By way of Kestrel’s Nest, Aftermath, a remembrance of the end of World War I, which came to a close on this day 85 years ago. Among the millions who died in the Great War was my great-grandfather, Alfred Amory Sullivan — he perished in the Battle of the Somme, on the side of the British.
Category: History
Lyrics Carry.
By way of Cheesedip and Do You Feel Loved?, test your knowledge of 80’s lyrics. As a child of the Eighties, I got a 97.
Neustadt’s End.
R.I.P. Richard Neustadt 1919-2003. His book Presidential Power was one of the first I read in college, and its argument still stays with me. He will be missed.
Party with Powhatan.
Williamsburg preps for Jamestown’s 400th birthday. I wonder if they’ll invite Roanoke.
A Second Opinion.
Historians and medical researchers wonder if FDR suffered from Guillain-Barre syndrome rather than polio. Either way, the splendid deception worked like a charm.
Don’t Know Much About History.
Sorry about the lack of updates since Sunday….As it happens, encroaching November has frightened me into working harder on my US history orals site. My note-taking is still two months or so behind my reading, but – in case you’re interested – I’ve recently put up notes and reviews on the following books:
| John Morton Blum, Years of Discord: American Politics and Society, 1961-1974. William Leach, Land of Desire, Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus. Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America. Robert Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941-1975. Robert Weisbrot, Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement. Gary Wills, Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home. |
Updates to the orals site should come relatively frequently for the next few months, so expect more to come.
From Pelennor to Petersburg.
Members of the fanboy press see 20 minutes of RotK, and they sound superb (Spoilers here about how certain scenes play out.) Meanwhile, the trailer for Cold Mountain, that other major Oscar-contending peak (besides Mt. Doom), is now online. I’m all for Civil War tales, but ah have to staht a-wunnderin’ about Jude and Miss Nicole’s accents after watching this.
Building Back to Basics.
Former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta aims to resurrect the progressive think tank, using the rise of similar conservative organizations in the ’60’s as a model. This sounds like a great idea, although, if the Center for American Progress is in fact serious about re-contemplating the party’s first principles, I suspect it’ll be only a matter of time before they run into trouble with the DLC establishment.
Shades of Watergate.
From out the mists of history, Watergate figures weigh in on Felonygate and this administration’s total lack of credibility: Nixon counsel John Dean calls the Bushies worse than his old employers, while Daniel Ellsberg argues that the Plumbers are back. Says Ellsberg of the Plame situation, “I see an almost identical pattern here [between his own experience and Plame’s]. Really, I don’t know of any analogy so close in the 30 years between now and then. This is not an everyday occurrence.” In related news, it turns out that the Bushies have lied again — this time, Wolfowitz & co. drastically overstated the health of the Iraqi oil industry, despite a Pentagon report to the contrary, so as to minimize the cost of Iraqi reconstruction for American taxpayers. Typical.
Buried, but not Dead.
New York prepares for a mass re-burial of over 400 Colonial-era slaves in the spot where they were found 12 years ago. Perhaps this ceremony will help to encourage more formal and historic recognition of the city’s relationship to slavery. (As the article notes, Gotham once held more slaves than any other city but Charleston.) And as New York, so too the nation — While the Holocaust Museum serves as an important and necessary reminder of how nations ostensibly grounded in Enlightenment ideals can go terribly, terribly wrong, it’s a bit glaring that we have such a fine museum in Washington dedicated to Germany’s most grievous sin, without any comparable historic institution focusing on our own. A National Museum of Slavery is well past due, and, Civil War importance aside, it should really be on the National Mall, not in Fredericksburg.