War has been described as the most successful of all of our cultural traditions, a dehumanizing reality confirmed by Ernest Hemingway when he once observed that many a good man “will die like a dog for no good reason.” As a hand-me-down...
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...
“I won a ticket for a dream house,” my mother tells me on the phone. “It cost a hundred dollars to buy. It’s a gorgeous house. Brand new and big big. If I win, I’ll give it to you. Then you and Allen can move here and live in it.”
Future historians who try to assess contemporary developments in Greece may be inclined to give a great deal of weight to the military junta that ruled the country from April 1967 until July 1974. They would be wrong. The junta, born in...
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...
Once upon a time, a French academic domiciled in the United States thought it would be a good idea to mark the opening of his university’s newly instituted Humanities Center by holding a conference on Structuralism, the philosophic system...
Historians looking back at the tragic events of September 11 will discover the roots of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon originating in three episodes that occurred in 1979. The first event was the Iranian...
Turn to the Edgar Lee Masters entry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations (I happen to be looking at the 14th edition, published in 1968, the centennial anniversary of Masters’s birth), and you will find brief quotations from five poems that...