The Libertarian Era?

The Libertarian Era?

I didn’t know what a libertarian was when I started reporting. I was just another liberal. I knew the Republicans were icky, and Democrats were more like me — except they didn’t care about debt. I had no idea there was an actual movement of thinking people...

How much did the Civil War cost?

While the desire to document military exploits and wars is as old as writing itself, the recording of military medical data is a relatively modern phenomenon. Although some initial attempts to chronicle the health of troops occurred in the first half of the 19th...

What is the Mind of the South?

Since the dawn of introspection, which predates Homer at least, what collective mind has been more exhaustively or passionately psychoanalyzed than the Mind of the South? In the decades since W.J. Cash probed and disparaged it in his historic 1929 essay for The...

Welfare Nation

My parents were children during the Great Depression, and it scarred them, especially my father, who saw destitution in his Brooklyn, N.Y., neighborhood: adults standing in so-called “bread lines,” children begging in the streets. My grandfather was a New...