Tag: Civil War
A Local Look at the Meanings of the Founding: A Review...
After excluding less plausible interpretations like Roosevelt’s, I think the Old Testamentish version of the Founding is the most defensible: the Founders left us some good principles which later were often disregarded, but which brave men and women in later eras fought for, often with success.
Hard Times, Landscape, and Memory
The memory of pain has the power to protect our joy. The land, the place, the names, the people; these are what connect us to today and to every past day.
Patriotic Work: Wendell Berry’s The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and...
No one can be whole alone; no one can be free alone. Rather, Berry holds that “[t]o be whole and free is…to be at home in a place and in a community where one knows and is known,” and where its boundaries include soils, waters, plants, and animals.
The Most Polarized Era Ever?
In selecting reading material, the average reader might not immediately reach for a book about Congress in the nineteenth century. That would be a...
Two Degrees of Separation
Henry County, Kentucky. Last week here we buried our 97-year-old neighbor, a woman named Thelma Chilton Moody Clark. Until this spring she had never...
With Malice Toward None (Well, Maybe Toward the Thought Police)
Check out this exceptionally fine speech http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ronald-maxwell/on-the-occasion-of-presid_b_212674.html by film director Ron Maxwell (Gettysburg, Gods and Generals), who refused to allow William ("inherited utility monopoly...
Abraham Lincoln and the Destruction of Place
In case you missed it, 2009 is the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Earlier this week I participated in a roundtable discussion on Lincoln’s...