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It is a commonplace among American conservatives that, at some point in the past, the way Americans understood their constitutional and cultural tradition diverged from the reality of the constitutional order established in 1787.  For the Southern Agrarians and their intellectual descendants, the great change occurred with the Civil War, which elevated “union” over the...

The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1995) by Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey Catholic University of America Press 168 pp., $19.95 Ask the average American what  his country stands for and he will likely answer “equality.” If that person studied a bit of American history, he or she would then cite the...

When Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was first passed, “help wanted: men” and “help wanted: women” ads were common in newspapers.  Private employers could hire and fire for discriminatory reasons.  Title VII made discriminatory ads and the hiring practices they represent illegal.  In their new book, Unequal, two law professors, Sandra...

A few months after the close of the American Civil War there was a brief but intense and interesting correspondence between Lord Acton, the European historian of liberty, and General R.E. Lee, hero of the defeated Confederacy, on the issues of the war. In the course of this correspondence Acton commented that Appomattox had been...

“I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.” —Daniel Webster In the spring of 1963, my sister and I were invited, along with my parents, to a dinner party given by White Russian friends at their penthouse apartment in Manhattan, whose tall mahogany-framed windows overlooked lower Central Park. ...

Disconnected is not an amusing book.  The subtitle’s “digitally distracted” doesn’t hint at its grim findings.  This short text—a long one might be too dispiriting—is nevertheless lengthy enough to expose the digital revolution as an outright calamity, though the author generally eschews the apocalyptic tone.  Of course, there is the familiar boast that children now...

In her Preface to this collection, Catharine Savage Brosman tells the reader that these essays are of three kinds: recollections of her own life and family, commentaries on literature, and examinations of the current state of American culture.  Taken together, her essays, Brosman says, are “an exercise in seeing the world, even feeling it, and...

In the beginning, the poetic birth of the city becomes visible in the Iliad in the warrior camp of the Achaeans, in what Pierre Manent calls—in one of his most striking formulations—the “republic of quarrelsome persuasion.”  We are not, of course, concerned here with the city as defined by, say, urbanology or archaeology, but with...

One of the less appreciated perils of literary fame is the risk a writer runs every hundred years as the anniversary of his birthday approaches.  This year marks the 200th birthday not only of Darwin but of Lincoln, a completely irrelevant coincidence that inspired Smithsonian—the trivializing newsletter of “the nation’s attic”—to celebrate the two men...