In 428 AD [sic], Giusto Traina has written a brief and engaging overview of the Mediterranean and Near East in the early fifth century. Traina, an ancient historian with a strong interest in classical Armenia, chose to survey the events of that year owing to its pivotal importance for the political and cultural history of...
Recent events raise the question whether an England that has imported so many different peoples of the world is still recognizable.
In the December issue of Chronicles, Edward Dutton writes about the peculiar self-censorship that characterizes Finnish political and cultural life (“Letter From Finland: Finland, Democracy, and Those Cartoons,” Correspondence). This reality was confirmed as the magazine was likely going to press, when the Finnish prime minister told journalists that they should not ask government ministers...
Snaking out from the Middle Atlantic states is a long distinguished line of political and literary Copperheads: Millard Fillmore, Horatio Seymour, Harold Frederic, Edmund Wilson, and the Pennsylvania duo of James Buchanan and John Updike. These men were certainly not proslavery, but they did view the Union cause with rather more skepticism than did their...
Philip Roth: The Anatomy Lesson; Farrar, Straus & Grioux; New York. Louis Auchincloss: Exit Lady Masham; Houghton Mifflin; Boston. In the opinion of Tom Wolfe, “the introduction of realism into literature… was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology. It was not just another device. It raised the state of the art to a new magnitude.”...
I’ve just returned from Albania, almost 22 years after visiting that country for the first time. In July 1991 I went there on an assignment with U.S. News & World Report, only weeks after the country’s borders were finally opened to foreigners after 45 years of hermetic isolation. I have visited many countries over the years,...
In an established literary conceit, houses become people, and people become houses: Roderick Usher and the House of Usher, Quasimodo and Notre Dame. Similarly, people become their cities, and cities their people. Parisians is not an “important” book like Graham Robb’s magisterial work of the historians’ art, The Discovery of France. But it is indisputably...
Eleven years ago, I moved to Northwest Wisconsin, a region called the Wisconsin Indianhead because it is shaped like the profile of an Indian chief I live just east of the nose. After a career of publishing magazines and editing newspapers in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, I decided to take a...
British scholar Timothy Stanley has produced the first significant biography of Patrick J. Buchanan, describing his life from his boyhood in Washington, D.C., up to the present. Stanley’s book is written in a breezy, informal manner—Buchanan is referred to as “Pat” throughout—and it makes for quick and generally enjoyable reading. Stanley gets much right in...
A review of Winter’s Bone: A Novel, by Daniel Woodrell. The Missouri Ozarks are the western outpost of Appalachia. The hills are not as high as their elder brothers to the east, but they plunge down into narrow, labyrinthine valleys, where streams of cool, green water run. The surrounding soil is mostly shallow and full...
Blue Jasmine Produced by Perdido Productions Written and directed by Woody Allen Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Grim. That’s the first thing to say about Woody Allen’s new movie, Blue Jasmine. The second is that its lead, Cate Blanchett, gives one of the best performances by an actress since Vivian Leigh played Blanche DuBois...
Jackie, Tiger, and Ellen—not as catchy as Martin, Bartin, and Fish, or Abraham, Martin, and John, but good enough to mesmerize the press this spring. In one respect, the mainstream media were right: Jackie Robinson was a courageous man; Tiger Woods is an extraordinary golfer; and Ellen DeGenerate—well, two out of three ain’t bad. But...
In an expedition that began in 1538 and endured until 1543, Hernando de Soto and six hundred men failed to discover in what is today Florida and the Lower American South that which they craved most to find—gold. Four centuries later, a young writer, poet, and novelist native to the region trained his genius on...
We Episcopalians—we’re just so special, don’t you know? We worship in such special ways. Our churches look so special, as do we ourselves—an indication of our social gifts. And when we fight, when we commence to break the church furniture over one another’s heads—at such moments we’re just, you might say, disgustingly, regurgitatingly special; so...
Immanentizing the eschaton via Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy has achieved his long-sought goal—namely, to be to 21st-century America what Bonaparte was to 19th-century Europe. In respectable quarters Justice Kennedy is considered a world-historical personage, having made the oxymoron “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. Several years ago, in a letter to the...
In 1793, the Jacobins, surfing the wave of Parisian mob violence, intimidated their less resolute colleagues into eliminating both the principle of monarchy and the existence of its politically superfluous incarnation, Louis XVI. Not content with killing a living king and pronouncing a death sentence in absentia on all the princes of the blood who...
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, recently published an article in Foreign Affairs which encapsulated the agenda of the globalist elite for the incoming Biden administration, should the former vice president be sworn in on Jan. 20. “When he first enters the Oval Office,” Haass writes, “President-elect Joe Biden will be greeted by an inbox...
One phrase leaps out of Paul Gottfried’s review of Walter McDougall’s Promised Land, Crusader State (January), and that is the strange idea than an American empire encompassing Latin America, the Philippines, and points beyond arose “without much popular opposition.” Contrary to McDougall and Gottfried, the anti-interventionist tradition started with the Founders of this nation, who...
Elizabeth Arthur: Beyond the Mountain; Harper & Row; New York. Blanche d’Alpuget: Turtle Beach; Simon &Schuster; New York. Janet Turner Hospital: The Ivory Swing; E. P. Dutton; New York. by Bryce Christensen Home, as Robert Frost observed, is that place “where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.” But...
In the Anglo-American experience, the partisans of concentrated wealth and advocates for political centralization have long been connected. Over the last three centuries, that connection has grown stronger, and in the United States this process accelerated dramatically during and after the Lincoln administration. Lincolnism, the idea that the central state ...
I once knew a lady who ran for governor of the state of Pennsylvania on the promise that, if elected, she would run the state like a family. Unfortunately, she lost the election, so we will never know what that would have been like. (I am tempted to say that it would be impossible to run...
On May 1, at a hearing on the future of Kosovo, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Democrat Tom Lantos of California, made a truly remarkable statement: Just a reminder to the predominantly Muslim-led governments in this world that here is yet another example that the United States leads the way for the...
The Oglala Sioux chief Red Cloud is generally portrayed as someone who chewed up the U.S. Army in battle after battle. He was, in the words of one author, “the first and only Indian leader in the West to win a war with the United States.” This conclusion is based on the Army’s decision to...
War talk was running high when they threw the loaded packs in back of the Gold Pony and left Flagstaff, headed north across the Navajo Reservation. Television and the newspapers had nothing to say about anything except the towering evil of Hubbub Ihnssain, while National Public Radio had suspended All Things Considered to concentrate on...
Pop pulled the sky-blue 1963 Chevy Impala out of the driveway in Wayne, Michigan. With Mom and three kids along for what our family would call our 9,000-mile trip, he jogged a block to Michigan Avenue, which, as US 12, always beckoned West to Chicago and, beyond that, to California. The kids: Johnny, nine; Caroline,...
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear Make all my memories come alive Take me away and turn back the years Sing me back home before I die Merle Haggard was a real American. At its best, his music was folk art, Americana poetry, each song capturing a snapshot of his...
Summer is the time for lazy fishing in the hot sun. That calls for a fish story. And what follows is no tall tale, although I think the moral of the story is quite significant. For I am now willing to say, without exaggeration, that catfish perfectly symbolize our great national problem. When I was...
I am running against myself in the November 5 general election. For the second time in my brief legislative tenure, I am providing constituents with “None of the Above” (NOTA) adhesive ballot stickers. Michigan election law docs not provide a NOTA option, but it does allow write-in campaigns using stickers. So I have produced NOTA...
January 8 I first came to Pisa in 1988. Christian Kopff had persuaded me to apply to make a joint-presentation of work that grew out of my dissertation on the colometry of Aeschylus. Feel free to skip this tedious pedantic digression: What is colometry? Perhaps it is better not to ask, but, properly...
With a whoop and a holler, politicians have suddenly discovered that there’s a wild animal called the American middle class prowling around, the voting booths, and officeholders are pounding down the stairs to make sure the rough beast does no damage once it gets inside the house. Almost every issue that has emerged in national...
Short reviews of His Name Is George Floyd, by Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa, and Aftershock, by George H. Wolfe.
America’s Revolutionary Mind, by C. Bradley Thompson (Encounter Books; 584 pp., $32.99). Thompson’s examination of colonial America’s natural rights political culture and the effects of the Declaration’s oft-quoted passage about unalienable rights is not likely to please members of the traditional right, and as such I consider it required reading. Thompson presents copious evidence that...
Politics and Prayer One of the high points of this fall’s campaign season was the vigorous debate over the place of religion in America’s public life. In retrospect, it may some day be regarded as the most meaningful public discussion of the question in this century. The exchange began early in the campaign when...
There’s a sucker born every minute. For just $99.00 and a used ticket stub for Wonder Woman, if you order by midnight tonight, you can enroll in a course on Healing Toxic Whiteness. It is taught by a young woman named Sandra Kim, a person of “multiple marginalized identities,” as she describes herself; with what...
Of late, our demographic soothsayers have been assuring us that by 2040 or thereabouts America will no longer be a Caucasian-majority country, and that with the eclipse of the white majority there will be, to belabor the obvious, no majority culture. For many this is cause for celebration. Among minorities, or at least those who...
Dittoheads were depressed at the end of April, when Rush Limbaugh announced his “trial separation from the Republican Party.” As in so many divorce cases, the charge was infidelity: the GOP had caved in on the minimum wage. Even though a good moral case might be made for the concept of a living wage, there...
Last Thursday the Conservative Party suffered a major blow in the general election in the United Kingdom, the third such race in as many years. It had not been due until May 2020, but Prime Minister Theresa May decided to call a snap election on April 19 and obtain a “stronger mandate.” At that time the governing party...
Hillary Clinton’s visit to Africa in late March, which was billed as a “goodwill tour” to strengthen America’s ties with developing nations, combined business with pleasure. In between meetings and photo-opportunities with African heads of state, Mrs. Clinton and her daughter Chelsea did a little taxpayer-funded sightseeing in the wilds of Uganda, Tanzania, and other...
“Down to Gehenna and up to the throne, He travels the fastest who travels alone.” —Rudyard Kipling Not as horrible as Calcutta or as ugly as Seoul, Bangkok, spreading along the flat flanks of the Chao Phraya river, is the whorehouse of Asia. Berth girls and boys will do anything you...
There are many self-styled friends of Israel in the United States who have been enthusiastically supportive of Kosovo’s independence for years. People like Sen. Joe Lieberman, Rep. Elliot Engel, Morton Abramowitz, William Kristol, Douglas Feith and ...
“Here, sir, the people govern,” said Alexander Hamilton in 1788, as he argued for the direct election of members to the proposed U.S. House of Representatives. “Here they act by their immediate representatives.” A working democratic republic was not a new idea, but what was new was putting the idea to the test. The task...
Since they first appeared in the late 19th century, professional academic historians in the United States have been pretty much Establishment men (though, in other days, they did observe some canons of evidence and reasoned argument, and an occasional maverick appeared to remind that historical understanding should be an evolving debate and not a party...
The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War; by Fred Kaplan; Simon & Schuster; 384 pp., $18.00 In 1958, former RAF officer Peter George (under the pseudonym Peter Bryant) wrote Red Alert, a novel about a communication accident that almost triggers a nuclear war. In a series of short, increasingly tense, time-stamped chapters,...
Republicans seem perfectly content to repeatedly proclaim the mass exodus of black voters from the Democratic Party’s “plantation,” only to be proven wrong time and time again.
“Though New York City has one of the most segregated schools systems in the country,” writes Elizabeth Harris of the New York Times, until now, Mayor Bill de Blasio “was all but silent on the issue.” He was “reluctant even to use the word ‘segregation.'” Now the notion that the liberal mayor belongs in the...
To understand the impact of the event known as the Mountain Meadows Massacre, it is useful to focus on the date of that atrocity: September 11, 1857. On that Friday morning, Mormon militiamen lured the members of a California-bound wagon train into an ambush. Collaborating with Paiute Indian allies, the Mormons slaughtered 120 people. Many...
In his essay on “self-reliance,” Emerson wrote that “travelling is a fool’s paradise.” He was referring to those who travel to escape the boredom or sadness of their lives, and who hope to return home somehow transformed. Yet we may add those who travel to boast (“Look, here I am at the Parthenon!” or “I...
More Americans than ever understand that the uproar over the upcoming election is less a contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and more a campaign to remain in power by what some call the deep state.
In mid-September, the original campus of Rockford’s Barber-Colman Company was named an historic district and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. It’s a fitting end to one of Rockford’s best-known manufacturing sites. Founded in 1900, the Barber-Colman Company gradually built the 15-building plant between Rock and River Streets, by the very ford in...
Hamas is a golem, a monstrous creature from Jewish folklore created from mud and made animate, which escaped his master and turned against him.