Tag: History

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.

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.

AuH20 + 1964.


“Let Scranton and Rockefeller make their token gestures at the ticket; let Romney and Rhodes snub it altogether. Nixon had been as nauseated by the [1964] convention — literally, he would claim in his memoirs — as any of them. Only he had swallowed his bile — and swallowed the rubber chicken, the back-room whiskey, and the church-basement juice, sitting in airports, sleeping in airplanes (or not sleeping, if it was a prop plane that rattled like the end of the world), gripping and grinning just as he had for his party every two years since 1946. Once more he would pack the bags, kiss the girls goodbye, and set out to collect the chits. It was a habit, strategy, a way of life.”

I did quite a bit of history reading over the vacation, and write-ups will follow in the orals prep subsection in short order. (In fact, expect that portion of the site to heat up over the next few months, since – other than TA’ing for Ken Jackson’s perennial “History of NYC” class – that’s all I’ll be doing for the rest of 2003.) But I’d be remiss if I didn’t hype Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm here. Simply put, I was awed by this book – Covering the Goldwater movement of the early 1960’s (i.e. the birth of modern conservatism), it’s massively researched and amazingly well-written, and easily the best recent work of political history I’ve read in months. (I do have quibbles – I don’t think Perlstein is completely fair to Kennedy, for example. But they pale in comparison to the strengths of this tome.)

The book also made me realize that I – and most other progressives, liberals, and assorted other lefties – really need to be more of a joiner. As Perlstein’s book notes, much of the rise of Reagan in ’66 can be attributed to the organization of the Goldwater groupies through ’64. As such, I particularly recommend this book to folks out there who’ve already gone full-out for Team Dean, since Before the Storm seems a great primer on how to exploit the niches of the system in order to buck the party establishment. Very good stuff.

The Conversations.

“On one of Lyndon Johnson’s tapes, one archivist said, he was heard to refer to a ‘pack of bastards,’ but he was really speaking of the ‘Pakistani ambassador.’ Another transcript stated that someone ‘lied. He gets his information from the Joint Chiefs,’ when the speaker actually said he
‘implied he gets his information from the Joint Chiefs.’” David Greenberg examines the trouble with White House recordings as a transparent window into History.