The Center for Cultural Restoration reconnects Americans with the deeper sources of our civilization through ideas, storytelling, and public presence. Each project below stands on its own; together they form a single effort to restore what has been forgotten.
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The first installment in this project is a major initiative already underway: “Remembering Upstate New York” — a pilot initiative for the restoration of regional and patriotic pride, centered on the history and culture of Upstate New York.
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“Manuscripts Don’t Burn” is a phrase taken from Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov in his novel The Master and Margarita, one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century.
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This intellectual and political memoir will capture the story of the author’s journey from childhood in rural upstate New York to the Ivy League, and to subsequent corridors of American power.
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A forthcoming initiative examining the formation and preservation of Catholic identity in American institutional life.
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CCR Founder Mary Eberstadt has been a prolific author and speaker, publishing hundreds of pieces, reviews, and other reflections, in many genres and venues across the West, for several decades.
Upstate New York has been the backdrop for some of the most significant events in American history — the abolitionist movement, the suffragist campaigns, the spiritual awakenings of the Burned-Over District, the Erie Canal. Yet much of that inheritance remains in shadow, and the people who live there are routinely caricatured rather than understood.
Led by Project Director Mary Eberstadt and a team of researchers and writers, Remembering Upstate New York documents and amplifies these regional stories through on-site research, long-form essays, and multimedia. The revival of American patriotism begins with the revival of regional pride.
The title comes from Mikhail Bulgakov, who wrote The Master and Margarita under Soviet censorship and never saw it published in his lifetime. For decades, tradition-minded writers have complained about the ugliness of contemporary art. Almost no one has answered it the only way that finally works — by making better art.
CCR Founder Mary Eberstadt and team are undertaking a major foray into literary fiction in the form of her two novels: The Washington Zoo, a comic novel of modern Washington in the tradition of Tom Wolfe and Christopher Buckley, and Trailer Boy, a young-adult novel set in rural upstate New York during the opioid epidemic. Both may extend into stage and screen, as The Loser Letters did before them.
Working title: Code-switcher: The Making of a Cultural Conservative. The story of a journey from childhood in rural upstate New York to the Ivy League and into the corridors of American power — the United Nations, the State Department as a speechwriter in the Reagan administration, and the halls of American intellectual life.
The personal story is interwoven with the seminal events of the era: Vietnam, the Iran hostage crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, and the culture wars at home. Written for a general audience, it is both a contribution to contemporary intellectual history and a reflection on what it means to be an outlier firmly grounded in tradition.
A forthcoming initiative examining the formation and preservation of Catholic identity in American institutional life. Details will be announced as the project develops.
CCR Founder Mary Eberstadt has published hundreds of essays, reviews, and reflections across more than four decades — on secularization, the sexual revolution, contemporary intellectual history, literary criticism, and much else. Beyond her seven books, most of that work remains uncollected and scattered across the venues where it first appeared.
The Legacy Project conducted by the CCR team serves three purposes: to bring this work in accessible form to a new generation of readers; to show the extraordinary range of it; and to keep it from vanishing into the ether. The project will collect, curate, and publish significant volumes of her writing.
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