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history 51

Taste and See: A Review of Christian Poetry in America Since 1940

While many recognize the limits of human language and the ways it has sometimes been used to harm, they see language as capable of naming (or, at least, gesturing toward)…
September 18, 2023

Toward Philosophy of Birth? A Review of Natality

For Banks, the glory of natality is not that it is a passage into the world for something or someone else, but that birth is a tool for our own…

Conservatism in a Liberal Regime

These essays unite history, philosophy, and social commentary to say something about the ebb and flow of ideas which shape post-modern accounts of who we are and where we came…

Prophetic History: A Review of A History of the Island

Contemporary sensibilities tend to prefer the nihilist abyss to such salvation, even as we pathetically pursue the latest "cure" for that emptiness—be that radical politics, surgical revisions to our anatomy,…

The Cake of Many Layers: Walking a City through Time

To walk a place is to open the door to the possibility that you will grow to love it. With time, you could get to know it in an intimate…
October 10, 2022

Shame and Exceptionalism: Livy’s Subversive History for Liberty

Livy asserts that shamelessness led to decadence which, in turn, led to greed and eventually devolved into demagoguery and tyranny. His assertion that Roman liberty and equality were destroyed by…

Living When We Are: A Review of Brisbane

Vodolazkin's novels do for Time what Wendell Berry does for Space: We can't just live where we are, we have to live when we are, too. So thanks to Vodolazkin…

Calvino’s Leonia and the Weight of History

The conservationist recognizes that the society we live in, as much as the natural world we live in, was given to us as a gift with the demand that we…
April 8, 2021

Embattled: The Story of the O’Hanlon Fresco

Mill Valley, CA. As our country struggles to come to terms with its racist past—and present—a controversy surrounding a 1934 mural at the University of Kentucky mirrors the racial tensions…
October 9, 2020

The Midwest: A Place with a History and a Future

In sum, Finding a New Midwestern History is an exemplary compilation of historical interpretations both renewed and new. The enthusiasms of Garland, Wright, and Turner—registered a century and a quarter…
January 1, 2020

Turning Heritage into History

Disenthralling ourselves from the past is an American tradition, and gaining a clear-eyed vision of the flaws and achievements of previous generations is itself part of our heritage.
September 20, 2019

“Blackest Land, Whitest People”

From here in my long-time Midwestern location, these lots are unshakeable reminders of a place in Texas where a shameful darkness once surrounded a part of my childhood.
August 21, 2019

Time and Place in Eugene Vodolazkin’s Imagination

We occupants of the Porch can profitably read Vodolazkin in light of our own concern to acknowledge human limitations and find ways to live well and more fully in our…

The Monkey in the Margin: History, Tradition, and Transgression

[T]he early scholastic notion of revelation was more dynamic than the modern one. Revelation does not occur, in the medieval understanding, once and for all in the static letters of…

Notre Dame and the Need for the Past

We know now that much of the Notre Dame Cathedral survived and that it will be rebuilt. But while the fire at the Notre Dame Cathedral burned, Americans mourned. They…

Nomocracy In Politics

FPR readers can now enjoy another web magazine that complements the already excellent work of the Front Porch Republic. Nomocracy In Politics is a new website that explores Liberty, Prudence, Imperfection, and…

New ANAMNESIS Symposium: “Views on Hawthorne, Simms, History, and Progress.”

Many FPR readers will enjoy the new symposium, "Views on Hawthorne, Simms, History, and Progress," in ANAMNESIS, A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and 'Things Divine.'

The Challenge Confronting Conservatives, Pt. I

Like the football coach whose pep talks wear thin, a President who turns every cause into a holy one, every enemy into a Hitler, and every conflict into a genocide,…

Islam and America: The President’s Fictitious History

It is characteristic of the tyrant, however, that he thinks he can get away with lies in the sense that no one will contradict them even when his statements are…
August 17, 2010

Preserving Local Memory

My grandma didn’t put up a Christmas tree. She didn’t bake pies. And she didn’t make fudge. Her kitchen was silent. I believe it was her way of mourning, not…
June 4, 2010

Evidence Gone Missing

Who is following in Susan B. Anthony's footsteps: Connie Schultz or Sarah Palin? Is abortion an empowering right necessary for true equality, or an inhumane tragedy linked to lack of…

John William Corrington: A Literary Conservative

It seemed a good time to get out and leave the classroom to idiots who couldn’t learn and didn’t know better, and imbeciles who couldn’t teach and should have known…
May 25, 2010

The Duma on the Potomac, for the Greater Glory of Government

The American Bolsheviks, on the other hand, are the mad-as-hell Tea Party with their sexpot Lenin Sarah Palin, fresh from cash-cow book tour and on a First Class Junket into…
April 22, 2010

The Stories We Tell…

Philadelphia, PA. If you have read just one of Wendell Berry’s novels or short stories, then you have glimpsed this Kentucky farmer’s love for family, place, and story.   In a contemplative…