About Lapham's Quarterly

LAPHAM'S QUARTERLY sets the story of the past in the frame of the present. Four times a year the editors seize upon the most urgent question then current in the headlines - foreign war, financial panic, separation of church and state - and find answers to that question from authors whose writings have passed the test of time. The method assumes that profound observations of the human character and predicament don't become obsolete. An issue addressed to the glory of military empire might open with the writings of Homer, proceed to contributions from Thucydides, Tacitus, and Marie de Medici, move forward in time to passages from the works of Dante and Shakespeare, come nearer to the present with the notations of Twain and Freud and Virginia Woolf, eventually arrive at the table talk of Adolf Hitler and the faith-based initiatives of President George W. Bush.

Abridged rather than paraphrased, none of the texts in Lapham's Quarterly will run to a length longer than five or seven pages, some of them (a love lyric, the recipe for Queen Mab pudding, a cure for the Bubonic Plague) to no more than five or seven paragraphs; literary narrative and philosophical commentary as well as letters, diaries, speeches, maps, charts, landscape painting, photographs, bills of lading, writs of execution.

The necessity of an undertaking along the lines of Lapham's Quarterly stands as proven by the all-too-numerous instances of an historical consciousness gone missing from broad sectors of the American mind. Within the wind tunnels of our high speed electronic media, the data shreds or blows away, and the time is always now. Not only do we lose track of our own stories (what happened yesterday, last week, three months ago), our elected representatives forget why sovereign nations go to war. As a consequence we have before us the catastrophe in Iraq, as well as a plurality of fellow citizens who don't know how or when or by whom they were given a Constitution and a Bill of Rights.

In answer to the problem of disappearing context, Lapham's Quarterly discovers in the uses of history both a natural resource and an applied technology. Some things change, others don't, but absent a knowledge of which is which, where then do we find our bearings in the gulf of time, and how do we not become orphans, marooned on the islands of the dream-ridden self?

Cicero framed the thought as an aphorism, "Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." Children unfamiliar with the world in time make easy marks for the dealers in junk science, totalitarian politics, and quack religion. The general states of amnesia cannot sustain the promise of individual freedom or the practice of democratic self-government. A knowledge of history arms us with our best weapon against the will to ignorance and the joys of superstition, makes possible the revolt against what G.K. Chesterton once called "the arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."