Remember when Eric Metaxas tried to start a late-night talk show? Watch: What happened to the show? Adam Gabbatt of The Guardian did some digging. Here is a taste of his piece: A group of conservat…

I started my recent piece on Doug Wilson’s use of American history with the sentence: “Idaho pastor Doug Wilson is having a moment.” Read it here. Over at The New York Times, the …

The Atlantic’s “Unfinished Revolution” issue is a veritable feast! Check out historian Jane Kamensky’s review of Amanda Vaill’s Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sister…

Davidson College sociologist Gerardo Marti reflects on Donald Trump’s “compact” with higher education institutions. Here is a taste of his piece at Inside Higher Education: &#8230…

Here’s the weekly roundup from A Public Witness. This week we celebrated the launch of a new book, highlighted a podcast conversation with Angela Parker, and reported on an upcoming execution of a man...

Davidson College sociologist Gerardo Marti reflects on Donald Trump's "compact" with higher education institutions. Here is a taste of his piece at Inside Higher Education: ...a proposed “compact” with higher education institutions would seek to condition federal funding on requirements that colleges ensure a “broad spectrum of viewpoints” in each academic department and that they abolish “institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”

The Atlantic's "Unfinished Revolution" issue is a veritable feast! Check out historian Jane Kamensky's review of Amanda Vaill's Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution. The subtitle: "She lived 97 years. Only 24 of them were with Alexander Hamilton." A taste: Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, Franklin; rinse and repeat: A new life of one of the Revolution’s male heroes appears in bookstores most years around Father’s Day.

Here are the most popular posts of the last week at The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Salem Radio “eliminates” the Eric Metaxas Show AI Charlie Kirk “speaks” from beyond the grave Smith: Doug Wilson’s offer to buy Christianity Today was a “publicity stunt” Thomas Chatterton Williams: “MAGA has found its George Floyd” Today at ARC Magazine: My piece on how Doug Wilson uses American history…

Historian Annette Gordon-Reed helps us sort this out. Here is a taste of her piece at The Atlantic: "Whose Independence?": ...Jefferson formulated the Declaration’s second paragraph, with language that has become its most quotable passage: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and 

I started my recent piece on Doug Wilson's use of American history with the sentence: "Idaho pastor Doug Wilson is having a moment." Read it here. Over at The New York Times, the moment continues. Ross Douthat's interview with Wilson got right to the point: Douthat: So let’s start off with a pretty basic question. We are both Christians.

Remember when Eric Metaxas tried to start a late-night talk show? Watch: What happened to the show? Adam Gabbatt of The Guardian did some digging. Here is a taste of his piece: A group of conservative donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a rightwing version of late-night talkshows like the Tonight Show and the Late Show, leaked documents reveal, in a further indication of the right’s ongoing efforts to overhaul American culture.

Are the recent political failures of the American left due, as we are so often told, exclusively to the failure to offer and attractive economic and political vision of the future--a public project that appeals to worker solidarity and materially liberates labor from corporate and market oppression? Or might our failure--now or in the immediate future--be equally due to the neglect of vocabularies of the self that appeal to the spiritual pain of alienation--vocabularies that present an alternative to the comforts of ideological certainty, that make irony and skepticism spiritually and intellectually attractive again? Jessi Jezewska Stevens, "Left-Wing Irony: An Alternative to the Politics of Contempt," The Point (Winter 2025), 50-51.

Here is a helpful post from the Humanities Indicators Project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences: The Humanities Indicators Project takes an expansive view of the humanities that encompasses the knowledge, skills, and activities that help people interpret and engage with language, culture, history, and the ongoing search for meaning and connection in human life. This includes: reading and creative writing;

Here is a tase of reporter Kristen Gelineau's article at the Associated Press: MAE SOT, Thailand (AP) — Mohammed Taher clutched the lifeless body of his 2-year-old son and wept. Ever since his family’s food rations stopped arriving at their internment camp in Myanmar in April, the father had watched helplessly as his once-vibrant baby boy weakened, suffering from diarrhea and begging for food.

Part of my work at the Lumen Center here in Madison, Wisconsin frees me up to do some public lecturing and teaching. I am currently offering lectures as part of the Organization of American Historians (OAH) Distinguished Lectures Program, but I am also very open to creating a lecture on the Revolutionary-era that might fit the needs of your group, whether large or small.

This looks like a really interesting conference to be held November 15, 2025 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Speakers include Patricia Limerick, Peter Colcanis, Susan Matt, Samuel Young, Kristy Nabhan-Warren, Paul Putz, Bradley Birzer, and Wilfred McClay. That is an eclectic mix of scholars! Here is some info from the website: The Lost Region Recovery Project Conference represents a pivotal moment for Midwestern studies.

Today The Atlantic website is filled with articles from its November 2025 issue on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. Here are some of the essays included: Jeffrey Goldberg, "The American Experiment" Caity Weaver, "What It Takes to Be a Revolutionary War Reenactor" Ken Burns, Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt, "What We Learned Filming…

...Trump won the popular vote. While some have seen this as a worrying sign that people are voting for style over content, the reality may be even worse: they are voting against leftist style. This would mean that, in addition to the myriad of factors cited above, left setbacks throughout the West are also due in part to its rhetorical posture--to its insistence on clinging to a vocabulary of moral superiority that implies contempt for the very people it is trying to persuade.

We have now lived in downtown Madison for just about two months and are really enjoying it. Joy and I are settling into our work here at the Stephen & Laurel Brown Foundation (Joy as Director of Upper House Commons and me as a Lumen Center fellow). Here's the latest: Since our arrival we have been engaged in that time-worn Protestant practice of "church shopping." So far we have visited an Evangelical Free church, a non-denominational church, a Christian Reformed church, and an Anglican church.

Here is a taste of my piece, “The Christian Nationalist Rewriting American History.” Idaho pastor Douglas Wilson is having a moment. The 72-year-old Christian nationalist was recently t…

Is American evangelicalism a white people’s movement? In this episode, we are joined by Wheaton College professor Vincent Bacote to talk about the history of 20th-century Black Protestants wh…

Eric Metaxas, one of Donald Trump’s court evangelicals, had a message for his newsletter subscribers this morning: As you may know, for ten years now I’ve hosted a daily two-hour program…

[Andrew] Jackson had the affection of the people. Their ardor transcended any single issue. When his opponents mocked him as an unlettered would-be tyrant, a backwoods poseur whose acres were tille…

Podcaster (“The History of the Americans”) and Substack writer (“Just Spitballing!”) Jack Henneman writes, “It should be said up front that I am a retired corporate la…

Podcaster ("The History of the Americans") and Substack writer ("Just Spitballing!") Jack Henneman writes, "It should be said up front that I am a retired corporate lawyer and executive, not a historian. I am, however, the son of a professor of history, grew up in a house lined with history books, and have done my share of reading over the years." …