Category: History
Who is This New Man?
The rubber band of our American common life is stretched to breaking.[1] Our connections are tenuous, our politics polarizing, and our sense of civic housekeeping — where we provide for others for the common good — seems like a foreign...
The Transcendentalists and Their World
Robert A. Gross is the James L. and Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History Emeritus at the University of Connecticut. His widely regarded book, The Minutemen and Their World won the Bancroft Prize. The following interview revolves around...
Christian Historiography and American History
Over the past year, parents and conservative activists have clashed with teachers and school officials over how the history of race in America is taught in the classroom. The rhetoric on both sides has been heated, with debate centering specifically...
The Prophet of Re-Alignment: Reading Michael Lind in the Ruins of the Old Republic
It has become a tired cliché to lament the polarization of American politics, yet after a year that witnessed a post-election assault on the US Capitol, and in which even epidemiology became a partisan issue, few would contest the truth...
Why We Are Restless
Ben and Jenna Storey met while doing their doctorates at the University of Chicago. Ben is the Jane Gage Hipp Professor of Politics and International Affairs, and Director of the Tocqueville Program at Furman University. Jenna is Assistant Professor of...
The Sphere, 20 Years Later
It was love at first sight. Tall and statuesque, she cast a beautiful golden glow. To a 23-year-old Florida girl, she radiated the style and energy of my new city, and I wanted to be just like her. I sat...
Purity Culture
So when Pilate saw that he was gaining nothing, but rather that a riot was beginning, he took water and washed his hands before the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this man’s blood.” (Matthew 27:24) Our contemporary culture has...
Reading “In Praise of Folly” in 2020
From across the political spectrum, it seems the one thing everyone can agree on right now is that we’ve lost the ability to speak to each other, much less persuade one another. Our seemingly irreconcilable differences about social and political...
Honor Thy Boomer
Boomers have had all the luck of cod in a cask in recent generational warfare. Lyman Stone declared at The Atlantic that “The Boomers Ruined Everything.” Joseph Sternberg accuses the Boomer bloc of The Theft of a Decade, stealing Millenials’...
Hansel & Gretel Disenchanted: A Response to Eugene McCarraher’s “The Enchantments of Mammon”
We know the story. There wasn’t enough to eat. The children had been turned out to fend for themselves, and had, hungry, found a gingerbread house to snack on. The gingerbread boys and girls outside the house were good advertising....