Tag: history

Timothy Dwight, the fervently reactionary and comically pompous head of Yale University, was a strong Federalist supporter who predicted that the accession of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency would lead to “a frenzied dance of Jacobinism.” Jacobinism — the doctrine of the ultra-radical and anticlerical wing of the French revolutionary movement — was as much […]

While most of the leaders of Mexico’s War of Independence were Mexican-born creoles, an exception was Francisco Javier Mina, whose name today appears on street signs and monuments throughout Mexico. Like Burke, Fox and Paine, Mina was a citizen of the mother country who deeply felt the pain inflicted on its colonists. Appropriately for a […]

In Norman Rosten’s The Joys of Yiddish, the term “chutzpah” is defined as “gall, brazen nerve, effrontery, incredible ‘guts’; presumption-plus-arrogance such as no other word … can do justice to.” As an example of chutzpah, Rosten cites “that quality enshrined in a man who, having killed his mother and father, throws himself on the mercy […]

Few people have ever less fitted the conventional image of a revolutionary than Venustiano Carranza. He was a country squire rather than an intellectual, he had been part of a ruling establishment and he took up revolution at an age when most men are contemplating retirement. Yet history placed him among the leading figures in […]