford, who was also a master. Borzage, the son of Italian-Swiss immigrants, achieved much in his films that can only be understood as Catholic art, which is why his movies are ...
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American Proscenium – Gott Strafe England!
Voices are heard from the British Islands that are highly critical of Mr. Reagan’s decision to do something about that other little island–Grenada. Let us take a brief peek at what for the last two centuries has been called in history books the perfidyof Albion. Once it was a world calamity, but today it seems more...
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Sinclair Lewis
Late in life, Harry Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, figured something out: he would soon be forgotten. In a mock self-obituary, Lewis foresaw that he would leave “no literary descendants. . . . Whether this is a basic criticism of [Lewis’s] pretensions to power and originality, or whether, like another contemporary. Miss Willa Cather,...
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In Rose City, the Dream Has Wilted
Springfield's history provides important context for Donald Trump's wild tales of pet-eating Haitian emigres.
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Dirtiest Campaign in Recent Memory
Campaign 1998 was the dirtiest in recent memory. The bottom of the slime-pit was reached by Al D’Amato and Chuck Schumer, who got into a spitting contest to determine which was the sleaziest politician in the history of the U.S. Senate: Schumer won. Elsewhere, leftist Democrats pulled out all the stops, blaring the message: A...
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My Big Brother
Not long ago, while reading A.J.P. Taylor’s impressively turgid English History: 1914-1945, I found, suspended in the tepid depths of all the fussily annotated tables and statistics, a sentence that all but knocked me out of my chair. It read, “Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could cheerfully grow old and hardly notice the...
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Sinclair Lewis
From the August 1992 issue of Chronicles. Late in life, Harry Sinclair Lewis of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, figured something out: he would soon be forgotten. In a mock self-obituary, Lewis foresaw that he would leave “no literary descendants. . . . Whether this is a basic criticism of [Lewis’s] pretensions to power and originality, or...
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Filmlog: Liliom
Frank Borzage may well be the best film director born in the United States, and I haven’t forgotten John Ford, who was also a master. Borzage, the son of Italian-Swiss immigrants, achieved much in his films that can only be understood as Catholic art, which is why his movies are now mostly unwatched or,...
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A Logical Choice
Machiavelli, in answer to the question of whether a prince should prefer gold or arms, replied that arms were the logical choice since gold could not always buy a strong military but a strong military could usually acquire wealth. This answer had not changed three and a half centuries later when Kipling wrote, “Gold for...
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Mayday
Last night’s quip went round the country: “Theresa May fell on her sword—but missed.” She is indeed, like Charles II, an unconscionable time dying. That monarch however went on—though not for long—to say that he hoped they would excuse it. No such hope for May: she is already arraigned at the bar of public opinion...
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Smearpolitik
After several weeks of fulminating about John Kerry’s war record and the medals he presumably awarded himself, at least some veterans of the Stupid Party eventually got down to the real point about the man who wants to replace ...
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End American Gerontocracy
Joe Biden's latest fall demonstrates again that he is a massive liability as president. It also shows how America is suffering from gerontocratic rule, with aging Baby Boomers in their 70s and 80s dominating leadership positions.
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Still In Saigon—In My Mind
“The earth outside is covered with snow and I am covered with sweat. My younger brother calls me a killer and my daddy calls me a vet.” So the Vietnam veteran appears in a popular song recorded a few years back by Charlie Daniels (written by Dan Daley). The Vietnam War is over, but the...
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Homo Sovieticus Lives On
To the old popular proverb, “The only good communist is a dead communist,” we should perhaps now add: “Once a communist, forever a communist.” Although as a muscled ideology communism is dead, as a way of life it is still very much alive. Similar to any other past and present mass belief or theology, communism...
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Hold the Gush
Like Virginia Woolf and Mary McCarthy, Rupert Brooke and Bruce Chatwin, Edna St. Vincent Millay’s striking appearance greatly enhanced her literary reputation. Readers were drawn to her poetry by her good looks and notorious sexual behavior. When she lost her health and beauty and became an alcoholic and a drug addict, she lost her following...
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The Country Writer
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...
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On the Chesterton Review
The Chesterton Review continues on, after celebrating its 30th anniversary last year. Back in 1974, on the centenary of the birth of the great English writer G.K. Chesterton, a small and seemingly insignificant literary journal was launched in England in honor of his memory. At the time, it seemed that the memory was fading. England,...
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White Guys and 9/11
Whiteness and maleness lately have been under constant attack. It’s worth remembering that 23 years ago our culture celebrated four white male heroes who stopped a terrorist attack in the skies above Pennsylvania.
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The President’s President
“Politicians neither love nor hate. Interest, not sentiment governs them.” —Chesterfield Richard Nixon’s second term as president ended over two years early with his resignation on August 9, 1974. Someday, when President Reagan’s papers and telephone logs are made public, I think they will reveal that Nixon completed his presidential term in the second Reagan...
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Burying the Hatchet
What now are called “the Indian wars” ended about a century ago, and the participants in those battles are dead without exception. After 1886, when Geronimo and his band surrendered, there were no more off-reservation wild Indians. Native Americans had become an administrative, not a military problem. The reservations would become a policing system where...
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A Hallucinogenic and Unrepentant Rant
Christine Blasey Ford, the accuser in the infamous 2018 confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, has written an unrepentant and incoherent book while showing no remorse for the ordeal she caused others and the nation.
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The Vanishing Craftsman
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...
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The Prospects for Peace
I returned to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) last May and July and noticed that Serbia had changed dramatically since my last visits there in late 1993. The financial reforms of a 75-year-old Serbian university professor, Mr. Dragoslav Avramovic, who has solid banking experiences in Yugoslavia and abroad, had stemmed the soaring inflation rate...
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Gigantic in Everything
When you visit a foreign capital for the first time, sooner or later you are likely to be asked the question: “What do you think of our country?” or “What is your impression of this city?” In St. Petersburg, which I had visited in May, I had a ready answer: Everything there (the worst as...
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Requiescat In Pace Domini
In any age, Samuel Francis would have been a remarkable man for the penetration of his mind, his unflinching pursuit of truth—regardless of current cant or personal consequences—and the gravity of his style. In our age, he is peerless, and his death represents an irreplaceable loss. Sam and I were friends and allies for over...
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Archduke Otto: Responding to Dr. Trifkovic
I read Dr. Srdja Trifkovic’s highly coloured article on ChroniclesMagazine.org about the recently deceased Archduke Otto of Austria with a mixture of surprise and concern. Not a single one of his sources supported the entirely negative picture that he drew. Let’s see why. “Habsburg was an enthusiastic supporter of the Jihadist side in the Bosnian civil war,...
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The Criminal State
“No government power can he abused long. Mankind will not bear it.” —Samuel Johnson The stereotype of the British journalist—and stereotypes are usually true—has an arrogant Brit arriving in Washington, rewriting the Washington Post and the New York Times for his dispatches, and spending the rest of his time in fancy...
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The Black Nationalism of George S. Schuyler
Decisions, decisions. Such is the life of a black man in America today. Whether to be a black nationalist, a black Muslim, an Afrocentrist, or simply a color-blind Christian—a.k.a. an “Oreo,” a traitor to the black race. Such choices are not new; they were made by black Americans in earlier generations, dramatically in the ease...