Having written an earlier post on the writer George Tucker, I thought I’d share this interesting little bit from his oeuvre. (More interesting than his 1827 novel A Voyage to the Moon; with Some Account of the Manners and Customs, Science and Philosophy, of the People of Morosofia, and Other Lunarians? Well, no. But still.) [...]

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I’ve been editing our entry on George Tucker this week. Tucker was the Bermuda-born cousin of the more famous jurist St. George Tucker, and he served three terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before being invited by Thomas Jefferson to join the faculty of the newly opened University of Virginia in 1825. Tucker was [...]

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One would do well to be skeptical of Sigmund Freud’s historical writings. So I don’t suggest this passage from his biography of Thomas Woodrow Wilson (written in 1939, published in 1967) to be anything but kind of funny: The University of Virginia was then, as it has been since its foundation by Thomas Jefferson, a [...]

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Some historians are particularly good at sketching characters. Case in point: David S. Reynolds, author of the just-released Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson. (Read a review.) Here he distinguishes the two Virginians, Monroe and Madison: Whereas Madison (the smallest president in American history) stood five feet five and weighed only a hundred [...]

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How do we remember war? According to Kent Gramm, the worst thing you can do is present war—in this instance, the Civil War—in terms that might make it attractive. (Or fun. Or honorable.) That would open you up to his accusation that you are living in a world of “fantasy, myth, and entertainment.” According to [...]

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