History
January 27, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Few men emerged from the Nixon White House with their reputations unscathed, let alone enhanced. Pat Buchanan was one of the few, a distinction he achieved in part by vanquishing the Senate Watergate Committee in his televised testimony at the end of the hearings. Buchanan tells the story of his Senate Watergate Committee testimony in chapter 17 (“Before the Watergate Committee”) of his 2017 memoir Nixon’s White House Wars: The
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January 16, 2023 — Scott Johnson
When Martin Luther King, Jr., brought his nonviolent campaign against segregation to Bull Connor’s Birmingham, he laid siege to the bastion of Jim Crow. In Birmingham between 1957 and 1962, black homes and churches had been subjected to a series of horrific bombings intended to terrorize the community. In April 1963 King answered the call to bring his campaign to Birmingham. When King landed in jail on Good Friday for
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January 9, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I’m traveling this morning and unable to adhere to my schedule for Power Line. For readers who may be unfamiliar with it, I thought I would take the liberty of revisiting the story of Elvis’s 1970 White House visit in connection with our celebration of the anniversary of his birth yesterday. Yesterday I focused on Elvis’s recorded work while acknowledging Peter Guralnick’s two-volume biography of Elvis — Last Train to
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December 28, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Whoopi Goldberg is in the news again — here and here, for example. Ignorance and malice can be mitigated, but stupidity is something with which you are stuck. Ms. Goldberg is the bearer of a toxic combination. Her thoughts on the Jewish people are a case in point. Something does not compute. When I was a teenager I read every paperback book I came across on the Holocaust. Among the
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December 27, 2022 — Scott Johnson
In the new (sixth) episode of Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray, Allen Guelzo joins Douglas Murray to discuss George Washington. If Washington is canceled (in the American spelling), should Washington, D.C. be canceled? Okay, maybe that’s not a persuasive consideration, but should the first president be canceled? This slightly more than hour long conversation seems to me to wind its way toward a compelling conclusion: “Subtract Washington from the equation
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December 27, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Following up on our dry run at Power Line University last week (not too late to go back and take it in if you missed it), tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4 pm Pacific/7 pm Eastern, we’ll be doing our first class session on The Federalist in webinar format, which means you’ll be able to watch live and send in questions and comments. We’ll be covering Federalist numbers 1 – 10, with
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December 24, 2022 — Scott Johnson
We have posted three episodes of Douglas Murray’s Uncancelled History series — on Thomas Jefferson, with Bowdoin College’s Professor Jean Yarbrough, on Abraham Lincoln, with Andrew Ferguson, and on Winston Churchill, with Andrew Roberts. What a pass of ignorance and malice we have come to that a rescue mission is necessary. That was my comment on the Lincoln episode, but it applies generally to the series. On Thursday Murray himself
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December 19, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I have a happy memory of taking my two youngest daughters to hear Andrew Ferguson read from his then new book Land of Lincoln at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in the Uptown neighborhood of Minneapolis back in June 2007. Andy greeted us warmly and we all greatly enjoyed the reading. (To that happy memory I can join the current observation that Magers & Quinn is with us yet. It is
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December 14, 2022 — Steven Hayward
I’ve written at some length about the suicide of academic history (which I’m going to expand and turn into a longer journal article eventually), but for now take in the latest grim statistics from the latest issue of the Middle West Review, where editor-in-chief John Lauck fills in some of the numbers in “The Ongoing History Crisis“: Around the Midwest, the news from history departments is grim, even at larger
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December 12, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Steve Hayward is the author of the two-volume history The Age of Reagan. Matt Continetti is the author of The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism. They agree — Steve here (Washington Free Beacon) and Matt here (Wall Street Journal) — that William Inboden’s The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink is must reading. Inboden is the executive director of the Clements Center
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December 11, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Israeli and Jewish groups are protesting Netflix’s showing of a film called Farha, which slanders Israel: Last week, a group of activists from World Herut, one of the most active Zionist movements worldwide, protested at the Netflix offices in London, demanding they cancel the screening of the Anti-Israel propaganda film “Farha.” The fictional movie slanders Israel and the IDF, in a way considered likely to raise the already high levels
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December 8, 2022 — Steven Hayward
Douglas Murray has a new venture entitled “Uncancelled History” that some readers may be interested in following. Its opening act is a ten-episode series of interviews with leading contrarian thinkers who take on the woke ideology of historical distortions that everyone knows today. I hope this is the first of several “seasons” of this great concept. The third episode in the series features Power Line favorite Jean Yarbrough of Bowdoin
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November 25, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Douglas Murray has kicked off a podcast series entitled Uncancelled History with author Jonathan Horn. (I prefer to spell uncanceled with one “l,” American style.) Horn is a former White House speechwriter whose first book — The Man Who Would Not Be Washington (2015) — was a biography of Robert E. Lee. He is also the author, most recently, of Washington’s End (2020), about the man who was Washington. Murray’s
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November 24, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Paul A. Rahe holds the Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College and is one of the country’s most distinguished scholars of history and politics. In view of his study of Republics Ancient and Modern, Professor Rahe is the academy’s foremost authority on the history of republics. Although his subsequent work on Soft Despotism was not far from his Thanksgiving reflections when
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November 22, 2022 — Scott Johnson
I learned from reading Power Line yesterday that John is on vacation in London. Like Steve, he is pursuing other interests in Europe. I am holding down the fort and reminded of then Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s statement at the press conference he held when President Reagan was shot in 1981: Constitutionally, gentlemen, you have the president, the vice president, and the secretary of state in that order, and
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November 3, 2022 — John Hinderaker
God help us: Henry V was no English hero but a ‘power-hungry imperialist’. Henry V was a power-hungry imperialist rather than an English hero, the Globe’s latest production of the William Shakespeare play will suggest. Rather than lauding a “band of brothers” defeating the French against the odds at Agincourt, the new staging will show audiences the “devastating cost” of Henry’s “bombastic pursuit of power”. *** It will be directed
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October 10, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Over at the University of Minnesota Medical School, one probably shouldn’t be seen with books such as Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon or Fan Shen’s memoir Gang of One: Memoirs of a Red Guard. It might reflect an inclination to think for yourself and other such bourgeois indulgences. I’m thinking that they missed a few strokes at this year’s white-coat ceremony for new students. The video below is a
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