Jimmy Carter (1924–2024)
He lived a good life, a life of uncommon decency, and there’s probably some grace in its ending before our next national nightmare officially begins.
“It is never too late to change the future”
In today’s installment of Letters from an American , Heather Cox Richardson reflects on the Wounded Knee Massacre.
“A September to remember”
The historian Timothy Snyder writes about “Trump’s Hitlerian month,” or “a September to remember.” With a discussion of the objection to making comparisons.
June 6
D-Day in Peanuts.
Facts and truth
Reading about Russian-textbook “history” made me recall an observation from Robert Caro’s Working: Research, Interviewing, Writing.
Fact-free history
In The New York Times, an introduction to Vladimir Medinsky, Putin adviser and lead author of new history textbook for Russian high-school students. War is peace, &c.
Heather Cox Richardson on the Second Amendment
“The idea that massacres are “the price of freedom,” as right-wing personality Bill O’Reilly said in 2017 after the Mandalay Bay massacre in Las Vegas, in which a gunman killed 60 people and wounded 411 others, is new, and it is about politics, not our history.”
“Who’s Afraid of Black History?”
Henry Louis Gates Jr. draws a parallel between a supporter of the Lost Cause and Ron Desantis.
Roosevelt, Painter, Snyder
Three excerpts from “The Homeless, Tempest-Tossed,” the final episode of The U.S. and the Holocaust, rom Eleanor Roosevelt and the historians Nell Irvin Painter and Timothy Snyder.
Eva and Miriam
It came as a jolt, even if it shouldn’t have, to see our friend Eva Mozes Kor for a split-second in the final episode of Ken Burns’s The U.S. and the Holocaust.
Undone by an archivist
There’s something sweet and fitting about the prospect of a man with no regard for history and no regard for the written word (save for its monetary value) being undone by an archivist. If the arc of the moral universe isn’t exactly bending toward justice, it might at least be bending toward poetic justice.
Juneteenth
There’s still no stamp. But there is a flag, designed by Ben Haith.
The History Channel
Admiral James G. Stavridis (ret.), on MSNBC a few minutes ago: “Sometimes you’re watching the History Channel in real time. This is one of those times.”
Words from Eduardo Galeano
At the end of Parallel Mothers.
Doris Miller and democracy
From the December 7 installment of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American.
Count the assumptions
“When we founded the New World with Christopher Columbus.”
Heather Cox Richardson again
More helpful than hours of “analysis” on cable news.
About Afghanistan
Heather Cox Richardson’s August 15 installment of Letters from an American is well worth reading.
Following a leader
The ghost of Fred Trump walks.
Donald Rumsfeld (1932–2021)
George Packer, writing in The Atlantic: “Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history. Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction.”
Orange Crate Art: Now and Then, a podcast
A new podcast, from historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman: Now and Then. As the title suggests, their conversation puts past and present together.
On Juneteenth
Eugene Robinson, writing in The Washington Post: “Making Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day news of emancipation finally reached enslaved people in Galveston, Tex., a national holiday is a victory. But it is a hollow one at a moment when the political party that won the Civil War and made that freedom a permanent reality is now moving heaven and earth to keep African Americans from voting.”
The worst
Tim Naftali, historian: “Trump is the worst president in the 232-year history of the United States.”
“In 1917 they say, right?”
“Just to set the record straight on your command of history: could you tell us when the Second World War took place, who was involved, and what its consequences were for the twentieth century?”
“Is it still celebrated?” Yes.
On June 19, a passage from Ralph Ellison’s Juneteenth.
“It is worth the effort”
Time as a river, from E.H. Gombrich’s A Little History of the World.
In the Dark Ages
Plus ça change.
Recently updated
A conversation between Sarah Milov and the historians who borrowed her work without attribution for a radio broadcast.
Credit where it’s due
Two historians — male, tenured — talked on WBUR’s Here and Now about the politics of tobacco. In doing so, they relied, exclusively, it seems, on a forthcoming book by another historian — female, untenured. She and her book were never acknowledged.
Peanuts and D-Day
Links to ten strips.