Archive
More than thirty years of First Things articles at your fingertips.
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Articles
Reclaiming a Positive Vision of Liberty
Over the past two and a half centuries, the word “liberty” has become talismanic in the West. At least two revolutions, the French and the American, were fought in...
The Return of Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington and the Struggle Against White Supremacy by david h. jackson jr. palgrave macmillan, 260 pages, $58.46 Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington by...
Someone’s Property
Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism by Peter C. Myers University Press of Kansas, 265 pages, $34.95 As predictably as the calendar pages turn, each time...
Manifesting Destiny
What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815“1848 by Daniel Walker Howe Oxford University Press, 928 pages, $35 This is a big, big book of more than nine...
A Religious People
A Secular Faith: Why Christianity Favors the Separation of Church and State by Daryl Hart Ivan R. Dee, 288 pages, $26.95 Why Politics Needs Religion: The Place of Religion...
The Blue, the Gray, and the Bible
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Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation
Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves. Or so I was taught in grade school. Later, of course, I became much more knowledgeable and sophisticated. I learned that Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation...
A Conservative Innovator
Jonathan Edwards: A Life by George M. Marsden Yale University Press. 615 pp. $35 Since Jonathan Edwards’ death 245 years ago, his reputation has undergone so many ups and...
The Puritan as Yankee: A Life of Horace Bushnell
The name of Horace Bushnell (1802-1876) was so well known in nineteenth-century America that when residents of Hartford, Connecticut, visited other cities they were often greeted with, “Do you...
While God Is Marching On: The Religious World of Civil War Soldiers
Reviewed by George McKenna In the preface to While God Is Marching On , Steven E. Woodworth, an associate professor of history at Texas Christian University, recalls that Ken...
Transgressing the Bounds: Subversive Enterprises Among the Puritan Elite in Massachusetts, 1630-1692
Historian Perry Miller began his monumental reexamination of American Puritan thought with Orthodoxy in Massachusetts (1933). In patient labor over the next thirty years, Miller sketched out the lineaments...
A New Birth of Freedom: Abraham Lincoln and the Coming of the Civil War
In the preface to Crisis of the House Divided , his 1959 work on the Lincoln“Douglas debates of 1858, Harry Jaffa, who had just turned forty, announced that the...
How the Evangelicals Saved America
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Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President
When Abraham Lincoln entered a nearly empty Richmond, Virginia, on April 4, 1865, black dock workers crowded around him, hailing him as a messiah. Shocked, Lincoln said, “Don’t kneel...
The “Dualities” of Thomas Jefferson
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