Gerald R. Ford Leadership Forum
by Jeff Polet The 14th Amendment is back in the news, which typically means something is afoot somewhere in this country, but is also an opportunity to review one of the most important provisions in our Constitution. After the Civil War, three amendments (13, 14, and 15) were added to the Constitution. The first got …
by Jeff Polet This series concerns itself with our American heritage, and in particular to make contemporary readers more appreciative of the “blessings of liberty” that have been vouchsafed to us. America is in many ways a dress rehearsal, a constant effort to improve our performance for a final curtain that will, hopefully, never happen. …
by Jeff Polet America is facing demographic decline. Whether it rises to the level of a crisis is open to debate (although you can put me squarely in the “uh oh” camp, and not only because I’m in my 60’s and devoid of grandchildren, which, in historical terms, is an anomaly of a high order). …
by Jeff Polet We’ve drawn the reader’s attention in a prior essay to Lincoln’s “Lyceum Address,” one of his more interesting speeches. That’s an intense competition, because Lincoln was an unusually gifted speechwriter — a testimony to the benefits of reading the Bible and Shakespeare and Poe at a young age. While “The Gettysburg Address” …
by Jeff Polet Our Heritage series typically focuses on American writers, but every now and then I am reminded of something from the non-American past that I think interesting. This happened to me this weekend as I was re-reading parts of Aristotle’s Politics, and I happened upon the section where he asks a very simple …
by Jeff Polet Most of our readers will know about the Philadelphia Convention in the summer of 1787 and assume that it had to replace the ineffectual Articles of Confederation. While there is some truth to that way of telling the story, the reality was actually more complicated. It is true that many citizens were …
by Jeff Polet In our enthusiasm to declare our independence from England, we Americans often forget that the American Revolution is a development of English political history and not a rejection of it. Writers during the revolutionary period often quoted Magna Carta, the historic English document that was an early articulation of the idea that …
by Kirstin Anderson Birkhaug That there are “forgotten Founders” is a truth universally acknowledged among students of the American Founding. Some of the men who sat for weeks in Independence Hall, laboring over the document that would become the Constitution, are generally unknown among everyday Americans. It does seem strange, however, that among the forgotten …
by Jeff Polet For many college professors, especially in the humanities, reading books is more than a habit, it’s compulsory. We can’t imagine not doing it. As the Preacher said millennia ago “to the making of books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” I don’t think I could …
by Jeff Polet As modern Americans, a resistance to monarchy is more or less bred in our bones. Our tale of our national origins largely revolves around a rejection of the tyrant King George in particular and monarchy in general. This “Dialogue Between the Devil and George III, Tyrant of Britain” is a striking example …
