Tag: american revolution
A Yankee Apology for Reconstruction
A 2021 study of memorials in America counted 5,917 monuments that memorialize the Civil War. In that total, only 1 percent include the word slavery; Yale’s Civil War Memorial is not among that 1 percent.
The memorial stands in one of the busiest corridors on campus. Four bas-relief figures—symbolizing courage, devotion, peace, and memory—surround tablets bearing the names of Yale men who fought and died for both sides. Verses of a poem, “The Blue and the Gray,” are etched
The Forgotten Ron DeSantis Book
History works for Ron DeSantis as an argument. It would be a mistake, though, to think he doesn’t care about it deeply or hasn’t devoted serious deliberation to his own understanding of the American past. In fact, his biography indicates a great respect for the discipline. DeSantis reportedly received special praise for his performance in an Advanced Placement U.S. history course at Florida’s Dunedin High School before he graduated in 1997. He majored in history at Yale during some
The Tech Industry Is in Its Whistleblower Era
When the hacker turned corporate-cybersecurity specialist Peiter Zatko went to work for Twitter in 2020, he thought he could help the company improve its practices after some embarrassing breaches. But either he couldn’t help Twitter, or Twitter didn’t want his aid—less than two years later the company fired him. Last month he issued a massive complaint against it to the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission, alleging widespread malfeasance and fraud at the
David Brooks: Conservatism Is Dead
I fell in love with conservatism in my 20s. As a politics and crime reporter in Chicago, I often found myself around public-housing projects like Cabrini-Green and the Robert Taylor Homes, which had been built with the best of intentions but had become nightmares. The urban planners who designed those projects thought they could improve lives by replacing ramshackle old neighborhoods with a series of neatly ordered high-rises.
‘Foundation’ Has an Imperialism Problem
This article contains spoilers through the first season of Foundation.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is perhaps the definitive expression of mid-century American liberalism. Certainly nothing from the academy can approach its popular influence. When David S. Goyer—the mastermind behind Apple’s extravagant TV adaptation, which wraps up its first season today—declared Foundation “the greatest science-fiction work ever written,” he was not indulging in prerelease hyperbole so much as reciting the official record. The Hugo Awards voted Foundation as the field’s
Why Don’t the French Celebrate Lafayette?
Lafayette, like Betsy Ross and Johnny Appleseed, is so neatly fixed in the American imagination that it is hard to see him as a human being. Betsy sews stars, Johnny plants trees, Lafayette brings French élan to the American Revolution. He is, in the collective imagination, little more than a wooden soldier with a white plume on his cocked hat. In the original production of “Hamilton,” Daveed Diggs portrayed him affectionately, with a comically heavy French accent and an amorous