Writer's Block

Posted: Tuesday, May 16, 2006
There was a mystique about Richard Hofstadter, as David Brown tells it in his biography of the eminent American historian. He produced the best books (The American Political Tradition and The Age of Reform) for the best publisher (Knopf), won the best prizes (two Pulitzers), taught at the best university (Columbia) in the best city (New York) at the best time in its history (the quarter-century after World War II). It is not claiming too much for Hofstadter to grant him a significant role in the transformation of American writing about history.   [Full Story]

Grappling with God
The faith of a famous poet.
Posted: Sunday, May 7, 2006
It's a safe bet that W.H. Auden would have been suspicious of the idea behind this book. True, he was forthcoming about his attraction to the Christian faith, an attraction that remained strong even during his years of professed atheism, and became explicit after his formal return to the church in 1940. He was equally forthcoming in lamenting what he called the "prudery" of "cultured people" who treat religious belief as the last remaining shameful thing, and find theological terms "far more shocking than any of the four-letter words."   [Full Story]

Right Turn

Posted: Thursday, February 2, 2006
Murray Friedman's book The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, is an effort to demonstrate that Jewish intellectuals, activists, and policymakers played a significant role in the formation of modern American conservatism. He therefore operates on a fairly large canvas, retelling many of the pivotal events in 20th-century American political and intellectual history, and along the way introducing us to important Jewish players.  [Full Story]

The Storm Over Katrina

Posted: Sunday, December 11, 2005
As the flood waters have receded from the drowned city of New Orleans, and the immense destructive effects of Hurricane Katrina from general awareness, a number of more detached and dispassionate evaluations of the crisis have begun to filter through. These point to conclusions radically at odds with what we were told at the time, which by now has assuredly engraved itself on the memories of countless millions of Americans.   [Full Story]

Teaching the Teachers
Would you like to be a teacher? Skip grad school.
Posted: Friday, October 28, 2005
A great deal is amiss in the way this country teaches its teachers. Many high school teachers come from schools of education with lax admissions standards, weak faculties, and inappropriate degree requirements. And as a means of forming college teachers, graduate education could hardly be more dysfunctional if we had set out to make it that way. In effect, most American graduate schools prepare students for research jobs that they will never have, and instill disdain in students for the teaching jobs that they most likely will have.  [Full Story]

Myth and Memory in the American Identity

Posted: Wednesday, October 26, 2005
Modern historical writing is, in many ways, a dead end. It fails to give us what we seek and need from history: a way of telling a compelling story of the nation. It fails to take into account the ways in which a nation's morale, cohesion, and strength derive from a sense of connection to its past. And it fails to acknowledge how much a healthy sense of the future depends upon what can only be called a "mythic" sense of the nation. If we are to define and restore our American identity, argued EPPC Senior Wilfred McClay in his recent Lehrman Lecture at the Heritage Foundation, we must have a deeper and richer understanding of our national story.  [Full Story]

Canon Fodder
When politics and literature meet, literature loses
Posted: Tuesday, July 26, 2005
Save your money and stay away from Denis Donoghue's new book on the American classics. A reading of this meandering, self-indulgent, intermittently strident, and consistently half-baked "personal essay" will do nothing to advance your knowledge of, appreciation of, or critical insight into the classic works of American literature. It is not sufficiently provocative or stimulating to rise to the level of being annoying. It is of interest only as an example, and a very saddening one, of just how low the state of literary studies has sunk in our time, when one of our best literary scholars could be induced to publish such a strangely intemperate and rudderless book.  [Full Story]

The Evangelical Conservatism of George W. Bush
Or, How the Republicans Became Red
Posted: Wednesday, February 23, 2005
"What I want to look at is, specifically, how the administration of George W. Bush seems to have marked a sea change in the evolution of Republican politics, in conservatism, in the present and future alignment of our political parties and ideologies, and the role of religion in our public discourse and public action. In addition, however, I want to talk about the ways that, taking a longer-range historical view, what looks like a sea change may in fact merely be the process of this administration and the political party it leads rejoining itself, consciously or not, to certain longer traditions of American political and social reform. And I will also want to ask, in the end, whether these changes or reorientations are entirely a good thing, or whether there are aspects of them that should give pause to Americans in general, and to conservative Americans and evangelical Americans in particular."  [Full Story]

The Uniqueness of the Civil Rights Movement

Posted: Saturday, October 2, 2004
For better or worse, the Civil Rights Movement has become a moral icon to the United States and much of the rest of the world. For better, because it was an admirable movement, both in its means and its ends, and one that clearly has had the effect of improving the American nation and recalling it to its own professed ideals. But, one must reluctantly admit, the influence has in some ways been for worse too. To the extent that the Movement’s example has come to be used mindlessly and mechanically as a template for all social and political struggles, its exaltation has also tended to elevate social movements over institutional politics, demonstrations over deliberations, righteous theatrics over reasoned compromise, and social history over political history.  [Full Story]

Land of Hope and Fear
Nathaniel Hawthorne and the American past
Posted: Monday, August 16, 2004
The central premise in Hawthorne's imaginative world -- his insistence that the weight of the sinful human past, in one's own life, in the life of one's family, and in the life of one's city and country, can never be denied or wished away -- is completely lost on a generation raised on smug therapeutic platitudes.  [Full Story]