The Rise of the Research University: A Sourcebook edited by Louis Menand, Paul Reitter, and Chad Wellmon. University of Chicago Press, 2017. Paperback, 406 pages, $32.50. Reviewed by Pavlos Papadopoulos Historians of higher education are members of a small subfield of...
Calvin’s Tormentors: Understanding the Conflicts That Shaped the Reformer by Gary W. Jenkins. Baker Academic, 2018. Paperback, 208 pages, $28. Reviewed by Chris Butynskyi In the wake of the five hundredth anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, Christians are...
Looming Civil War: How Nineteenth-Century Americans Imagined the Future By Jason Phillips. Oxford University Press, 2018. Hardcover, 320 pages, $35. Reviewed by Carl Lawrence Paulus “What is past is prologue.” William Shakespeare’s line from The Tempest is inscribed...
Two Tolkiens on View Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth [Exhibition catalogue] Edited by Catherine McIlwaine. Bodleian Library, 2018. Hardcover, 416 pages, $65. Reviewed by Alexi Sargeant The red jumps off the page. You’re in the middle of a letter from Father Christmas...
These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore. W. W. Norton, 2018. Hardcover, 960 pages, $40. Part One: The Idea (1492–1799) Reviewed by Craig Bruce Smith “The United States is founded on a set of ideas,” says eminent historian Jill Lepore in the opening...
“The Last God’s Dream,” while certainly among the more daring of Kirk’s “experiments in the moral imagination”(as he described his literary efforts), is also one of the more successful at blending the author’s varied interests in politics, history, literature, and metaphysics.