Culture
March 2016
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March 3, 2016
In 1965, James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr. participated in a public debate at Cambridge University. Under discussion was the question of whether “the American Dream has been achieved at the expense of the American Negro.” What became clear during the debate is that Baldwin and Buckley largely agreed upon the facts about the status of blacks in America. Both parties agreed that black people had achieved some modest social and material advances since...
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March 3, 2016
Robert Wuthnow, arguably the dean of sociologists of religion, presents in his numerous books a brilliant amalgam of quantitative and qualitative information based on interviews and archival materials. He also has worked with the Gallup Organization and the Pew Foundation and has served on the board of the General Social Survey. He seems dubious about the phrase “American religion”—hence his title suggesting it is something invented—when based only on polling...
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March 3, 2016
This deeply researched and wide-ranging study advances our knowledge of early modern history in diverse and yet complementary ways. On the one hand, Noel Malcolm makes some important contributions with regard to several recent scholarly trends, including studies of borderlands and frontiers between diverse cultures, religions and empires. These encounters typically included both collaboration and confrontation, whether on the individual or collective level,...
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March 3, 2016
The lure of high-end historical fiction—Gore Vidal’s “Narratives of Empire” series, to cite one popular example, or even a movie like “Lincoln”—is the sharing of secrets: The author tells us things we could not otherwise have known, insights and revelations “kept” from us by the limitations of the historical record—the same historical record that provides the story with its plausibility. The key to the success of these narratives is that we viewers and...