Capture of the SS Mayaguez

On May 12, 1975, a military swift boat commanded by the Khmer Rouge captured the U.S. container ship Mayaguez off the Cambodian coast.

In Federalist #44 Madison reviewed Congressional powers and suggested most of them were non-controversial.

The 2014 documentary “The Last Days of Vietnam” puts viewers amid the chaos of the final days of the South Vietnamese government and the fall of Saigon in 1975. News footage of North Vietnam’s assault on Saigon and the heroic response of U.S. military and embassy officials to evacuate South Vietnamese gives a realistic view of Black April, as the South Vietnamese refer to the collapse of their country.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, consists of two black granite walls bearing the names of service members who died or remained missing as a result of their service in the war.

Reviewing the Constitutional debates impresses one with the level of argument engaged by both sides. Members of both parties were serious students of history and political theory, demonstrating that a common education doesn’t necessarily produce agreement. What’s most striking about the arguments of that day is how comprehensive, detailed, and thorough they were.

Peter Berger in his classic essay “On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honor,” demonstrated how societies where honor matters have a thick sociology while those with a thin social sphere are dominated by ideas of human “dignity.”

Many Americans of Generation X and older will recall the red, white, and blue American Freedom Train that was a centerpiece of America’s glorious Bicentennial celebration.

In Federalist #43 Madison continued the themes of the prior essays: an examination of the detailed powers given Congress in Article I, section 8, while also addressing some additional powers.

The most famous photo of the fall of Saigon appears to show a long line of people perched on a ladder atop the US embassy, waiting to be evacuated by a US military helicopter.

If you are dimly aware of a thing called “national politics,” and if you are also dimly aware that a lot of people are getting very red in the face over them, then you might, stifling a yawn, walk over to your bookshelf and pull down a collection of Emerson’s essays.

The commentary on Pope Francis’s passing indicates the extent to which the Catholic Church retains some cultural authority.

Two viruses that define our age and negatively affect our judgements are the tendency to read the past in light of present values and, conversely, to think the problems we face are unique to us.

One of the most compelling, but depressing, World War II films is 1977’s “A Bridge Too Far.”

I offer to the readers of these essays on The Federalist a bit of a breather.

Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 president election outraged Democrats and delighted Republicans.

The founding of the United States is one of the greatest events in world history.

Carl Schmitt, a German writer and thinker who achieved some notoriety after he joined the Nazi party, wrote his most important works in the decade prior to Hitler’s rise to power.

It’s late 1787 and you’re deliberating whether to affirm the plan for the new government.

In 1955, Rudolph Flesch released what ought to have been the definitive book on reading education: Why Johnny Can't Read—And What You Can Do About It.

I’ve argued that essays 37-39 are the hinge on which The Federalist turns.

In recent years some scholars on the Right have begun to emulate those historians of the Left who reject that American Founding as the best source for America’s core principles on liberty and order.

On his last Friday in office, President Biden announced that he had “amended” the Constitution by holding that the Equal Rights Amendment, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex, had met the criteria for ratification.

In the past two Reflection essays I’ve pondered the question as to whether American had a founding and, if so, what difference it makes to think so.

In Federalist No. 1, Alexander Hamilton claimed that the Americans had to determine once and for all whether the formation of political institutions could result from reflection and choice or would forever be subject to fate and chance.

The American founders were acutely aware that human beings desire power. Like Lord Acton, they believed that power tends to have a corrupting effect on those not only who attain it but those who reach for it.

A story, perhaps apocryphal, has an audience member ask Albert Einstein why so many advances had been made in physics and so few in our understanding of politics.

The New York Times’s “1619 Project” renewed debates over the nature of America’s “founding.”

The eccentric essayist and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously asserted, “Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose."

Hamilton concluded his meditations on taxation by introducing two ideas that gained little traction at the time but would down the road.

In 2022, a group of historians and political scientists advocated for replacing the U.S. House's single-member district system with proportional representation to promote a multiparty system, but this proposal is criticized for misunderstanding the purpose of representation and for the practical instability it could create, as seen in other countries with multiparty systems.