Pragmatism was once called America’s philosophy. The pragmatic cast of mind was practical, even-tempered, experimental, effective. These qualities were ascribed to Americans generally, and the reading public that accepted the description...
Harry S. Truman was as ill prepared to be president of the United States as any man who has occupied the White House in the last century, yet he was confronted, immediately on being catapulted into office, with a wide variety of dramatic...
This is an age obsessed by the need for moral guidance. After God died and our faith in universal reason collapsed, we look everywhere for advice on how to find the good life. Even The New York Times Sunday Magazine has become a source of...
The era of the Civil War and Reconstruction remains the crucible of American history, the trial that decisively defined this country and its self-perceived mission. The American people seem to recognize that fact, for no era in our history...
Louis Rubin should have been with us. One year short of Street’s magic dozen, 1946—57, he abandoned journalism to earn distinction at Hollins College and then the University of North Carolina as a teacher, critic, author, publisher, and...
The publication on Independence Day 1981 of the concluding volume of Dumas Malone’s great Jefferson biography has inspired almost as much celebration of the author as reflection on the post-presidential years of his great subject. That is...
In The Beauty of Inflections, Jerome J. McGann sounds a compelling call for “socio-historical” criticism of literature. His book addresses Keats, Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade,” and the...
Many times each year the reviewer is called upon to answer the question “Do we really need yet another book about the Civil War?” Surprisingly often the answer is a tentative “Yes!” Considerable stores of new information are assembled into...
In her highly acclaimed first book, Praying for Sheetrock, Melissa Fay Greene focused on a little known patch of the large and complex quilt that is the Southern civil rights movement. She peopled it with characters who were both courageous...
