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.
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.”
Today in history
“August 5, 1974, was the day the Nixon Presidency ended.... “On August 5, 2018, precisely forty-four years after the collapse of the Nixon Presidency, another President, Donald Trump, made his own public admission.”
Principiis obsta and finem respice
Post-WWII, a professor of philology (“Middle High German was my life”) speaks.
On John F. Kelly
Josh Marshall and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Must be read to be believed
When Donald Trump speaks of slavery, it’s not to mourn the original American sin: it’s only to proclaim that everybody did it.
NEA, NEH, CPB funding
A visual representation of the combined budgets of the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
“An enemy of the people”
Long story short: the French Revolution, an Ibsen play, Lenin, Stalin, and sometimes Mao.
“Past events”
From Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Frederick who?
Does Dunning K. Trump think Frederick Douglass is a living human being? Does he have any idea what Frederick Douglass is known for?
Then and now
“Nonetheless, through a combination of intentional propaganda and general paranoia, the perception gained traction that America was being swamped with exiles to the point where millions of jobs and democracy itself were at risk.”
Rewriting the past
From Nineteen Eighty-Four.
E. B. White on America Firsters
Fascism, nationalism, and America Firsters.
A song for the day
“I’m History,” words and music by Van Dyke Parks.