For the last few years the first book I’ve assigned in my classes on the history of American foreign policy is Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno.  Written in 1855, and based on the memoirs of New England sea captain, the novella is set off the coast of Chile in 1799.  Bachelor’s Delight, a seal hunting […]

The Puritan heritage still casts its long shadow over American culture, even if very few Protestants today would identify with Puritan theology in its original form. Puritanism survives in its moral rigidity, its legalism, and its exaggerated notions about the historic mission of the United States. At least among American Protestants, it also survives in […]

From the reaction to Glenn Beck’s rally last weekend at the Lincoln Memorial, you’d think the right-wing hordes had marched into Washington to personally storm the White House. But as is usually the case, the truth is much more boring. Billed as the “Restoring Honor Rally,” the primary themes of the speeches were patriotism and faith, […]

G.K. Chesterton didn’t fall for the lure of the “eugenists” in his day; nor should we in ours.

Renaissance humanists and their successors asked a question for which we now desperately need an answer.

When President Obama fired General Stanley McChrystal and sent General David Petraeus to Kabul in his stead, he wrote the latest chapter in a long narrative of civil-military tensions in America.

Decades on, we’ve only just begun to ask the difficult questions about assisted reproductive technologies.

American’s many post-Cold War land wars have obscured important strategic truths, among them the real value of the U.S. Navy.

Redefining the strategic niche of the Marine Corps may be the key to a future as glorious as its past.

A technology-enabled temptation to shorten the tether on Coast Guard operations threatens the future of a uniquely resourceful organization.