Our task is to cultivate free and responsible human beings and not contented cavemen who sing the right songs and say the right pledges on cue.
Richard Gamble
Something disappears from the past when historians seek to convict more than to understand.
Goldman reminds us that the quest for uniformity leads to coercion. The more we try to agree, the more we disagree.
Too often we would rather use the past to confirm what we believe to be right and good than to do the work of personal and national self-understanding.
Thompson's book rises to what Nietzsche called “monumental history,” but it requires a certain intellectual and historical counterbalance.
If we broaden our perspective, we see that the Progressive movement was an effort to undermine much more than just the Declaration and Constitution.
The question in 1919, and before and since, was whether such sweeping attempts at social control promoted responsible citizenship or undermined them.
The centennial of Prohibition is an opportunity to retrace our steps and consider afresh the limits of politics.
History is a form of “chastened” thought, John Lukacs insisted; and he was right.
Raw emotion (and fine prose) from some of the First World War's participants
Not only was Wilson what Bourne called a “state idealist,” but he talked about imperial war in way that enhanced the mysticism of the modern state.
