Darryl Hart

The Bar Jester Not Only Is But Sounds Funny

May 9, 2013

Find out why here (thanks John Fea).…

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Second-Hand Sex

1354114_cherub April 2, 2013

Hillsdale, Michigan…. Perhaps it is a function of having been reared by two alums of Bob Jones University — where, let’s be clear, I did NOT go — but I continue to be amazed by the modern West’s nonchalance

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The Wonder of Liberal Education

Septem-artes-liberales February 25, 2013

Having had a day off last week in honor of the past presidents, I am loathe to disagree with former presidents (in this case, of the American Historical Association). But a post on the value of liberal education (via John…

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The Learning and Limits of Libraries

office library January 17, 2013

Three articles recently caught my eye, all of which having to do with scholars’ fame, only two having to do with their libraries.
The bookless one involved a professor of history at the University of York who blamed the victims…

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From Culture to Party Wars?

January 1, 2013

Among the various postmortem evaluations of the November election, R. R. Reno’s at First Things (“The New Secular Moral Majority,” December 2012) caught my eye:
The Democratic party is very likely to become more and more dependent on Nones (20…

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Do Conservatives Need to Belong to A Minority to Get an Academic Job?

December 18, 2012

Jonathan Zimmerman thinks the answer is yes (thanks to John Fea):
At Columbia University, 650 employees wrote checks for the Obama campaign, while only 21 made donations to Mitt Romney. And at Brown, 129 faculty members gave to Mr. Obama,…

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Excluding Religion from Public Life is Tricky

December 16, 2012

Protestant conservatives of the Religious Right variety may be surprised to know that the strongest arguments for undressing the public square (of religious garments) came from Protestants. Whenever Roman Catholics wanted public funds or support for parochial schools, from the…

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Do You Have to be Old to be Conservative?

December 14, 2012

Most readers know the line (attributed to Winston Churchill, I believe), if you’re not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. And if you are still a liberal at forty, you have no brain. The recent conference at the…

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What’s Paleo About Evangelicalism?

seat at the porch October 31, 2012

The Baylor University historian, Thomas Kidd, wrote a post recently in his regular column at Patheos about evangelicals who are neither liberal nor comfortable with the GOP. He referred to this group as “paleo evangelical” and mentioned that some of…

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The Passing of Two Great Intellectual Historians

Clio October 12, 2012

News of the passing of Gene Genovese and Henry May took the wind out of these aging sails. In addition to reading these historians while in grad school almost thirty years ago, I knew both of them and befriended a…

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Intellectual Historians on Intellectual Conservatism

Kirby Hall October 10, 2012

Seth Bartee over at the U.S. Intellectual History blog has a piece on the Intercollegiate Studies Institute which includes a reference or two to FroPo conservatives:
Essentially neo-conservatives successfully homogenized conservatism by getting rid of what they considered the racist…

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Historian on the Debate

president-obama-and-gop-nominee-mitt-romney-share-a-laugh-during-the-first-presidential-debate-on October 4, 2012

The blogosphere is filled with opinions on last night’s debate between the president and the challenger. The chattering classes has gotten a whole lot larger. Unless you are a historian and follow the posts at the History News Network, you…

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Walter McDougall on American Exceptionalism

mcdougallw September 20, 2012

In the afterglow of last weekend’s gathering of Porchers, which featured a panel on American exceptionalism, a piece by Walter McDougall over at the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s website comes at a good time. (Is there ever a bad one…

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Senior Moment

Flo September 4, 2012

If Virginia is for lovers (what an odd campaign that was), Michigan should be for duffers. I understand why some FroPo’s may object to the sport alleged to spoil a good walk — golf. It wastes water, ties up productive…

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Firm Identities and Loose Borders

Drinkability_Bud_Lightjpg June 29, 2012

Hillsdale, Michigan.… A drive back from New England to the upper mid-West on Tuesday gave me ample time to hear the journalistic accounts of the Supreme Court’s decision on Arizona’s immigration laws. The first item of note was the availability

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Egalitarian Elites and the Academic Dilemma

tocqueville March 12, 2012

It doesn’t take an acquaintance with Tocqueville to spot the flaws in many American claims about equality. Just go to school. You soon learn that an A paper is not equal to a C paper. You also learn that those…

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