This very well-reasoned post on the plight of conservatives in academia slipped under my radar, but was good reading over coffee this morning.

Happy Birthday James Madison, born on this date in 1751. From Federalist 49:

The reason of man, like man himself, is timid and cautious when left alone, and acquires firmness and confidence in proportion to the number with which it is associated. When the examples which fortify opinion are ANCIENT as well as NUMEROUS, they are known to have a double effect. In a nation of philosophers, this consideration ought to be disregarded. A reverence for the laws would be sufficiently inculcated by the voice of an enlightened reason. But a nation of philosophers is as little to be expected as the philosophical race of kings wished for by Plato. And in every other nation, the most rational government will not find it a superfluous advantage to have the prejudices of the community on its side. The danger of disturbing the public tranquillity by interesting too strongly the public passions, is a still more serious objection against a frequent reference of constitutional questions to the decision of the whole society. Notwithstanding the success which has attended the revisions of our established forms of government, and which does so much honor to the virtue and intelligence of the people of America, it must be confessed that the experiments are of too ticklish a nature to be unnecessarily multiplied. We are to recollect that all the existing constitutions were formed in the midst of a danger which repressed the passions most unfriendly to order and concord; of an enthusiastic confidence of the people in their patriotic leaders, which stifled the ordinary diversity of opinions on great national questions; of a universal ardor for new and opposite forms, produced by a universal resentment and indignation against the ancient government; and whilst no spirit of party connected with the changes to be made, or the abuses to be reformed, could mingle its leaven in the operation. The future situations in which we must expect to be usually placed, do not present any equivalent security against the danger which is apprehended.

Happy Birthday General John Pope, Union Civil War general whose reputation never recovered from the debacle of Second Manassas in 1862. I have read some revisionist takes on his life, but his life and career (like that of Ambrose Burnside and Joe Hooker, both of whom have had their advocates in recent years) seem destined for a dark corner of history's basement.

Nero died on this date in 37AD, as did the great American cartographer Nathaniel Bowditch in 1838. A good son of Salem, you could use his maps with complete confidence in a dense fog. Charles Darwin also passed on this day in 1882. His work devastated mainline Protestantism, and sent many fleeing into the Catholic Church. Said Newman to those looking for comfort:

It does not seem to me to follow that creation is denied because the Creator, millions of years ago, gave laws to matter. He first created matter and then he created laws for it -- laws which should construct it into its present beauty, and accurate adjustment and harmony of parts gradually. We do not deny or circumscribe the Creator, because we hold he has created the self acting originating human mind, which has almost a creative gift; much less then do we deny or circumscribe His power, if we hold that He gave matter such laws as by their blind instrumentality moulded and constructed through innumerable ages the world as we see it. If Mr. Darwin in this or that point of his theory comes into collision with revealed truth, that is another matter -- but I do not see that the principle of development, or what I have called construction, does. As to the Divine Design is it not an instance of incomprehensibly and infinitely marvelous Wisdom and Design to have given certain laws to matter million of years ago, which have, surely and precisely worked out, in the, long course of those ages, those effects which He from the first proposed. Mr. Darwin's theory need not then be atheistical, be it true or not; it may simply be suggesting a larger idea of Divine Prescience and Skill ... but at first sight I do not see that the accidental evolution of organic beings is inconsistent with divine design -- It is accidental to us not to God.

And Nathaniel Hawthorne, another famous son of Salem (so many for an insular town -- Hawthorne, Bowditch, Joseph Story, Benjamin Crowninshield, Elias Hasket Derby, Samuel McIntire -- who said Boston was the Athens of America?), published his novel Scarlet Letter on this day in 1850. This came in the midst of Hawthorne's most creative period. Think of it -- has any author done so much of worth in so short a time? First came the Scarlet Letter in 1850, followed in 1851 by House of the Seven Gables (Halfway down a bystreet in one of our New England towns stands a rusty wooden house with seven acutely peaked gables in the midst...), followed in 1852 by both Blithedale Romance and the Life of Franklin Pierce.