History
Arts & Culture, Biographies, History
Isabella Stewart Gardner: ‘One of the Seven Wonders of Boston’
Jon Hersey March 19, 2020
Isabella Stewart Gardner was a firecracker of a woman with a studied yet eclectic taste in art and the means to acquire lots of it. As one friend put it, she lived “at a rate and intensity, with a reality that makes other lives seem pale, thin and shadowy.”
Arts & Culture, Ayn Rand & Objectivism, History, Philosophy, Politics & Rights
How Heroes Improve Our Lives: An Interview with Andrew Bernstein
Jon Hersey March 12, 2020
In Heroes, Legends, Champions, Andrew Bernstein has created a fascinating hybrid of useful philosophy and inspirational vignettes about outstanding men and women. The result is a book that can help people rise to heroic heights in their own lives.
Arts & Culture, History
Miami Beach’s Art Deco Answer to the Great Depression
Joseph Kellard February 28, 2020
Miami Beach boasts the world’s greatest concentration of art deco buildings, which reflect a distinct era in American history—along with the can-do attitude that has defined the nation.
Arts & Culture, History
Zora Neale Hurston, Undefeated
Timothy Sandefur February 20, 2020
Often scorned and rejected in her own day, Zora Neale Hurston was a pioneering writer who looked beyond the controversies of her time and sought to articulate a lasting vision of life—one free of bitterness or pettiness and full of grace and beauty.
Biographies, History
Robert Smalls: From Slave to War Hero, Entrepreneur, and Congressman
Tim White January 31, 2020
Robert Smalls had much in common with many other heroes of history, such as Joan of Arc and Rosa Parks. Like them, Smalls refused to live as a victim.
History, Philosophy, Politics & Rights
Leading an Enlightenment Life in an Anti-Enlightenment World
Timothy Sandefur November 21, 2019
Exemplars of Enlightenment thinking, Deborah Feldman, Yeonmi Park, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali escaped oppression in pursuit of freedom, rational inquiry, and the life these values make possible. They are models for us all.
Arts & Culture, History
The Life and Poetry of John Keats
Lisa VanDamme November 21, 2019
Keats’s life was cruelly short and marred by tragedy, unrequited love, and ill health. But his frail body held a formidable soul. That soul lives on through his poetry and inspires us to make the most of our own opportunities for joy.
Economics, History, Politics & Rights
The Bravery of Hong Kong’s Freedom Fighters
Timothy Sandefur November 21, 2019
The bravery of today’s Hong Kong protestors is nothing short of incredible. Confronting the massive forces of the world’s largest and most bloodstained dictatorship, they stand for freedom against overwhelming odds. Yet they remain undaunted.
Arts & Culture, History, Reviews
The Ascent of Jacob Bronowski: The Life and Ideas of a Popular Science Icon by Timothy Sandefur
Stephen R. C. Hicks November 13, 2019
Sandefur’s well-trained and wide-ranging mind, brought to bear on a subject of deep personal interest, has delivered prose that is both graceful and direct. What emerges from his biographical portrait is the closest any of us now can get to one of the great humanistic minds of the previous century.
Ayn Rand & Objectivism, History, Philosophy, Politics & Rights
The Prometheus Connection, America’s Original Spirit: Rise, Demise, Recovery by Kevin Osborne
Alex Bleier November 7, 2019
In the tradition of Ayn Rand’s essay “For the New Intellectual,” Osborne explains that knowing the history of how we got where we are today can teach us what we need to do to reestablish America’s original spirit—and the freedoms that flow from it.