James Madison and Walt Kelly, creator of the Pogo comic strip, had this much in common:  they both concluded that we are the problem. Kelly issued his most famous pronouncement — “We have met the enemy and he is us” — on a poster for the first Earth Day in 1970.    For those of us sweltering through…

David O. Stewart, novelist?  Pretty soon.  The following notice just ran on Publishers Marketplace: “Author of SUMMER OF 1787, the recently published AMERICAN EMPEROR, on Aaron Burr, and a forthcoming history of James Madison, founder and president of The Washington Independent Review of Books David Stewart’s MR. BINGHAM’S SECRET, about a deathbed confession that reveals…

Wednesday marked the 208th anniversary of the duel between Vice President Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, former Secretary of the Treasury.  In the dawn hours, each traveled to a lonesome outcropping of New Jersey’s Palisades to try to kill each other in a savage ritual. Burr succeeded, dispatching his long-time nemesis with a pistol shot…

Three recent events reinforce the wisdom of this remark by William Faulkner in Requiem for a Nun.  First, the New York Times is starting a series of pieces to be written by Adam Goodheart and Peter Manseau that will aim at correcting the historical statements, misstatements, and abuses of this political campaign season.  Titled “History Corrected,”…