During the early 1920’s, 30 years after he had written his famous essay on the significance of the frontier in the nation’s history, the great American historian Frederick Jackson Turner published two other works on the democratizing role of what he termed the “section.” Sections, Turner wrote, “serve as restraints upon a deadly uniformity. They...
Our American government was founded on the ideal of res publia, the republic. History is filled with earnest attempts to create this ideal—Athens, Sparta, Rome—all of which served America’s founders as the intellectual backdrop for a true new world order. The original conception of a classical republic held public virtue in highest esteem. Rulers, magistrates,...