George McKenna

Legutko thinks that liberty has undergone an Orwellian redefinition in the West that has changed it into its opposite: fear of expressing anything at odds with liberal orthodoxy. Continue Reading »

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 robert j. norrell belknap, 508 pages, $35 In the early twentieth century, Booker T. Washington was the most famous black . . . . Continue Reading »

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 I taught American political thought, whenever we got to the Declaration of Independence, some student would report . . . . Continue Reading »

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 hundred pages, documented with thousands of footnotes and supplemented with a bibliographical essay of twenty-two pages . . . . Continue Reading »

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 in the Public Square by Brendan Sweetman InterVarsity, 256 pages, $19 AFTER TWO THOUSAND years, we are still mulling over . . . . Continue Reading »

The Civil War as a Theological Crisis by Mark A. Noll University of North Carolina Press, 216 pages, $29.95 Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War by Harry S. Stout Viking, 576 pages, $29.95 Nothing in American history”not the Revolution, not the Second World . . . . Continue Reading »

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 applied only to areas in actual rebellion against the Union—places not in control of federal forces. I . . . . Continue Reading »

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 downs that it is hard to get a fix on his identity. In the last century alone, he went from a narrow-minded provincial who . . . . Continue Reading »

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 know Horace Bushnell?” Bushnell, pastor of Hartford’s Congregational North Church from 1833 to 1859, . . . . Continue Reading »

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 and Ric Burns’ 1990 documentary on the Civil War quoted freely from the letters of Civil War soldiers without revealing . . . . Continue Reading »