“All issues are political issues,” said Orwell, “and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.” Among contemporary political issues, abortion is…
It is a pleasure to discuss these two books edited and written by Brigham D. Madsen, professor of history at the University of Utah. Their primary subject matter is the westward migration during the California…
Ronald H. Limbaugh’s Rocky Mountain Carpetbaggers chronicles Idaho’s gubernatorial administrations—maladministrations?— during its territorial years. The scenario Limbaugh creates runs as follows: (1) a petty politician has connections in Washington; (2) he is appointed to the…
After a century of fledgling survival, Chesterfield, a quiet, remote hamlet in southeastern Idaho, has suddenly become the subject of unprecedented attention. This hamlet is curiously without any of the trappings of the contemporary landscape — fast food restaurants, gasoline stations or residential subdivisions.
For the last two centuries, the scientific study of the Bible has been dominated by historical concerns, as scholars have at tempted, in different ways, first to write a history of the literature of ancient…
Perhaps the Roman historian Tacitus put it as well as anyone when he ‘wrote that “history’s highest function” is “to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as…
The peril of extinction brings us up against this reality, this simple basic fact: Before there can be good or evil, service or harm, lamenting or rejoicing, there must be life.[1] About Considering Consider is…
We were inside the world.
The children were sleeping.
Light fell through the window.
One of us wore red.
Of course, when anyone asks me what my husband does for a living, I never say, “He builds nuclear weapons.” No one in Richland builds bombs. People here only teach school, fight fires, design containment…
Adolph Hitler was barely one month old when my father, Walter ‘Edward Clark, now still living, was born on 31 May 1889. When he was fifteen, in 1904, Father started to farm on his own in Idaho. Hitler was then a choirboy in Austria, avidly aspiring to become a priest. Only six years earlier, the United States had been engaged in a “splendid little war” on the largest Carribean island — at the enthusiastic urging of William Randolph Hearst and Teddy Roosevelt.