Victor Davis Hanson gave the following speech at the Wednesday Morning Club at the Four Seasons Hotel in Los Angeles, California, on February 1, 2006. For more information on the Wednesday Morning Club, e-mail Mike. --FrontPageMag Editors.

Michael Wiener: It’s truly an honor to be here to introduce to you somebody whom I greatly admire and whom I consider a friend. Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a classical scholar. He’s a Director Emeritus of Classics at California State University at Fresno. He’s a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford and Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study of Behavioral Science, also at Stanford. He has won awards as a commentator. He has won awards as a journalist. He’s the National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow and the Manassas Fellow in Greece. He’s a terrific fellow, I might add. And he’s also been a professor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis. He’s written many...

Abraham Lincoln's long limbs and saturnine features have lately been stretched out on the psychotherapist's couch. The cover to last October's Atlantic Monthly considered "Lincoln's Great Depression" (an excerpt from Joshua Wolf Shenk's book Lincoln's Melancholy). Applying modern clinical diagnoses to the historical record, Shenk found him to be a severe manic depressive with suicidal tendencies. Peeking into his medicine cabinet, he noted a pharmacopeia of opiates, sarsaparilla, cocaine, and mercury pills. Last month, a lavishly promoted three-hour film on the History Channel (seen by some 2.8 million households) pressed the case further, dwelling on Lincoln's premonitions of his own death, his inferiority complex, and his likely--at least in Gore Vidal's view--homosexuality.

It is into this thicket of psychobabble that John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln strides--long-legged, loose-limbed, and a hundred feet tall. The 1939 film is being issued for the first time on...

[Mr. Radosh, adjunct senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, is co-author with Joyce Milton of "The Rosenberg File."]

Everyone loves conspiracy theories, and Europe is no different. First they had the best-selling French book whose author claimed the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were covert actions of American intelligence; next there was the Arab world's claim that it was an operation by Israeli intelligence. Now we have a new one - in the form of a much-hyped German television documentary, "Rendezvous With Death," directed by Wilfried Huismann with the help of an American JFK assassination buff named Gus Russo. The film first aired in Germany in January and is now being readied for American distribution.

Ulrich Deppendorf, the director of German television's public broadcasting network, ARD - the equivalent of PBS here - claims the documentary proves that "Lee Harvey Oswald was the final pawn in a...

MRS. Sandoval," Homer Macauley said, "your son is dead. Maybe it's a mistake. Maybe it wasn't your son. Maybe it was somebody else. The telegram says it was Juan Domingo. But maybe the telegram is wrong."

Beginning in the mid-19th century, the telegram was the most immediate way of distributing news or sending a message. Whether it was one of those dreaded "regret to inform you" notices from the War Department that William Saroyan's Homer delivered in "The Human Comedy," or "send money" pleas or birthday congratulations, the arrival by hand of those yellow envelopes always seemed momentous. In that spirit, the evangelist Billy Graham was quoted as saying, "I am only a Western Union messenger boy, delivering a telegram from God to the door of humanity."

In 1929, Western Union and its army of uniformed messengers sent more than 200 million telegrams. By last year, that number had dwindled to 21,000. Bowing...

[Mr. Hill is a staff reporter for the Baltimore Sun.]

Most say that America today is a distressingly polarized country - deeply divided over issues from abortion to gun control, from affirmative action to evolution.

Hah! You want polarized? Think of the country that Abraham Lincoln faced when he took office in 1861 - states seceding, a Civil War on the horizon, all over the seemingly insoluble issue of slavery, the one that had stumped the founding fathers.

Or, for that matter, think of the country when Lincoln began his second term in 1865 with only a few weeks to live. A victorious North was trying to figure out what to do with a defeated South and millions of newly freed slaves - with opinions ranging from forgive and forget to ruthless revenge.

One big difference between now and then is that then the president was Lincoln. That is no disrespect to the current occupant of the Oval Office. Few, if any, who have held that office live...

[Noliwe M. Rooks is associate director of the program in African American studies at Princeton University. Her book White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education has just been published by Beacon Press.]

In the late 1960s, black studies became a part of American higher education. By 1971 more than 500 programs, departments, and institutes had been founded on four-year college campuses; add in black-studies initiatives in those same years at high schools and community colleges, and the number jumps to more than 1,000. Today roughly 450 colleges and universities offer graduate programs, undergraduate programs, or both. To be sure, those numbers represent an occasion to celebrate. But jubilance may be premature. It is becoming increasingly clear that before the field can move confidently into the future we need to clear up some continuing confusion about why and how what we now call African-American...

America has had a difficult time reckoning with its racist past. Slavery was a defining part of the cultures and economies out of which the nation grew, and for most of its first century the ownership of humans by other humans was taken for granted. A pseudo-Darwinian ranking by ''race" justified that order, which stood on pillars of skin color and ethnic origin. When that blatant structure of denigration was overthrown by the Civil War, implicit assumptions of white supremacy remained so lodged in the national psyche that slavery became a half remembered shadow, with heirs of slave-holders in contented denial about its brutality and descendants of slaves locked in punishing marginality by means of legal insult and economic short shrift.
Failure to reckon with slavery and its consequences is still the American problem, which is manifest not only by the unyielding grip of white racism that impossibly burdens one generation of African-Americans after another, but also in the...

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia attorney and author, who writes a weekly newspaper column, “Attorney at Large.”]

Pennsylvania lawmakers are worried that our kids in college are being brainwashed.

Late last month a committee of the Pennsylvania state legislature convened in Philadelphia to investigate whether the Commonwealth’s colleges discriminate against politically conservative students. The committee took two days of testimony at Temple University. Established last July, this committee will conduct two more hearings in other parts of the state, before reporting back to the House of Representatives next November.

Representative Gibson C. Armstrong, a Republican out of Lancaster County, introduced the resolution creating the committee. During the first day of the hearings, Armstrong told Temple President David Adamany he had received more than a dozen complaints from Owl students about political indoctrination in the classroom. While defending his faculty...

In "The Conservative Mind" (1953), a founding document of the American conservative movement, Russell Kirk assembled an array of major thinkers beginning with Edmund Burke and made a major statement. He proved that conservative thought in America existed, and even that such thought was highly intelligent--a demonstration very much needed at the time.

Today we are in a very different and more complicated situation. Nevertheless, a synthesis is possible, based on what American conservatism has achieved and left unachieved since Kirk's volume. Any political position is only as important as the thought by which it is derived; the political philosopher presiding will be Burke, but a Burke interpreted for a new constitutional republic and for modern life. Here, then, is my assessment of the ideas held in balance in the American Conservative Mind today.

Hard utopianism. During the 20th century, socialism and communism tried to effect versions of their...