History

Exemplars of Enlightenment thinking, Deborah Feldman, Yeonmi Park, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali escaped oppression in pursuit of freedom, rational inquiry, and the life these values make possible. They are models for us all.

Keats’s life was cruelly short and marred by tragedy, unrequited love, and ill health. But his frail body held a formidable soul. That soul lives on through his poetry and inspires us to make the most of our own opportunities for joy.

The bravery of today’s Hong Kong protestors is nothing short of incredible. Confronting the massive forces of the world’s largest and most bloodstained dictatorship, they stand for freedom against overwhelming odds. Yet they remain undaunted.

Sandefur’s well-trained and wide-ranging mind, brought to bear on a subject of deep personal interest, has delivered prose that is both graceful and direct. What emerges from his biographical portrait is the closest any of us now can get to one of the great humanistic minds of the previous century.

In the tradition of Ayn Rand’s essay “For the New Intellectual,” Osborne explains that knowing the history of how we got where we are today can teach us what we need to do to reestablish America’s original spirit—and the freedoms that flow from it.

In this excellent video, Timothy Sandefur tells the story of the great American hero Frederick Douglass, one of history’s most influential advocates of freedom.

As Ayn Rand wrote, “To laugh at the contemptible, is a virtue.” With the wit of a Mark Twain and the jaundiced eye of a Richard Mitchell, David Stove practiced this virtue diligently and thus did philosophy a tremendous service.

Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as polls report the increasing popularity of socialism among young Americans, it’s worth pausing to remember the massive evil it embodied and the bravery that brought it down.

For all of his errors, Jaffa's insistence that the truths of the Declaration are not historical artifacts but timeless principles worthy of defending will make his best work last forever.

Locke’s intellectual honesty was the root of all of his achievements—and it’s on display in his newly uncovered “Reasons for Tolerateing Papists.”