"Not one of the four articles debating the pros and cons of dropping the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki presents the orthodox Christian evaluation of that earth-shattering decision." Letters from a priest and columnist Diana West.

The radical left and right have now merged in a virulent form of anti-Americanism, says C. Bradley Thompson. He worries about young men reading scary, reactionary thinkers, and then disagreeing with him about the ideas that motivated the founders.

The Pilgrims were not 21st-century liberal democrats, but they created political institutions and practices that profoundly influenced the course of American politics, and facilitated later experiments in republican self-government and liberty.

Distorted Calvinist beliefs now animate progressive causes. They are responsible for America’s missionary foreign policy, rootedness in individualism, and repugnance for hierarchy.

The speed of the rise of the “woke” brigades and the accelerated abandonment of America’s Christian heritage has once again caused Catholics to doubt the compatibility of their faith with the American experiment.

Learned Hand’s advocacy for judicial restraint, bold defense of the First Amendment, and commitment to the legal rights of the states still claim our attention, especially as judicial activism is promoted by legal minds on the left and the right.

The Age of Empire: 1875-1914 (1987) by Eric Hobsbawm, and Essays in the Public Philosophy (1955) by Walter Lippmann.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s began with modest goals for changing the public sphere but morphed into an overhaul of every aspect of life. James Kalb reviews Christopher Caldwell’s recent reassessment of the hallowed movement.

There was a uniquely Catholic contribution to the Confederate cause. John DeJak reviews new scholarship on the political loyalties of Confederate Catholics by Gracjan Kraszewski.

Modern politics was born in the French Revolution and knowing its history can enrich our understanding of today’s political challenges. Ronald J. Granieri reviews Jeremy Popkin’s latest book, covering events from the Tennis Court Oath to the Terror.

Russian Conservatism, by Paul Robinson (Northern Illinois University Press; 300 pp., $39.95). Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism, by Ed West (Constable/Little, Brown; 432 pp., $17.99).

Conservatives’ faith in originalist judges has been misplaced, as the most recent U.S. Supreme Court term has shown. John Roberts and his ilk will not preserve American liberty or the timeless truths about humanity upon which the Constitution rests.