In terms of political liberation and constitutional democracy, Americans cannot help but think back to 1776 and the Declaration of Independence. For the English, the mind reaches back to the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, and for those with somewhat longer historical memories, to Magna Carta of 1215. But the true origin of political…

The claim that there were "surprising similarities" between the West and the more advanced regions of Asia as late as 1800-1830, and that the Industrial Revolution was the one transformation that set Europe apart from Asia is central to the arguments of multicultural historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Bin Wong, Jack Goldstone, John Hobson, and…

The attention in the West, especially in the United States, now accorded Islam and those who conduct themselves according to its precepts betrays woeful ignorance of both. As Graham Fuller has persuasively argued in his recent book, "A World Without Islam", Western culture owes much to Islam as well as to Muslims and would be greatly impoverished…

On January 20, 2009, Dr. Manmohan Singh, the prime minister of India, became the leader of the free world. The free world's attention was focused elsewhere: Senator Barack Obama, who on that day became President Barack Obama, quietly abdicated the role now taken up by Dr. Singh, having run an election campaign premised upon the ever-present but…

Great Books programs and Western civilization courses have understandably emphasized the Greco-Roman and Hebraic origins of Western civilization, while moving on to a European focus, with some material relating to the Western Hemisphere usually brought in for good measure. After all, people have the ancient Greeks to thank for such landmark…

One of the reasons often advanced for the study of Western civilization is its history of scientific and technical prowess. Advances in science and technology have resulted in the many conveniences of modern life: air travel, automobiles, and smart phones, to name just a few. These are fruits of the Baconian project, which emphasized observation…

Now that Colonel Muammar Gaddafi is dead and his forty-two years as despotic ruler of Libya and fomenter of international disorder has come to a permanent halt, it is a good time for governments--both in and beyond the NATO alliance--to review accommodations and agreements made with his regime. It is also time for the academic social policy…

Norman Jay Levitt was the author's good friend, collaborator, and co-author. He was--above, before, and after politics--an honest inquirer. His socio-cultural views evolved continuously. Levitt, truth-seeker and liberal, was impatient with, and a devastating critic of, the political correctness and--even worse--the philosophic triviality that…

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the controversy surrounding Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberta Menchu constituted one of the most interesting--and acrimonious--academic debates to take place in recent decades. It may seem that not much new can be said about it now, for most every single person weighing in on the subject has already spoken,…

Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" is the nation's best-known work of American history. It is also the nation's best-selling survey of American history, having sold two million copies since its publication in 1980 and still selling about 125,000 paperback copies yearly. The fifth and current edition covers America up to the…

The part played by Sally Hemings in the life of Thomas Jefferson has been regarded as provocatively dubious since political enemy James Callender claimed in 1802 that Jefferson was the father of several of Hemings's children. Historian Merrill Peterson, observing that paternity is hard to prove, wrote in 1960 that no concrete evidence was ever…

In scholarly terms, a "review of the literature" or "literature review" is a summation of the previous research that has been done on a particular topic. With a "dismissive literature review," a researcher assures the public that no one has yet studied a topic or that very little has been done on it. A "firstness claim" is a particular type of…

In this article, the author describes five types of teachers who remain in the yeoman or domestic category of the profession, that is, who rely more on standardized idiosyncrasy than on the numen of "personality" as a means of ensuring recollection among their students. These are: (1) the Mother; (2) the Martinet; (3) the Peer; (4) the Maverick;…

Camilo Jimenez taught writing and literature at the prestigious Universidad Javeriana in Columbia for nine years until his resignation in December 2011, for reasons explained in this article. Having found that only three out of thirty of his students in his "Assessment of Non-Fiction Texts" course could successfully summarize a work in one…

Nothing is more likely to distort one's understanding of reality than the notion of relativism. It was for good reason that Thomas Aquinas began his treatise "On Truth" by repudiating the "error of the ancient philosophers [Democritus and Protagoras] who said that any opinion a person has in his intellect is true and that two contradictories can…