In my day, and my day was not so very long ago, boys respected and even feared the fathers of the girls whom they dated. Growing up, I went out with a lot of Italian girls. I knew that their fathers ruled their households, their daughters, and me when I was with their daughters. If...
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Arthur Ashe Lives
As widely reported last year, a statue of Arthur Ashe has joined those of the Confederate heroes that grace Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. Were the issue only, or even principally, the desire of Richmonders to commemorate the life and accomplishments of their native son, the proposed memorial would have excited little debate. But these...
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A Setting Sun
“I would rather that the people should wonder why I wasn’t President than why I am.” —Salmon P. Chase Contra Ecclesiastes, the American presidency was something new under the sun. With no explicit precedents to guide them, the Founding Fathers constructed the office and defined its parameters by analogy. In his richly detailed, elegantly written,...
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Race Matters
This book is either irrefutable evidence against a multicultural society or the last-ditch plea of someone who is very concerned with the problems posed by multiculturalism but: who wants to make a go of it nevertheless. It may well be both. Lani Guinier’s essays ask how far democracy must go to accommodate itself to groups...
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A Child of the Revolution
In his engaging biography of John C. Calhoun, Irving H. Bartlett reminds us that American political culture and the men who made it were not always as decadent and corrupt as they are today. Yet Bartlett’s book is not a partisan manifesto. He is respectful of Calhoun but not always sympathetic to his views, aspirations,...
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An Aura of Prophecy
“A republic, if you can keep it.” —Benjamin Franklin More often than not, historians of antebellum American politics lose their perspective, and perhaps their good sense, when they encounter John C. Calhoun. The other great men in the political history of the United States during that era-John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster and Henry...