To all you members of the brigade, our lamplight love still burns strong.

It all begins and ends where the student's lamp has shone, and they're alone.

We've talked a lot about Amor Mundi and Lamplight Love on entitled opinions of late.

Today we're going to talk about an important form that Amor Mundi and Lamplight Love on Entitled Opinions of Late. Today we're going to talk about an important form that Amor Mundi takes or sometimes fails to take in the modern era,

namely love of country, and in particular, love of the country called the United States of America,

and even more particularly, the form that love of country

took for a 19th century New Englander who loved a country that was not in reality the

country she lived in, who loved a country that had not yet been born into its new birth

of freedom, in some, a country that declared one thing and

countenanced another. Some people take declarations more seriously than others, and the protagonist

of today's show was what you might call a declarative American, by which I mean an American

who holds such truths to be self-evident.

Stay tuned, a show on the end of the lockdown,

where our conversation will be taking place remotely.

My guest, Lydia Molland, is dialed in from Maine while I'm here on the other coast of this

sprawling North American continent, where 12 score and 17 years ago,

our father has brought forth a new nation conceived in liberty,

and, if you believe, Abraham Lincoln, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Lydia Molland is a philosopher who teaches at Colby College. She's the author of two

books on Hegel, an editor of another book on the philosophy of humor in the 19th century.

And as of last year, she's also the author of a 600-page biography of someone whom she first became aware of in 2016 when she was rummaging through a box of archived letters in the Schlesinger Library for the history of women in America at the Radcliffe Institute.

That box contained a letter that made a strong impression on her.

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