Archives Homepage

There was once a professor of law named John Millar. Born

in Scotland in 1735, he went
to Adam Smith's lectures on
moral philosophy and then,

finding his own religious con- victions too weak for a clerical career even by the tolerant standards of the Enlighten- ment, took to the law. In 1761 he became a professor at the University of Glasgow, where he is said to have been among the first to lecture in English rather than Latin, acquiring a reputation as an orator in his university and be...

At the turn of this century, the Irish-American jour- nalist Finley Peter Dunne wrote a column of politi- cal and social satire for a Chicago newspaper. On

one occasion, he touched on the ancient
world, attributing the following observation
to his character, the sage of Halsted Street,
Mr. Dooley:
I know histhry isn't thrue, Hinnissy, be-
cause it ain't like what I see ivry day in
Halsted Sthreet. If any wan comes along
with a histhry iv Greece or Rome that'll
show me th' people fightin', g...

These are uncertain times for the armed forces of the
United States. How could
they not be? With the Cold
War over, the very founda-
tions of our thinking about national security have undergone profound changes. Short of a terrible accident, the likelihood of a nuclear war between major powers is slim. Indeed, wars among any major powers appear unlikely, though ter- rorism and internal wars triggered by eth- nic and religious animosities will be with us for some time, if not forever. More...

Colleen A. Sheehan, in The William and Mary And Virtue Quarterly (Oct. 1992), Box 8781, Williamsburg, Va. 23187-

878 1.
Scholars in recent years have been vigorously debating the intellectual origins of the Found- ing Fathers' ideas. Did they derive mainly from the liberal philosophy of John Locke, the classi- cal republicanism of Plato and his heirs, the modern republicanism of Machiavelli, or other intellectual sources? The conventional view of James Madison (1751-1836), the "father" o...