History
As Rich Lowry explains in his latest column, we Americans are perpetually paranoid about our government, whether it’s the liberal paranoia throughout the Bush years (Patriot Act, world hegemony) or the right wing paranoia amongst conservatives in the Clinton years (Waco, domestic anti-terrorist laws post-Oklahoma City). Lowry explains that our paranoid view of government has…
In these times, the observations of Alexis de Tocqueville seem as apt as ever: [Government] takes upon itself alone to secure [the people’s] gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was…
ProJo scribe Ed Achorn just released a new book, Fifty-nine in ’84, which tells the story of Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn’s 1884 season with the Providence Grays when he won 59 consecutive games. Old Hoss was indeed a character, something that can be seen even in the stills captured in this video: But there’s more…
In “Strange Bedfellows“, sometime ProJo book reviewer Erik Chaput and Russell J. DeSimone explain how free blacks in antebellum Rhode Island joined forces with the conservative Law and Order party to help put down the egalitarian and populist Dorr Rebellion. [I]n Rhode Island, forces loyal to Governor King, including some 200 black men from Providence,…
It shouldn’t go unremarked that radical left historian Howard Zinn has passed away at the age of 87. Zinn, Matt Damon’s favorite historian, is best known for his A Peoples History of the United States, a controversial work that has generated mountains of debate within (and outside of) the historical profession. (He even caused a…
Peter Berkowitz reviews Patrick Allitt’s The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American History in the latest Policy Review. Berkowitz explains that Allitt helps explain the “paradoxes that constitute conservatism in America.” The questions that guide his study are straightforward: “Where did conservatism come from, what are its intellectual sources, and why is it internally divided?”…
I suppose when you’ve established a weekly shtick, you gotta keep doing it. Even when the source material is a Revolutionary War hero. So sometimes you overreach. Like comparing Rhode Island’s own Revolutionary War hero General Nathanael Greene to Lt. William Calley, the war criminal notorious for his role in the My Lai massacre. It…
Brian Wilder conveys an interesting and timely history lesson on slavery in Rhode Island, but he ends with a peculiar conclusion: Today it is strange, and perhaps convenient, how little most of us know about the extent of Rhode Island’s involvement in slavery. The least we can do is to dump a word that lost…
The beastliness of tarring and feathering has probably been the most deeply disturbing smack of history as I’ve worked my way through HBO’s John Adams presentation on DVD. During a childhood vacation, I walked through a wax museum with my parents, and although much of the attraction is lost to my memory, I still remember…