Some early modern thinkers saw the American Indians as exemplars of natural man, but JQ Adams believed the opposite: “Shall [Indians] doom an immense region of the globe to perpetual desolation, and to hear the howlings of the tiger and the wolf, silence forever the voice of human gladness? . . . . Continue Reading »
In a section discussing early nineteenth-century American expansion, Robert Kagan’s Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Vintage) , from which I drew the last several posts, includes several quotations from JQ Adams in . . . . Continue Reading »
Said smiling Alexander I to future President John Quincy Adams, “On s’agrandit toujours un peu, dans ce monde.” (From Adams’ diary, May 6, 1811.) A multiply revealing statement: The smile, a worldly smile, a smile of co-conspiracy; the Tsar’s evident presumption that . . . . Continue Reading »
John Quincy Adams was stung by British sneers that the US was a “peddling nation” with “no God but gold.” But we’ve shown them: The Brits are now attempt to “alarm the world at the gigantic grasp of our ambition.” This is America’s future: “If . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Among Empires: American Ascendancy and Its Predecessors , Harvard’s Charles Maier describes the trade-off that other countries have established with the “empire of consumption” that is the US. Why, he asks, do other countries, especially China, continue to extend credit to . . . . Continue Reading »
Everyone knows how to summarize Calvinism. It’s TULIP. And it’s a venerable summary, going all the way back to Dordt. Not so, argues Ken Stewart in his recent Ten Myths About Calvinism: Recovering the Breadth of the Reformed Tradition . On page 291, Stewart reproduces a page from a 1913 . . . . Continue Reading »
Walter Ong ( The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (The Terry Lectures Series) ) takes note of the much-remarked primacy of taste in eighteenth-century European culture, but Ong offers an explanation: “The sense of taste is basically a discriminatory . . . . Continue Reading »
In a chapter on the “secularization of labor” in his The Restoration of Perfection: Labor and Technology in Medieval Culture , George Ovitt traces the disruption of “spiritual” and “manual” labor to eleventh-century monastic reforms, tied in with the Gregorian . . . . Continue Reading »
Not long after independence, the US faced “its first acute foreign threat,” writes Michael Oren in Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present . Not from Britain or France, but from North Africa. John Paul Jones complained that “The Algerians are . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Kagan opens his Dangerous Nation: America’s Foreign Policy from Its Earliest Days to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (Vintage) by observing the contrast between the worries of the world and the self-perception of Americans: “Americans have cherished an image of themselves as by . . . . Continue Reading »
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