AFF's Doublethink

Ramesh Ponnuru has an excellent article about libertarians and the Civil Rights Act in the current issue of the National Review. (Log-in required). Read this then read the whole thing:
Civil rights are a problem for the American Right: a political problem, an intellectual one, a moral one. In the civil-rights debates of the 1950s [...]

What? Who dares mention W. in the same breath as the author of the Federalist Papers and framer of the Constitution? Well, as I mentioned before, I’ve been listening to Empire of Liberty, a history of the United States from 1789-1816. Although there are no references to W. in the book, the [...]

It may be a pure myth that Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag at the request of George Washington. But it turns out that Ross was an actual flagmaker for the US military. Reviewing a new biography of Ross, the WSJ reports
Ross’s reputation for producing American flags lasted well beyond the Revolutionary [...]

In honor of my road trip to Philadelphia this weekend, I downloaded the audiobook version of Gordon S. Wood’s Empire of Liberty, a history of the United States from 1789 to 1816. Empire is the newest volume in the Oxford History of the United States and Wood has won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes [...]

Yesterday, the NY Times Book Review devoted its cover to a pair of novels about the war in Vietnam. One dates back to the war itself:
Karl Marlantes’s first novel, “Matterhorn,” is about a company of Marines who build, abandon and retake an outpost on a remote hilltop in Vietnam. According to the publisher, Marlantes [...]

Are liberals and conservatives coming together to add President Grant to our pantheon of heroes? This morning, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz argues in the Times,
Although slandered since his death, Grant, as general and as president, stood second only to Abraham Lincoln as the vindicator of [American] principles in the Civil War era. 
The occasion for [...]

When I was a kid, my mom bought me a placemat with little portraits of all forty American presidents (which is how many there were back then). After all while, I knew all of their names and when they held office.
Mostly by accident, I spent some time this afternoon consulting Wikipedia’s list of America’s [...]

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, on ABC:
If Martin Luther King, Jr., were alive, he would march on this White House because he would say, “Don’t escalate the war in Afghanistan. Get on the side of working people, because if you don’t, you’re going to undermine the reform agenda and the possibilities of a [...]

If you thought five books was a lot to review, try seven. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz takes on that challenge in a cover story for The New Republic.
Wilentz begins by recounting a crude remark about “mulatters” (i.e. mulattos) that Lincoln made while stumping for Gen. Winfield Scott, his party’s presidential candidate in 1952. [...]

A Dell laptop running Windows Vista is like the partnership of Gen. William Westmoreland and Secretary Robert McNamara.