Search Results: history archives

Messing About in Old New York

Celebrating B Company’s birthday in style at the Seventh Regiment Mess in May 1940. read more

Msgr Antony Conlon

Our friend died in April and the following obituary was compiled by the Order of Malta. read more

Les jours heureux du Liban

A conversation the other day sparked a look at Lebanon in the old days: black-tie dinners, summer in the mountains, the casinos and the glamour of Beirut. read more

Investigating the Other Modern

The 2012 conference of the Association of Art Historians will look at ‘the other modern’. read more

Reviving Manhattan’s Parisian Splendour

“Practically perfect in every way” was how Mary Poppins described herself in the Disney film, but Ralph Lauren has given birth to a grande dame on the Upper East Side that might justifiably make a similar claim. read more

Debating Hiroshima

Three years ago, Roger Kimball and I had an interesting exchange on the morality of the bombing of Hiroshima in which I contrasted the reaction of conservatives and Christians at the time with the moral relativism of today. read more

The Huguenot Monument, Franschhoek

AMONG THE MANY peoples who, through the various vicissitudes of history, have found their home in South Africa are the Huguenots, or French Protestants. These people have always had a certain fascination for me, having being born so close to New Rochelle, the city in the New World founded by Huguenot refugees. The city’s public […]

The Men Who Saved Quebec

The British Crown’s toleration of Catholicism in Quebec was cited by the rebel colonists of the 1770’s as, ironically, an ‘intolerable act’. That the Church of Rome, that bastion of backwards conservatism and slavish hierarchy, could be tolerated in the lands under the power of the British parliament riled the Whigs—the enlightened liberal progressives of […]

A Sienese Gem Lost

STEALING A GLANCE at the photo above, the viewer would easily be forgiven for mistaking the vista for that of a subway entrance in turn-of-the-century Siena, Italy. The proud medieval tower lurks over a comely metal-and-glass structure of continental flavor. However the city fathers of that ancient Italian municipality never deigned to erect an underground […]

The Great Seal of Carolina

THE ROYAL CHARTER which erected the Province of Carolina created the colony as a county palatine, similar to Durham, Chester, and Lancashire back in England. However, instead of being ruled by a Count Palatine (or Prince-Bishop in Durham’s case), Carolina, named after England’s martyr-king Charles I, was to be ruled by eight Lords Proprietor, the […]

The Owl Shop, New Haven

MAKING ONE OF my occasional forays into the neighboring state of Connecticut yesterday afternoon I was introduced to a little corner of paradise. A friend and I were going to partake in an evening with a club at Yale of which he was formerly president. As a mark of his completed tenure in the office […]

Dingbat Through the Ages

Newsdesigner.com has an interesting post enlightening us to the history of the ‘dingbat’, the vignette which can be found atop the International Herald Tribune. The design first originated in the nameplate (also called, varyingly, the ‘masthead’, ‘banner’, or ‘flag’) of the New-York Tribune. The Tribune became the New York Herald Tribune, which my Aunt Naomi […]

NYU Students Take to the Streets…

…to join in the fight against our cousins, the Hun. I doubt many of NYU’s ROTC students would be brave enough to don their BDUs in the streets of Greenwich Village these days. Well I don’t doubt they’d be brave enough, but they’d no doubt be more prudent perhaps. Anyhow, the ROTC program for all […]