Новости за 08.08.2018

On Friday this stark tweet drew gasps from across Twitter:

The tweet was written by Manisha Sinha, a professor of history at the University of Connecticut. Messages of support poured in immediately from Jelani Cobb, Annette Gordon-Reed, Kevin Kruse and scores of others.

The ordeal began shortly after she wrote an op ed published by CNN with the headline, "What happened the last time a President chose America's enemies over its friends."  In the article Sinha compared Donald Trump to Andrew Johnson. Читать дальше...

The North Fork fire approaches the Old Faithful complex at Yellowstone  September 7, 1988.

That’s one of the lessons of the fire that ravaged Yellowstone 30 years ago.

There is a hidden history in the story of art in America. The great artists did not start out as great artists. They were trained to be good by other painters and they did artistic work wherever they could find it to improve their art and make enough money to pay the bills.

Having recently watched 72 full-length (42-55 minutes each) episodes and 18 shorter (none longer than 7 minutes) historical commentaries of the French TV series "A French Village"(FV), this reviewer feels enriched by the experience. Here's why it seems valuable, especially for potential viewers in this country.

President Harry S. Truman defended using atomic bombs against Japan as a means of ending a war that would have grown far bloodier had the planned invasion proved necessary.  Some have accused him of lying to the American people and to the world.  The Japanese were willing to surrender as early as the spring of 1945, according to these "revisionist" historians, provided only that they could retain their sacred emperor.

Almost a year before the Confederates fired on Ft. Sumter and a bookish, bald, kind-faced minister and professor named Theodor Parker would die while being treated for tuberculosis in temperate Florence, being very far from his birthplace of Lexington, Massachusetts. Rev. Parker was of the New England intellectual vanguard; conversant with the transcendentalism of his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, deeply read in the new German philosophies of Friedrich Schleiermacher and the higher biblical criticism of the time... Читать дальше...

Whatever happened to the notion that rich people should pay their fair share of the cost for their country’s public programs?

News outlets just announced that the Trump administration is going to redesign Air Force One, the Boeing 747 with the iconic blue-on-blue-on-white paint job that has heralded the arrival of every American president since John F. Kennedy.

Edwin G. Walker (1830-1901) - son of David Walker (abolitionist) - one of two Black men first elected the the Massachusetts State Legislature in 1866

Recently, speaking about the creation of the Constitution to a room filled with teachers of history, I mentioned that the drafters struggled over how best to choose the president. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention initially agreed that Congress should make the choice, but then grew concerned that foreign powers would bribe congressmen to favor their preferred candidates.

Related Link The North Korean Nuclear Crisis in History (Interviews with Mitch Lerner and David Fields)

In Lillian Hellman’s play The Children’s Hour, two female teachers in an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Massachusetts are accused of having a lesbian affair by a student. A second student (under duress) backs up the contention of the first. There is an immediate scandal, parents are outraged, the teachers are fired and the school’s reputation is badly damaged. No, this did not happen last Thursday, as you may have suspected, but in 1934, when Hellman’s play opened as a smash hit on Broadway. Читать дальше...