History

It would be hard to name an artist whose influence has been as ubiquitous as Frank Lloyd Wright’s. Yet he achieved his status not by lowering his standards but through a devoted pursuit of his ideals—ideals that gave voice to the principles of individuality and aspiration at the center of the American consciousness.

Killers of the Flower Moon is a bloated film with a malevolent sense of life. Despite its enormous runtime, it misses the opportunity to depict both the rights abuses to which the Osage were subjected and the good entrepreneurship they and others engaged in.

Oppenheimer was a key mind behind the invention and development of the bombs that ended World War II. He was also haunted by the question of whether producing these bombs was the right thing to do. This question runs throughout Christopher Nolan’s recent biopic, Oppenheimer, hailed by some as “the most epic WWII film yet."

Robert P. McCulloch worked constantly to grow his wealth and create new things, even when others couldn’t see the potential in his ideas or dismissed them as impossible. He deserves to be remembered as a productive businessman, a pioneering inventor, and, most of all, a visionary.

Adam Smith and Ayn Rand are widely considered to offer merely different flavors of pro-capitalist thought. But their differences are greater—and far more consequential—than their similarities.

If freedom-loving Brits are serious about the moral principles on which liberty depends, they must oppose the monarchy and advance a vision of a free British republic.

The Stasi Poetry Circle offers an unusual glimpse of the relationship between communist totalitarianism and the poetic impulses of both its victims and their victimizers.

What many of Lincoln's contemporaries—and many today—mistook for paradoxes or even contradictions more often reflected the prudence of a leader facing the horrendous task of guiding the United States toward a philosophic principle when unprecedented bloodshed made it sometimes seem safer to disregard that principle.

The life and fate of banned Russian novelist Vasily Grossman is a tragedy worthy of his own novelistic skills. More than fifty years after his passing, we can only imagine what he might have achieved had communist tyranny not stifled him.

Ayatollah Khamenei has said that an Islamic revival is spreading through the Middle East, not by conscious intent, but “like the scent of spring flowers that is carried by the breeze.” Maybe so, but a headwind is blowing steadily and insistently from the West.