U.S. History

There are no “good wars,” rather, there are wars with varying degrees of destructiveness. The American War Between the States was especially destructive, and the scars have not fully healed 160 years after it ended.

The transatlantic slave trade from Africa is a well-known chapter in the history of slavery in the Western Hemisphere, but much lesser known is the enslavement of Native Americans. Many of them were shipped to plantations in the Caribbean where they were worked to death.

Edwin S. Corwin in The President: Office and Powers, 1878-1957 has argued that the Constitution is a tussle for control between the executive and legislature. It is, he claims, “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.”

Have Americans forgotten how to be free? When warfare erupted between American colonists and the British government, the colonists believed that they had God-given rights that protected them against state power. Would that Americans today believed the same thing.

A past article, presenting a “libertarian” viewpoint of nuclear weapons, has two choices, but pointedly leaves out a third choice: nuclear disarmament. According to Murray Rothbard, disarmament is the only true moral choice and also the most practical.

Though stories of the masses are valuable and insightful, the lives of magnates of industry, and the lesser magnates—such as the owner of the mine where my grandfather labored—also need to be told.

Trump has even dubbed himself “a Tariff Man.” This is nothing new, however, his frequent claims regarding the US economy during the Gilded Age need scrutiny.

South Vietnam ceased to exist as a separate country 50 years ago. What followed was an object lesson on the failures of socialism, as Marxist ideology turned Vietnam into one of the world's poorest countries. Vietnam‘s “second revolution” was successfully embracing a market economy.

When modern progressives claim to support equity, what they really mean is the confiscation of wealth and transferal of private property to politically-favored groups. These policies have a sorry history from Reconstruction and continued through the 20th century communist regimes.

Prophetic Statesmanship is worth reading as an example of the misplaced ingenuity with which intelligent scholars can defend ridiculous views. Efforts to unify Americans in the worship of the godlike Abraham Lincoln cannot succeed.