What I do want to talk about is the packaging and marketing of the Civil War as part of a larger commodification of cultural desire in which the making of Turner’s film and his participation in it become exemplary. I wish to speak, that is...
In the heart of downtown Aberdeen, the tea room is the Tastie Tattie Shop. Today’s menu features tatties and chili, and the girl I give my order to is wearing a stud in her nose. Aberdeen, the Granite City, looks built to last, but the...
On October 19, 1865, Sam Clemens—nearly 30 years old, in debt, haphazardly employed—wrote a letter to his brother Orion. Encouraged by the completion of his first significant creation, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” Clemens overflowed...
In support of the revised version of childhood, Nicholas Orme, who holds a senior academic position at the University of Exeter, and who is the author of several books on medieval schools and education, has collected an impressive amount of...
In First Monday in October, the movie that anticipated appointment of the first woman to the United States Supreme Court, Walter Matthau plays a role that amiably caricatures the late William O. Douglas. The plot is built around a...
Since liberalism is shot through with compromise at the level of political action, it is constantly in need of moral grounding. Reclaiming Liberalism’s examination of the principles set forth in the classic texts, as illuminated by the...
Andrew Burstein’s lively and perceptive book not only provides an engaging portrait of a long-forgotten age, delightfully populated with characters worthy of a novel, but it offers an extended reflection on the role of memory and history in...
The great chronicler of the diplomatic method, Harold Nicolson, once wrote that the origins of modern diplomacy can be traced to the “determinant” influence of Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu’s achievement was the development of a coterie of...
Granted, Adams’s persona was firmly wrapped in the mantle of failure—so much so that savvy readers soon suspected that he was protesting just a bit too much about his ignorance and ineptitude. Still, when he writes that “Nothing in...
