Robert J. Brugger

Ruffin: Family and Reform in the Old South. By David F. Allmendinger, Jr. Oxford. $34.50. The Diary of Edmund Ruffin, Vol. 3, A Dream Shattered: June, 1863—June, 1865. Edited by William Kauffman Scarborough. Louisiana. $65. If Ken Burns' rightly [...]

In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson. By Noble E. Cunningham, Jr. Louisiana. $24.95. In 1883, Congress having voted money for a new stone to mark Jefferson's grave at Monticello, descendants decided to send the original tombstone to [...]

Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins from a Long War. By Gloria Emerson. Random House. $10.95. VIGNETTES. Friezes. A tableau of men with ashen faces, the prop wash blasting dust into them, trying to heap bloody bundles i [...]

"How or on what conditions," asked R. G. Collingwood in a famous knotty question, "can the historian know the past?" His answer of course was that one "must reenact the past in his own mind," rethinking for himself the thought represented in the rec [...]

The more one reads about military spending and the Soviet-American nuclear arsenal, the closer one draws to despair. Precious little in this lugubrious literature inspires confidence in the course of human events, in the power of reason or nurturing [...]