James Marcus

Oct 10, 2024 | theatlantic.com | James Marcus

Lore Segal, who died on Monday, spent the last four months of her life looking out the window. Her world had been shrinking for some time, as a hip replacement, a pacemaker, deteriorating vision, and other encroachments of old age had made it difficult to leave her New York City apartment, even with the aid of the walker she referred to as “my chariot.” But now, after a minor heart attack in June, she was confined to a hospital bed at home.

Jun 21, 2024 | lawliberty.org | James Marcus |Allen Mendenhall |William Anthony Hay |Bradley J. Birzer

We all have guilty pleasures. Mine is Ralph Waldo Emerson. A proud Southerner, I’m not supposed to like him. His Southern contemporaries William Gilmore Simms and Edgar Allan Poe lambasted him.

May 2, 2024 | wsj.com | James Marcus

When Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friends hammered out the principles of Transcendentalism in the mid-1830s, the result was a fairly gossamer way of thinking. The movement included a sizable number of activists and reformers, but as theorists the Transcendentalists insisted that the world was a kind of shimmery projection of consciousness.

Mar 26, 2024 | audible.com | Matthew Stewart |Manisha Sinha |Alan Taylor |James Marcus

How a band of antislavery leaders recovered the radical philosophical inspirations of the first American Revolution to defeat the slaveholders' oligarchy in the Civil War. In their struggle against the slaveholding oligarchy of their time, America's antislavery leaders found their way back to the rationalist, secularist, and essentially atheist inspiration for the first American Revolution.