On the Fourth of July near the end of the 18th century, citizens of Boston paraded into the church that gave birth to the first Tea Party movement. The city’s board of selectmen, the executive arm of the town government, had announced that Congressmen John Lowell, a Harvard-educated lawyer and notable of the founding generation,...
Eugene Genovese was one of the most influential and controversial historians of his generation. Whether Genovese ever self-identified as a conservative remains an intriguing question, without a simple answer. Few people knew him better than I did. In his teens, Genovese, the son of a Brooklyn dockworker, had joined the Communist Party USA. It eventually...
“The world has never had a good definition of liberty.” —Abraham Lincoln Food lines lengthen in Moscow; show trials continue in Beijing; bicycles replace motor vehicles in Havana. As the Warsaw Pact and Berlin Wall crumble, so does the standing of Mao and Che, even on college campuses. The closing of this millennium may not...