Below The Beltway

The Election of 1920 is unique in American history. Never before had so many men who either had been, or one day would be, President vied for the office at the same time.
But for an untimely death, Theodore Roosevelt would have been the presumptive Republican nominee and, given the political conditions of the time, probably [...]

Recent American history has seen some fairly contested, highly partisan Presidential elections. In 1992 we saw the most successful run by a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1916 1912. In 1996, we saw Republicans fresh off an historic take-over of Congress convinced they could defeat a sitting President. In 2004, the race between Bush [...]

You don’t have to love Shakespeare’s plays to find Clare Asquith’s Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs And Coded Politics of William Shakespeare both interesting and enjoyable. In fact, it almost helps if you come to the book with little more than a passing familiarity with the plays themselves and, certainly, no familiarity with the countless books, [...]

You might think that a biography of Albert Einstein would be a tough read; full of discussions of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Unified Field Theories that, for the average person at least, would be incomprehensible. In Einstein: His Life And Universe, though, Walter Isaacson takes the life, ideas, and career of one of the most [...]

I’ve got my review of Brian Doherty’s Radicals For Capitalism up over at The Liberty Papers.
It’s a massive read, but worth it if you’re at all interested in the history of ideas and the personalities who turned libertarianism into a real movement.

I don’t generally read autobiographies of contemporary figures, but after watching his interview on 60 Minutes last month, I was compelled to read Justice Clarence Thomas’ autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son.
And I’m glad that I did, because it’s one of the best books I’ve read in quite awhile.
Clarence Thomas’s story is one that should be an [...]

The central premise of Brink Lindsay’s The Age Of Abundance is that the unparalleled prosperity that became a central part of American life in the years after World War II has fundamentally transformed American culture and politics and moved us in what he contends is a more libertarian direction.
While the book serves well as a [...]

Through eleven volumes and nearly 100 years of alternate history, Harry Turtledove has been writing the story of a North America quite different from the one that we’ve lived in.
It’s a world in which the Confederacy won the Civil War in 1862 thanks to a twist in history. In our world, just prior to the [...]

In America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It, Mark Steyn puts forward what can only be described as a chilling vision of the future.
Europe, or at least the Europe we know, is, he contends, doomed. Thanks to a combination of low birth rates and a welfare state that has sapped individuals [...]

Federal Appeals Court Judge Richard A. Posner is known for being both prolific and controversial. In addition to authoring one of the most important academic treatises in the field of law and economics, he is also known for writing on more controversial topics ranging from the 2000 Presidential election to sex. And it’s when [...]