Historical narratives will typically note that the Magna Carta was a result of struggles between an unpopular king and a group made up of secular lords and lords of the Catholic Church in England. It’s actually a pretty complicated story which played out over centuries and also had a long prologue, but the point is … [Read more…]
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. At his website, he states: “I write about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics.” His general view of the politics seems to be describable in non-standard terms as “liberal realism”. For example, while making it clear he is far more liberal than … [Read more…]
In The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity by Richard Fletcher, we learn of the very prominent role played by aristocratic families, even royal families, in the conversion of the European barbarians to Christianity. The missionary monks and bishops and priests were often from powerful and wealthy families of Ireland and England and then Francia … [Read more…]
I had exquisite timing this summer, was well prepared to think in a rational, fact-based way about Europe’s crisis with immigrants as well as with the slower moving crisis in the United States. For the umpteenth time, I was also reminded of one of my high school history teachers: a somewhat eccentric man who was … [Read more…]
I don’t get it. What world do political theorists and philosophers, political commentators of all sorts, live in? For decades, their fellow practitioners of the humane arts and sciences, the historians, have been trying to deal with the realities of human biological existence—William McNeil, the distinguished historian from U of Chicago, was well-known for trying … [Read more…]
Fred Reed is still working away at his vocation of recent years: speaking to a mostly deaf American public about the more serious and fundamental problems confronting Americans or all of mankind in these early decades of the 21st century. That he takes himself, and his writing, less seriously than do many of our sages … [Read more…]
An article published in March by Steven Wasserman, In Defense of Difficulty and subtitled A phony populism is denying Americans the joys of serious thought., begins: It is a commonplace to bemoan the vanishing of serious criticism in our popular culture. The past, it is said, was a golden age. More than 25 years ago, … [Read more…]
See Quietly Charitable or Quietly Murderous But Always Quietly American for my take on the topic of one important aspect of American moral character. Solzhenitsyn had a similar take and summarized the situation as: Americans are a uniquely evil people. He was speaking of large-scale American crimes against Russian POWs and refugee peoples in the … [Read more…]
William R Polk has an impressive resume, summed up in the short bio published with his articles at
Shortly after I published my essay, Mathematical Models of Human History: Are They Plausible?, on the use of mathematical models in history, I saw an article by Stephanie Pappas summarizing some results of work done by Simon Powers, “a postdoctoral researcher in ecology and evolution at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.” Powers is working … [Read more…]