With Both Hands

Sign in Subscribe

History

The Long View: Millennium: A History of the Last Thousand Years

Prior to 1500, the idea that Northwestern Europe and its disapora would come to dominate the world would have seemed pretty strange. One can make a case that this is a temporary state of affairs. All of the ancient seats of civilization were in other places, and had been for

Linkfest 2017-04-21

* How Is An Emergency Room Like A Monkey Wrench? Depending on you do the accounting, emergency rooms aren't the most expensive way to get care. * LIBERALISM'S FUTURE If you combine this essay from 2016 by Rusty Reno, editor of First Things, with this 2017 article by

The Long View: Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America

Olasky's Fighting for Liberty and Virtue seems a bit like Fernandez-Morera's Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, an regrettably polemical look at an inherently interesting subject. Fighting for Liberty and Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth-Century America by Marvin Olasky Crossway Books, 1995 $25.00, 316

The Long View: Samuel Johnson and His Dictionary of Doom

Samuel Johnson may be one of the most influential figures in English orthography. Samuel Johnson and His Dictionary of Doom Perhaps the most common defense of the traditional orthography of English is that the spelling is supposed to reflect the etymologies of the words, and so gives useful clues to

The Long View: Why We Need a Philosophy of History

Francis Fukuyama's legacy will surely be his essay, "The End of History", or the book version thereof. In the narrow sense that liberal democracy does indeed seem to reflect a completion, or an exhaustion, of the Western political tradition, I think Fukuyama's thesis can

The Long View: Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds

Textual analysis and criticism of religious texts was a real innovation in the mid-nineteenth century. However, historical criticism of the Bible and the Talmud exhibits the amusing spectacle, as work has slowly progressed, of converging on something very much like the traditional account. Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible

The Long View: Theodore Roosevelt's Letter to the Government Printing Office

Contents Introduction Theodore Roosevelt's Letter to the Government Printing Office The List The History Introduction A minor mystery attends this document. Public Printer Charles Stillings says in the Government Printing Office directive of September 4, 1906, that the spelling changes are being made pursuant to "Executive order.