“I NO sooner perceived myself in the world,” wrote English philosopher John Locke, “than I found myself in a storm.” Locke was referring to the maelstrom of religious fanaticism and intolerance that ...

One day when I was in graduate school, I found myself knee-deep in National Union Catalogs (a kind of old-school WorldCat) at the Hoover Institution Library. I had gone in search of nineteenth-century ...