William Appleman Williams ( Empire As A Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament Along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative ) notes the tradition from mercantile to laissez-faire policies in the Jacksonian era: “We are dealing with the . . . . Continue Reading »
Bucking Montesquieu and most other theorists of republicanism, Madison argued that the American system required a large rather than a small territory to operate effectively: “Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a . . . . Continue Reading »
The purportedly Egyptian writings of Hermes Trismegistus, understood as an obscure historical figure in the time of Moses, played a crucial role in the Renaissance. Collected together in the Corpus Hermeticum, it was published in 1463 in a translation by Marsilio Ficino and reprinted 22 times over . . . . Continue Reading »
Describing Constantine’s deathbed baptism, Alan Kreider ( The Change of Conversion and the Origin of Christendom ) observes that “it is impressive that the church leaders required Constantine to go through all this. For many years they, faced with a potential recruit of no less power . . . . Continue Reading »
The New Yorker reviewer of A World on Fire: Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War notes that the Civil War was the American war that fundamentally changed American consciousness, and America’s place in the world: “More than our War of Independence, which we grandly . . . . Continue Reading »
The numbers are numbing. All the quotations below are from Walter Russell Mead. “In the last five months of World War II, American bombing raised killed more than 900,000 Japanese civilians, not counting the casualties from the atomic strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This is more than . . . . Continue Reading »
Without American missionaries, no Transcendentalism, says Mead (almost): “Missionary endeavors to translate the sacred writings of other faiths into English may have been for the purposes of arming Westerners for religious controversy with the heathens, but the ideas of those texts quickly . . . . Continue Reading »
Mead again: “After [World War II], General MacArthur’s reconstruction of Japan was essentially an implementation of the missionary program at the point of bayonets. The traditional ruler gave up his claim to divinity; freedom of religion was established; feudalism was abolished and land . . . . Continue Reading »
Mead highlights the role of American missionaries not only in hte formation of a moral Wilsonian foreign policy, but in the creation of “global civil society.” He goes so far as to suggest that the “very concept of a global civil society comes to us out of the missionary . . . . Continue Reading »
Mead again: “Jefferson’s dispatch to Tripoli and Algiers of a punitive mission against the Barbary pirates was the first but by no means the last such expedition sent out by American presidents. The village of Quallah Battooo on the coast of Sumatra was shelled and burned by an American . . . . Continue Reading »
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