It’s worth pointing out that [Herman Melville] worked in [the New York Custom House] as a deputy customs inspector between 1866 and 1885. Nineteen years, and he never got a raise - four dollars a day,...
Why is America the last best hope of Earth? What if it's Liechtenstein? Or, worse, Canada?
When one of a culture's guiding credos is that all men are created equal, any person who, say, becomes an expert on, say, nuclear weapons or, say, ecology, i.e., anyone who distinguishes himself throu...
There are people in this country who will argue that because of the demise of morals in general, and Sunday school in particular, kids today are losing their innocence before they should, that because...
The whole thing reminds me of graduate school seminars, except these people are smart and funny and have something interesting to say.
The names of the compact's signers, including Anne Hutchinson's husband, Will, are listed below the text. Here lies the deepest reason why the Woman's Healing Garden strikes me as so forlorn - that Hu...
The internet is the nerd Israel, a place to speak and listen to spectacularly specific concerns.
The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. More importa...
That's what I like to call him, the current president. I find it difficult to say or type his name, George W. Bush. I like to call him the current president because it's a hopeful phrase, implying tha...
Once or twice a day, I am enveloped inside what I like to call the Impenetrable Shield of Melancholy. This shield, it is impenetrable. Hence the name. I cannot speak. And while I can feel myself freez...
Not that there wasn't still plenty of subduing to do here in North America. Even within our own limits, the savage still lights his death fires, to appease the wrath of an idol, he points out. What's...
No cowboys for Canada. Canada got Mounties instead - Dudley Do-Right, not John Wayne. It's a mind-set of Here I come to save the day versus Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.
Luther’s point was that, according to Scripture, salvation is not a bake sale:
Let us thank God for having given us such ancestors; and let each successive generation thank Him, not less fervently, for being one step further from them in the march of ages.
Jeff Davis’s name they’ll proudly praise, ah ha, ah ha And Lincoln’s tomb will be disgraced, ah ha, ah ha The nation’s flag will lose its stars The stripes they’ll change to rebel bars And we’ll all w...
I’ve encountered my fair share of war reenactors over the years, but I’ve never seen a reenactment of this banal predicament: a tired woman in a dark house answering a child who is supposed to be asle...
In other words, the most ardent republicans since the fall of Rome were asking their king to help them prevail over the representative legislature of the world’s oldest constitutional monarchy, the gr...
In America, on the ordinate plane of faith versus reason, the x-axis of faith intersects with the y-axis of reason at the zero point of I don't give a damn what you think.
I see plainly that America can defend herself if proper measures are taken, he wrote, adding ominously, and now I begin to fear she should be lost by herself and her own sons. The
I don't know how to describe the magnificence of Carlsbad Caverns without making it sound like a cartoon or a drug trip or a cartoon of a drug trip. The only thing I can say is that it is one of those...