Much has been written about the modernization of the Catholic Church—especially the crucial years from 1870 to 1970. These histories have been written from a number of perspectives, each with different definitions of modernity. James Chappel, assistant professor of history at Duke University, gives us a new interpretation which succeeds in revising some of these...

Charles the Great looms out of the swirling obscurity of post-Roman Europe like the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria, signaling simultaneously radical renewal and an alteration of everything that came before. As Janet Nelson illuminates in her new book, it is impossible to imagine the West without Charlemagne as figurative and literal progenitor. The King of...

It is an inconvenient fact—and one studiously neglected by proponents of unrestricted global migration—that the main military participants in the politically incorrect and toxically masculine medieval Crusades were migrants. Nubian infantry, Egyptian cavalry, Armenian Turcopoles, European knights, and Turkic horsemen from the Eurasian steppes all migrated to the Levant during the High Middle Age period...

As a boy, your author lived in a working-class neighborhood just outside Houston’s city limits. My parents were the children of rural people who had come to Houston looking for work during the Great Depression. They lived in frame houses sitting on cinder blocks in Houston’s West End, a community of people Larry McMurtry called...

As a second-year West Point cadet in March 1969, I was returning to my room after chemistry class midafternoon on a Friday. As I stepped inside Pershing Barracks, I saw a number of cadets huddled around a note posted on the stairway railing. In neat penmanship were the words: “General Eisenhower died this morning.” Neither...

For a pacific, commercial republic protected by two giant oceans and two peaceful neighbors with small militaries, America sure has fought a lot of wars.  Michael Beschloss’s Presidents of War details eight American leaders beginning in 1807 who took us to war and just one, Jefferson, who didn’t. The text wraps up after the Vietnam...

The 21st century is a return to the Age of Walls. As historian and archeologist David Frye writes in his important new book, Walls: A History of Civilization in Blood and Brick, few have noticed that a new era of wall building is now upon us, driven by mass migration and Islamic terrorism. While the...

This handsome hardbound volume, an authoritative study in art history that can pass as a coffee-table book, is billed by its publisher as “the first-ever history of the representation of dreams in Western painting.” The author, Daniel Bergez, is himself a painter, and also a scholar, critic, and professor at the Lycée Henri-IV in Paris....

The World Trade Organization (WTO) has been criticized since its founding in 1995. Leftists claim that free trade places the Third World at a disadvantage, while President Donald Trump and paleo conservatives argue that some WTO policies threaten U.S. sovereignty. But what is the origin of the WTO and the neoliberal economic theory that underlies...

The first English translation of Ernst Jünger’s journals from the Second World War is a cause for celebration. The journals were like treasures stashed away in an old castle, behind a door that could be unlocked only if one learned to read German. It’s open now, and what’s inside are literary gems on every page....

Stephen Bodio is a memoirist, journalist, critic, sportswriter, naturalist, outdoorsman, hunter, falconer, bird breeder, dog breeder, and now a novelist.  Born in Boston, he has lived in the dusty roadside hamlet of Magdalena in southwestern New Mexico for more than 30 years and has published a dozen books, including the superb Querencia—the literary artist’s autobiographical...

Boyd Cathey is an 11th generation Carolina Tar Heel who was mentored by and worked with Russell Kirk.  The Land We Love: The South and Its Heritage is written reverentially, just as one might reflect on the memory of one’s mother.  For the South is not just any region of the United States, like the...

This is a massive biography of an economic historian whose popular fame rests on his having been made one of 65 Companions of Honour by the Queen while remaining a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It suffers from many of the difficulties encountered by biographers of men of thought.  Like William Howard...

There is no pleasing Duke University law professor Brandon L. Garrett, author of the death-penalty-abolishment screed End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice, though much about the current state of criminal justice should please him.  Nationwide, death sentences and executions are at historic lows, yet he claims that the...

In 2004, Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde published The Populist Zeitgeist, an attempt to define the growingly important but haphazardly applied concept of “populism.”  He had an emotional as well as an academic interest, because “far-right” nationalism had enmeshed his own brother.  His influential conclusion was that populism was an unlikable “thin ideology,” almost infinitely...

Today, a century after the close of the “war to end all wars,” the prospect of achieving what the U.N. and other such garrulous bodies call “global peace” seems ever more remote.  According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, if only we could establish everywhere the right to equality before the law, freedom of...

Dr. Daniel Mahoney, the Augustine Chair in Distinguished Scholarship at Assumption College, has written a most scholarly and challenging book, in which he argues that “humanitarianism” without grounding in faith is a danger to our civilization.  This philosophy seeks to create a “new man” and produce a “new humanity,” with roots in Auguste Comte’s “religion...

However much they may enjoy watching Captain von Trapp sing “Edelweiss” in The Sound of Music, most Catholic intellectuals nowadays are squeamish about delving too deeply into the production’s historical background.  Such reticence is hardly surprising, for in Von Trapp’s day Catholic Austria was led by Engelbert Dollfuss—a man deeply enthusiastic about his Germanic heritage,...

Of the making of books about Churchill there is no end.  The latest is the best to date.  Andrew Roberts reduces Churchill’s epic life to some 1,100 pages, offering a précis of the great events in which he was involved while drawing on 40 new sources.  These include the private diaries of King George VI...

Throughout the Introduction and into the first chapter of Ship of Fools you seem to be seated before a television screen listening to, and watching, Tucker Carlson in his nightly broadcast.  The voice is the same, the tone is the same; so is the manner.  Then, almost imperceptibly, you find yourself slipping—or rather being slipped—from...

One of the root problems facing our beleaguered world is that many of our contemporaries are belaboring the past as a burden, believing that the legacy and traditions of Western Civilization are a millstone around modernity’s neck.  Cast off the shackles of the past, with its outmoded morality and outdated way of doing things, and...

What you might find on a long walk, a determined walk, a walk of exploration, you never know, of course, until you take the next step.  And the next; and the next—in Rory Stewart’s case, across the constantly revelatory terrain of the borderlands shared since Roman times by England and Scotland. To what end?  Do...

In an age of anti-elite anger, it might seem otiose to publish an academic analysis of aristocratic ideas in Western thought.  But as the post-1945 order rattles itself to pieces, it is time to look past its bankrupted beliefs and discredited leaders for other guiding principles—principles based on history instead of ill-defined and naive hopes,...

There’s a lot of buncombe in Bob Woodward’s Fear: Trump in the White House.  Doubtless Chronicles readers heard some of it when the book was released on September 13, as the mainstream media played and replayed on the hour reports of Chief of Staff John Kelly allegedly grousing in the author’s presence that Trump’s “an...

With the Midterm Elections safely behind us, should we count on the left to renounce the fun of castigating nonleft types for their racism, sexism, and hetero normativism?  Not on a bet. We’re at a new place in the world.  I mean a world that, especially in its European components—this includes, naturally, us—has to widespread...

Author of several novels and a memorable autobiographical work entitled Our Father’s Fields (1998), as well as a leading light of the Abbeville Institute, James Kibler has produced in the present work an indispensable study of the classical influence on Southern literature.  Other literary historians and critics of Southern letters have explored this territory; however,...

British journalist Peter Hitchens is a great controversialist.  His most famous work remains his 1999 Abolition of Britain, which lamented the decline of Britain since the 1960’s, focusing particularly on the decay of morals and the rise of pop culture.  Since then Hitchens has written books critical of numerous aspects of modern British society including...

Mr. Neumayr’s comprehensive and exhaustive work, a fine example of investigative journalism, should deeply worry Catholics, laity and clerics alike. Jorge Mario Bergoglio is the first Latin-American pope in Catholicism’s centuries-long history.  He is also, Neumayr quips, “the Pope they have been waiting for,” whose messages support Marxists and Marxism, shockingly unlike the statements issued...

Reading Ann Coulter’s newest polemical masterpiece brings to mind one of her previous ones.  I don’t mean her sparkling In Trump We Trust, published just before the 2016 election (and reviewed in this magazine), in which she predicted that the unthinkable would happen.  Rather I refer to her 2011 book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob...

Last fall, when they stopped in New York on their way to vacation in Europe, Chronicles editor Chilton Williamson and his wife invited Taki and me to dinner.  Before the wine started flowing and Taki’s raconteurial skills became the primary entertainment, Chilton mentioned his desire for more reviews of books of economic history in the...

God, War, and Providence approaches the story of Roger Williams by exploring the relationship between Puritan Massachusetts and Williams’s Rhode Island, and the relations both colonies had with the Indian tribes inhabiting these regions. Plymouth Plantation was founded in 1620 by English Separatists.  The plantation system had first been employed in Ireland to subjugate the...

Two questions immediately suggest themselves regarding this work: Who was (or is) Pandora (and her box), and do we really need yet another book on World War I, detailing its causes, alliances, generals, battles—replete with maps, photos, charts and so forth?  Yes, 2018 is the 100th anniversary of the war’s end (November 11, at 11:00...

David Cannadine launches Victorious Century by quoting Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of...

“You can observe a lot just by watching.” —Yogi Berra I call 2016 the Chronicles Election.  The issues discussed in this magazine, often a lonely voice in the wilderness, for more than 30 years finally caught up with the national political discourse and got a president elected.  They are bum trade deals, an eroding industrial...