Marvin Olasky is the chairman of Zenger House, which gives annual awards to journalists who write great articles with street-level reporting; the author of 30 books, including Moral Vision: Leadership from George Washington to Joe Biden; and an Acton Institute affiliate scholar.
Posts by Marvin Olasky
November 06, 2025
November, Native American History Month, will rightly bring out remonstrations against the injustices of the 1830s, but to understand what happened we should start with the Proclamation Line of 1763, a British attempt to separate American colonists (who would live east of the Appalachians) and Native Americans (told to stay west).
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October 08, 2025
October, National Book Month, is a time for “best book” recommendation lists. I have a hard time being objective about the highly subjective experience of reading, so here’s my personal list not of “the best” but of titles that educated me.
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September 12, 2025
One constant in American life is a debate about schooling. Educators and psychologists repeatedly erase blackboard plans and chalk up new ones. Screens in the 2010s are saviors, and in the 2020s devils.
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August 29, 2025
The saga of Hurricane Katrina began 20 years ago, on August 29, 2005, when Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco examined weather forecasts concerning a tropical storm that had assaulted south Florida but that was now a Category 3 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and declared a state of emergency for all Louisiana.
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July 10, 2025
July 10 is the 100th anniversary of the Scopes “monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. Some pundits will praise the trial as a public relations victory for both evolution and famed lawyer Clarence Darrow, who claimed, “The fear of God is not the beginning of wisdom.
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February 13, 2025
This year is the 150th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which guaranteed African Americans equal treatment in public transportation. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1883 declared the Act unconstitutional, saying it infringed on the ability of private companies and individuals to run their affairs as they wanted.
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January 20, 2025
As we look toward an inauguration on January 20, I think of Robert Altman’s movie
Nashville (1975) and its leadoff song: “We must be doing something right to last 200 years.”
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June 18, 2024
Happy centennial, Johan Huizinga! He wrote his famous history book,
The Waning of the Middle Ages, in 1919, but an English translation came out in 1924 and changed the way many thought about writing history.
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May 08, 2024
It happens in many careers. A person with a “Do not steal” moral standard enters an organization where, it seems, everyone steals. What then?
Most of us have heard of Harry S.
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April 16, 2024
I’ve watched hundreds of westerns over the years, and 48 years ago even wrote my doctoral dissertation on the politics of the genre from 1948 to 1962. I wasn’t surprised when movie watcher Hannah Long early this year called
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) the best western ever made: John Ford’s film makes the top 10 on just about everyone’s list.
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