Archive
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Articles
Audacious Abe
The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedomby h. w. brandsdoubleday, 464 pages, $30 r The Problem with Lincolnby thomas j. dilorenzoregnery...
The Real Sherman
The Scourge of War:The Life of William Tecumseh Shermanby brian holden reid oxford, 640 pages, $34.95 If William Tecumseh Sherman is known for one thing, it is the scorching...
Lincoln Lost, Douglas Won
Everyone on that hot, dusty August afternoon in 1858 in the square at Ottawa, Illinois, knew who one of the men on the platform was. That man was Stephen...
The Imperial Conductor
Toscanini: Musician of Conscience by harvey sachsliveright, 944 pages, $39.95 When the first instruction manual for leaders of orchestras—Johann Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister—appeared in 1739, it was a sign...
Nuanced Patriotism
I love my country – I fear my government. I first saw that mantra as a bumper sticker in the Clinton nineties. It then began to sprout as billboards and...
Play American
Just seventy years ago, a Fortune poll reported that 62 percent of Americans listened to classical music, 40 percent could identify Arturo Toscanini as an orchestral conductor, and nine...
Dissenter for the Absolute
No American philosophy has as yet been produced,” complained Charles Sanders Peirce in 1866. “Since our country has become independent, Germany has produced the whole development of the Transcendental...
Lincoln and Justice for All
“Justice and fairness” has become something of a mantra ever since presidential candidate Barack Obama told Joe the plumber that his hope was to “spread the wealth around” so...
The Prudence of Abraham Lincoln
Say the word prudence to the ancients, and you would have named a virtue. Say it to the faculties of American colleges in the nineteenth century, and you would...
Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography
While describing the Rawlsian-liberal idea of “the unencumbered self” and “the procedural republic” in Democracy’s Discontents (1994), political theorist Michael Sandel highlighted two individuals who represent the pro and...
Reparations Then and Now
On May 4, 1969, James Forman rose to interrupt the Sunday morning services at New York City’s Riverside Church to read aloud a “Black Manifesto.” The Manifesto was an...
