(For the use of the membership only) by Tom Huston I don’t have a thing against moderates. Indeed, some of my best friends are moderates. I am confident that they are genuine moderates because they assure me that they are. They are leery of extremists (whom they associate with the Tea Party and evangelical snake handlers), but they still invite me to an occasional cocktail party. That, I think, demonstrates that they also are tolerant.…

(For the use of the membership only; copyright © 2013 by Tom Charles Huston, all rights reserved, reprinted by permission) By Tom Huston I have been ruminating lately on the debt I owe to that generation of American conservative thinkers who were my mentors in the early morning hours of the modern conservative renaissance. The clock is working against those of my generation who were present, if not at the creation, then at the hour…

by Andrea Neal In the history books, William Henry Harrison was the first president to die in office, but Hoosiers should remember him as the man who shaped the Indiana Territory. Indiana was a territory for 16 years before it became a full-fledged state. Following a multi-step process set out in the Northwest Ordinance, citizens first had to get practice in governing, grow in population, petition for statehood, be accepted into the union and write…

For the use of the membership only (605 words). by Tom Huston I am ornery enough to never worry about whether I am on the right side of history. On the other hand, James H. Madison, an Indiana University historian, writes in the Nov. 4 issue of the Indianapolis Business Journal that he is worried that Hoosiers may fail to get right with history by incorporating a ban on same-sex marriage into the Indiana Constitution.…

by Eric Schansberg, Ph.D. Nov. 22 marks the 50th anniversary of the death of three highly influential people: Aldous Huxley, John F. Kennedy and C.S. Lewis. Although Kennedy — in his life and especially in his death — is the most famous of the trio, all three had an impressive impact during their lives and in the decades since. All three have ancestral roots in Great Britain: Kennedy was a third-generation Irishman; Lewis was born…

by Cecil Bohanon, Ph.D. The Indiana legislature will likely consider expanding statewide pre-kindergarten programs for children at risk. Informing the discussion will be an extensively studied 1960s pre-K experiment, the Perry Program from Ypsilanti, Mich. Its findings suggest we reexamine a forgotten goal of early education. In the Perry Program, researchers assigned 123 three-year-old children from low-income black households to either a control group or a treatment group. Those in the treatment group participated in…

Resolved: That all Indiana students should receive the best possible education. The problem is that this obviously worthy goal is pursued at the statehouse with a failed assumption — that our school districts operate the same way, apply the same standards with the same parental support, all with the same bureaucratic apparatus supervising the same assembly line of interchangeable teachers. That all is a figment of John Dewey’s imagination. As such, it is being exposed…

by Andrea Neal For 30 years, he was a dominating figure on the Indiana frontier, at first resisting the white man’s encroachment and later giving in to the inevitable. The historian Calvin Young called him “one of the greatest Indian chiefs of all time.” “Some day we will recognize him as our first great Hoosier and an American of national importance,” wrote Otho Winger, historian and Manchester College president, in 1942. Indeed, Miami Chief Little…

YOU MAY not have heard this good news about the Indiana economy: The state has avoided as a whole the mistakes that result in local housing bubbles. And this, among other reasons, is why Indiana remains a relatively good place to live. This was not intentional, alas, as will be explained, but it nonetheless gives us an advantage. Wendell Cox, a public-policy consultant who writes on this topic for The Indiana Policy Review, describes the…

by Randal O’Toole The Carmel Chamber of Commerce says that Indianapolis needs a regional transit system — which inevitably means higher taxes — so Indianapolis can compete with communities such as Minneapolis and Salt Lake City. In fact, since 1990, the Indianapolis urban area has grown more than twice as fast as the Minneapolis or Salt Lake urban areas, and faster than any other major urban area in the Midwest, so Indianapolis seems to be…