The Great Northeastern Birthday Tour. Highlight of the month was another long car trip. I have posted the itinerary and some pictures here. This was payback to Mrs. Derbyshire, who back in June sat patient and uncomplaining through my birthday tour of Civil War battlefields. Her birthday’s in October, so we did what she wanted...
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On October 3rd, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Immigration Act. The 1965 Act did two big things, and a multitude of small ones. The first big thing it did: abolish the oldNational-Origins quotas, established in 1921, revised in 1924 and 1929. The idea of the quotas was to maintain demographic stability by...
Read MoreIn my morning trawl through the news websites, I scan the European and British ones with a growing sense of horror. Europe’s crisis of illegal immigration just gets worse. Chilton Williamson, in his recent fine essay Beyond “Immigration”[Chronicles, August 2015] described it as “national and cultural suicide. Such a thing is unknown in the history...
Read MoreEvery nation has, in its collective psyche, a special place for its bloodiest war: a place warmed with intense emotions and turbulent with unresolved—probably unresolvable—controversies. For Americans that place is occupied by the Civil War, the 150th anniversary of whose ending in April 1865 we have just gotten through commemorating. I have the Civil War...
Read MoreAll proper congratulations to David Cameron, elected last week as Prime Minister of Britain on the Conservative Party ticket. I can’t say I repose any great hopes that Cameron will actually conserve anything; but then, Britain’s not my country, so the stakes for me are merely tribal (the Anglosphere), civilizational (the West), and sentimental (I...
Read MoreWho was the great villain of the 20th century—the person most to blame for the evils of those decades? The stock answer is the person whose name is an anagram of “HEIL! OLD FART.” I disagree. It seems to me the title properly belongs to Lenin, the guy who really got the totalitarian ball rolling....
Read MoreI have been reading Paul Johnson’s new short biography of Dwight Eisenhower. This fulfills a long-standing intention of the feebler kind—a velleity, Bill Buckley would have said. Thus: In his 1983 book Modern Times, Paul Johnson made a point of talking up U.S. presidents then regarded by orthodox historians as second-rate or worse: Harding, Coolidge,...
Read MoreI have taken another trip on my syllogismobile to an alternate universe. Among the artifacts I brought back with me was A.J. Braithwaite’s History of Britain (2011 edition), a standard text for British schoolchildren in that universe. The following extracts are from the final chapter, titled “Britain since 1945.” Britain and Ireland became Soviet satellites...
Read MoreHard Road Home, by Ye Fu
Taking humanity at large, perhaps the greatest service any person of our time could perform for future generations would be to bring rational, consensual government to China. That such a populous nation, with such high general levels of industriousness and intelligence, and with such a glittering cultural legacy, should be ruled by a clique of...
Read MoreThe myth of the rational actor.
I was in England for Remembrance Sunday this year. The wreath-laying ceremony at the Cenotaph was very moving. I had forgotten how much emotion the British invest in this and how high a proportion is imaginatively keyed to WWI. Remembrance Sunday is defined to be the Sunday closest to Armistice Day, November 11, when the...
Read MoreNathan Bedford Forrest remembered.
Here is a thing that happened in the Civil War. If you know your Civil War minutiae, it’ll be familiar to you, in which case I beg your pardon. I can’t resist a good story. A young lieutenant of the war angered his general by abandoning two artillery pieces to the enemy. The general ordered...
Read MoreWhat a lot there is to know about the War Between the States!
Talk about biting off more than you can chew! Since taking up the Civil War (War Between the States, War of Northern Aggression, whatever) as a part-time study, I’ve been getting emails from friends and readers asking me what I’ve learned. The main thing I’ve learned is how impossibly much there is to learn. Goodness,...
Read MoreGettysburg: The Last Invasion, by Allen C. Guelzo
To write a book about the Battle of Gettysburg is as audacious an enterprise as Robert E. Lee's Pennsylvania campaign itself. Allen Guelzo, in this book's Acknowledgments, tells us that the 2004 edition of a standard bibliography lists 6,193 "books, articles, chapters, and pamphlets on the battle," along with a 128-page magazine, published twice yearly...
Read MoreMargaret Thatcher had some direct impact on my life in three ways that I can recall. One. In January 1979, four months before she assumed office as prime minister, I left England for a trip to the Far East. I was quite affluent at the time (sigh…) and was planning a long nonworking stay out...
Read MoreA grandchild of two coal miners loses a parent.
Following the betrayal and defenestration of Margaret Thatcher by her colleagues in November 1990, the Daily Telegraph offered for sale a commemorative coffee mug adorned with a picture of the lady. I immediately placed an order, and that commemorative mug has held pride of place in our family glassware cabinet ever since. Having learned as...
Read MoreOne set of lectures and I'm hooked.
Growing up in England, one didn’t hear much about the American Civil War. England’s own Civil War loomed larger in our education and imaginations, though it had been fought two centuries earlier than the American conflict. A key battle in our Civil War took place a dozen miles from my hometown. As school kids, we...
Read MoreChronicles of wasted time.
It’s a slow news week and I’m temporarily out of outrageous opinions, so here are my recollections of being down and out in Southeast Asia in 1972. Apologies to George Orwell, with whom I am not attempting to compete. I would not dare. It took me three months—late June to late September—of pick-up work teaching...
Read MoreRemembering a brave soldier
Here is a story from World War Two. The place is the island of Crete; the date, May of 1941. The Wehrmacht was busily occupying Greece. The British expeditionary force in that country, overwhelmed, was being evacuated. Some of the Allied troops were moved to Crete, to fortify the rudimentary defenses of the place. They...
Read More"Minister Farrakhan" to you.
That's how things went in old New England, according to David Hackett Fischer in Albion's Seed. I can relate, having just watched Louis Farrakhan's address to the Nation of Islam Savior's Day conference on February 27. Farrakhan was speaking to an audience of 18,000 followers in Rosemont, Illinois. The full video of the speech is...
Read MoreThe High Tide of American Conservatism: Davis, Coolidge, and the 1924 Election, by Garland S. Tucker III
The 1924 presidential election was, on the face of it, a snoozer. The major-party candidates were Calvin Coolidge (Republican) and John W. Davis (Democrat). Both were conservative — sensationally so by today's standards. As Garland Tucker notes in this enjoyable and informative book: "There were … very few philosophical differences between Davis and Coolidge." Both...
Read MoreOut of Mao's Shadow, by Philip P. Pan
Reading Philip Pan's fine book — somewhat late: it came out in June last year: I am sorry — I was reminded of one of those caustic jokes that used to circulate in Brezhnev's U.S.S.R. Coming up to its 60th birthday, Communist China has not actually run out of bullets, any more than the U.S.S.R....
Read MoreThe Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes
May 7 this year marked the fiftieth anniversary of C.P. Snow's "Two Cultures" speech in Cambridge, England. There were some scattered commemorations. Roger Kimball, writing in the February 1994 issue of The New Criterion, had already noted the naïvety and incoherence of Snow's arguments, yet allowed that there was a grain of truth in them:...
Read MoreKipling Sahib: India and the Making of Rudyard Kipling, 1865-1900, by Charles Allen
There are three stories to be told about Rudyard Kipling. First there is the straightforward biography, telling us what the man did and what happened to him. There have been many of these, Andrew Lycett's 1999 Rudyard Kipling being the most highly regarded of recent efforts — justly, in my opinion. For a much slighter...
Read MoreWatching the Door, by Kevin Myers
The recent killings in Northern Ireland have everybody over there wondering whether this is a dying sputter of republican terrorism, or the beginning of a new round of "Troubles." Two British soldiers were killed on the evening of March 7, when they went to the gate of their compound to accept an ordered-in pizza delivery....
Read MoreThe Poems of Mao Zedong, edited and translated by William Barnstone
The Belgian sinologist Pierre Ryckmans (pen-name "Simon Leys") was once asked for his opinion of Mao Tse-tung's poetry. He replied: "Well, if poetry were painting, I would say that Mao was better than Hitler … but not as good as Churchill." Ryckmans' quip[*] suggests the moral dilemma in confronting Mao's poetry. Imagine yourself at an...
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