Dr. Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, passionately conveyed the role our nation’s founding principles played in advancing justice and freedom, and stressed how important it is that college students understand these principles. Mirrer has dedicated her life to teaching Americans about America’s exceptional history. Her remarks were given upon accepting the 2014 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education, with tributes from Roger Hertog, businessman and philanthropist; historian and biographer, Robert Caro; and Benno C. Schmidt, chairman of the City University of New York Board of Trustees and 2010 Merrill Award recipient. The 2014 presentation marked the Merrill Award’s tenth anniversary.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a fellow of the Future of Democracy Project at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and founder of the AHA Foundation, and Niall Ferguson, senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and a senior fellow of the Center for European Studies at Harvard University, received the 2016 Philip […]
University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer delivers remarks upon accepting the 2017 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contributions to Liberal Arts Education. He spoke of how the “openness of universities to divergent and clashing ideas, to analytic debate, to rigor, and to questioning, is a critical ingredient in illuminating societal, scientific, and humanistic issues.” […]
“Does this nation in its maturity still cherish the faith in which it was conceived and raised? Does it still hold those ‘truths to be self-evident’?” This is the pivotal question the political philosopher Leo Strauss raised in the opening pages of his most well-known book, Natural Right and History. Quoting part of the famous second […]
Being patriotic, THE SCRAPBOOK is glad but not surprised to learn that nine out of ten Americans want schools to teach the founding principles of the country and the story of the American Revolution. Being worldly-wise, however, THE SCRAPBOOK is sad but not surprised to learn that the schools do so shabby a job of […]
The Founding Fathers’ intent has become a form of political self-assurance and a political conversation killer. Challenge a point of view and have the Founders’ intent spit back in your face. End of debate. You are wrong. The person you are debating—with the Founders “backing”—is right. I am not going to try and extrapolate how […]
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