The Problem With Anne Hutchinson
Anne Hutchinson bewitches most college students. When analyzing her trial transcripts, with her clever and sarcastic repartee with Massachusetts Bay Governor John Winthrop and the Puritan ministers,…
Barrett Wendell and New England Orderly Idealism
Long after Barrett Wendell’s death, an elderly George Santayana remembered his former Harvard colleague fondly. “We were on the same side of the barricade.” Both he and…
Richard Henry Dana, Sr.: An American High Tory
Richard Henry Dana, Sr. lamented the lengthening record of misery born of Thomas Jefferson and the Revolution of 1800. Outlines of the French Revolution could be seen…
The Toryism of Richard Henry Dana, Sr.
Lucretia Mott listened with horror. In early December 1849, the Romantic essayist, poet, and lecturer Richard Henry Dana, Sr. told Philadelphians in a public lecture that the…
Boston’s Bohemian Tory
In the early 1820s in a Federal home on Boston’s Beacon Hill, three little boys played together. One was John Lothrop Motley, later diplomat, historian, and author…
The Tory Tradition
One day in the late nineteenth century, as the great English literary critic and professor George Saintsbury walked over an English bridge, two passersby looked at back…
Franklin Pierce, Political Protest, and the Dilemmas of Democracy
On the stump in New Boston, New Hampshire in early January 1852, Franklin Pierce gave a long oration during which free-soil hecklers forced him to address his…
The Spontaneous Disorder of Kansas-Nebraska
The Kansas-Nebraska Act passed 165 years ago this past spring, and as cannons roared on Capitol Hill to celebrate its passing, over the next four years cannons…
Alexander Stephens and The “Cornerstone Speech”
Anxious onlookers packed the Savannah Athenaeum on the night of March 21, 1861 to hear the newly appointed Confederate States Vice President, Alexander Stephens. He had held…
Orestes Brownson’s New England and the Unwritten Constitution
The danger of majoritarian tyranny hangs over republics. The dilemma of constituting a virtuous republic while also restricting interests, sects, and factions’ use of unchecked political power…
Were the Salem Witches justly Hanged?
On February 29, 1892, a large audience gathered at the Essex Institute in Salem, Massachusetts to reconsider the infamous Salem witch trials from the distance of two…