Bringing Aristocracy in America into dialogue with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America can help historians to better understand the nature of the conflict between “aristocracy” and “democracy”—an issue that may be more relevant even in our own time than many had thought. When Alexis de Tocqueville published the first volume of his Democracy in America in […]
Archives for February 2017
Bridling the Unbridled: The American Constitution and The Presidency of Donald Trump
Whatever one may think of President Trump, perhaps the greatest hope for Making America Great Again is not found in a particular president but in the American people’s own charter of government: The Constitution of the United States. H.L. Mencken famously defined democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want, and […]
History Without Reading
Recognizing, and acting, on the reality of student life as it is currently lived means imagining a world without books—broadly construed—as a means toward preventing their disappearance. “I cannot live without books,” Thomas Jefferson famously wrote John Adams in 1815. Jefferson did not believe the American republic could survive without books—or without people to read […]
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin
On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in Hardin County, Kentucky; and Charles Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England. The coincidence of their being born on the same day might lead us to think about the points of similarity in their lives. William Herndon was Lincoln’s friend and law partner, and he wrote one […]
Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration
An interview with Carson Holloway, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, about his recent book Hamilton versus Jefferson in the Washington Administration: Completing the Founding or Betraying the Founding? (Cambridge University Press, 2015)