Tag: Ford

Is History Really Bunk?

Recently, I was reminded of one of C. S. Lewis’s essays that I hadn’t thought about in quite a while; in fact, I couldn’t recall if I had read it. Yet, as a professor of history, I must have perused his “Is History Bunk?” at some time or other. So I checked into it as if it were a new piece of Lewis’s corpus that I hadn’t seen before. The essay is found in the collection called Present Concerns, the… Read more »

John Adams, Facts, & Brett Kavanaugh: A Primer

It was March 1770 when a crowd of Boston colonists began angrily harassing a British sentry. Soon other soldiers came to his aid. In the confusion, amidst the clamor, the throwing of snowballs, ice, and stones, and even being threatened with clubs, the soldiers misunderstood a command from the officer in charge and began firing into the crowd. Five colonists lay dead and six more were wounded. It became known as the Boston Massacre. Emotions ran high. Would the soldiers… Read more »

Bring Down the Curtain on This Theater of the Absurd

Just when we thought the Brett Kavanaugh hearings were over, the judge is hit with an eleventh-hour accusation of sexual harassment. From his high school days. Thirty-six years ago. The hearings themselves were a ludicrous display of manufactured outrage and protests as extremists deliberately disrupted the proceedings. The screaming and hysterics were carefully timed to erupt every half hour or so, it seemed. Yet Kavanaugh is the extremist? As the vote for confirmation was about to happen, suddenly Sen. Diane… Read more »

Chambers, McCarthy, & Trump

An interesting question was posed to me yesterday by a former student, wanting to know what Whittaker Chambers might think of Donald Trump. I gave him my short answer but then decided it would be perhaps insightful to provide a fuller one here today. For those of you unfamiliar with Chambers, here’s a short synopsis of his life. Whittaker Chambers, in the 1920s, became a member of the Communist party because he saw it as the hope of a world… Read more »