What Do Conservatives Do with Donald Trump Now?

By |2021-01-06T18:10:31-06:00May 4th, 2016|Categories: Donald Trump, Forrest McDonald, John Willson, Politics, Presidency, Republicans|

Donald Trump has felt the pulse of the people and taken into account the meaning (and limits) of the Constitution and come up with the outlines of a plan that is both reasonably coherent and (dare I say?) conservative. “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” —Sun-tzu, ca. 400 BC; or Machiavelli, 1520 AD [...]

Forrest McDonald, RIP, in the Mighty Company of the Founders

By |2022-01-19T08:15:45-06:00January 21st, 2016|Categories: American Republic, Forrest McDonald, History|

The great American historian Forrest McDonald (1927-2016) passed away this week at the age of eighty-nine. The following remarks by Stephen Klugewicz and Lenore Ealy, former students of Dr. McDonald, were delivered at the April 2010 national meeting of The Philadelphia Society, at a dinner in Dr. McDonald's honor. The event was held at the [...]

The Role of the “Middle Delegates” at the Constitutional Convention

By |2020-10-18T13:32:36-05:00January 7th, 2016|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Constitution, Constitutional Convention, Featured, Forrest McDonald, Political Science Reviewer|

The contribution of the middle delegates—from Connecticut, Delaware, North and South Carolina—was crucial to the structural design of the Constitution. Without these these eight men, the Grand Convention might not have succeeded in its undertaking. Oliver Ellsworth Historians of the Constitutional Convention have agreed that there were divisions among the delegates, but have [...]

Is History Subjective?

By |2022-01-06T21:48:32-06:00September 2nd, 2015|Categories: Forrest McDonald, History, Quotation|

History is a mode of thinking that wrenches the past out of context and sequence, out of the way it really happened, and reorders it in an artificial way that facilitates understanding and remembering…. Historians—whether Everyman, recalling his immediate or distant past, or professionals, attempting to reconstruct the past by studying relics of it—deal in [...]

Was Alexander Hamilton a Great Man?

By |2020-07-10T14:58:18-05:00July 12th, 2015|Categories: Alexander Hamilton, Books, Featured, Forrest McDonald|

Forrest McDonald’s biography most likely will prove indispensable. What Alexander Hamilton thought, and how he came to think it, is nowhere else so plain as here. Alexander Hamilton: A Biography, by Forrest McDonald (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.) That Alexander Hamilton was among the most luminous and creative of the Founding Fathers every schoolboy [...]

Civil Society and Its Rivals

By |2022-01-06T23:12:47-06:00May 2nd, 2015|Categories: Books, Forrest McDonald|

Government in the West has become so big and cumbersome that it not only has ceased to work, but has also contributed powerfully to the breakdown of the intermediary institutions that constituted civil society in the first place. Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals by Ernest Gellner (240 pages, Penguin Group, 1996) The [...]

A Conservative Historian’s Memoir

By |2022-01-06T22:32:35-06:00October 5th, 2013|Categories: Books, Forrest McDonald, George Nash, History|Tags: |

Above all, Forrest McDonald survived and thrived because he was not by temperament a party-line ideologue and was unfazed by the imprecations of those who were. Unlike too many of his fellow historians who let their present-day policy agendas control their interpretation of the past, McDonald refused to distort his subjects in this way. Recovering [...]

The Political Thought of Gouverneur Morris

By |2021-12-02T11:56:42-06:00May 18th, 2013|Categories: American Founding, Constitution, Forrest McDonald, Political Philosophy|

Gouverneur Morris believed that God gives every man the right to liberty (hence his regarding slavery as an abomination), and he believed that legitimate government derives its authority from the consent of the governed. As is well known, Gouverneur Morris, the New York aristocrat who represented Pennsylvania in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, wrote the [...]

History of States’ Rights, 1774-1817

By |2022-01-06T22:47:12-06:00February 7th, 2013|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Bradley J. Birzer, Charles Carroll, Constitution, Declaration of Independence, Featured, Federalist Papers, Forrest McDonald|

Americans, as brothers and descendants of Englishmen, were entitled to the rights inherited from the English through the development of Anglo-Saxon common law and through the several political battles. On the eve of the American Revolution, most American thinkers had embraced the idea of all rights (and, therefore, sovereignty) being inherited.[1] Americans, as brothers and [...]

Low Expectations: The American Presidency

By |2022-02-22T18:01:43-06:00August 15th, 2012|Categories: American Republic, Books, Forrest McDonald, George Washington, Presidency, Thomas Jefferson|Tags: |

The American Presidency, by Forrest McDonald Twice, in The American Presidency, Professor Forrest McDonald states that the executive office of our government “has been responsible for less harm and more good … than perhaps any other secular institution in history.” In the same sentence, he also notes that “the caliber of the people who have served as chief [...]

John Dickinson: The Most Underrated Founder?

By |2020-07-12T16:57:13-05:00June 18th, 2012|Categories: American Founding, American Republic, Books, Constitutional Convention, Forrest McDonald, John Dickinson|

John Dickinson’s standing in the American pantheon is shamefully obscure in view of his contributions toward the establishment of an independent regime of limited government, federalism, and liberty under law. Having studied eighteenth-century America all our adult lives, we are prepared to offer a generalization: the more one learns about the subject, the less prone [...]

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