Wilfred McClay is a historian and intellectual scholar who holds the G.T. and Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of several books, including *Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story*. He contributed essays to The Weekly Standard on American intellectual history, patriotism, religion, and the literary canon.
It was a measure not only of his robust good health but the vitality of his public commitments that Bruce Cole’s sudden death last week came as such a shock to so many people—and that they were shocked to discover that he was 79. He seemed so much younger. Bruce had become one of the key figures in…
Auden and Christianity
The American Classics
Hawthorne in Concord
Emerson
KENNETH LYNN ENJOYED a long and productive career as a scholar of American literary and intellectual life, first at Harvard, then in a quixotic attempt to turn Washington's Federal City College into a serious university, then at Johns Hopkins, and then in a very active retirement. He produced…
The name of John Dewey generally evokes hissing from conservative intellectuals. But there is at least one way in which even they ought to find his example admirable. Dewey was easily the most prominent American philosopher of his time, and over the course of an enormously long life -- from 1859 to…