Новости за 25.09.2018

You know the poem:

“Lizzie Borden took an axe

and gave her mother forty whacks.

When she saw what she had done,

she gave her father forty-one.”

The story of history’s most famous (alleged) axe murderer has been turned into a movie, Lizzie, starring Chloe Sevigny, that just opened, and it attempts to show exactly how Lizzie pulled off the ax murders of her wealthy father and step mother on August 4, 1892.

The astonishment at the horror of the slayings was matched... Читать дальше...

On Thursday I was honored to speak to 23 new American citizens, at a naturalization ceremony aboard "Old Ironsides" in Boston Harbor, as they swore allegiance to the United States of America.  As the son and grandson of immigrants, you would have appreciated the drive, determination and ambition of these new Americans.  Like you and your family, they will be an engine of growth and prosperity and within a generation their families will be indistinguishable from those that have been here for 300 years. Читать дальше...

Related Link What historians are saying about the Kavanaugh nomination 

Dear Reader: When some sturdy book like this is finally in my hands, my practice for some time has been, after glancing at the list price, to go to the Index. After rummaging around a bit, I seek out the Bibliographical List or Essay and check out the citations. Then, I read the initial sentence and paragraph, then the concluding several pages. 

Buried Child by Sam Shepard. The Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey 2018. Directed by Paul Mullins. Pictured (left to right): Roger Clark as Bradley and Sherman Howard as Dodge. Photo credit: Jerry Dalia.

The Army of the Potomac suffered devastating and demoralizing losses during the Overland Campaign in 1864. From the crossing of the Rapidan River in Virginia on May 4 until the closing days at Cold Harbor in June, the army experienced roughly 55,000 casualties. In just one hour on the morning of June 3, the Union lost 3,500 men. Shortly after that debacle, the Fifth Corps commander, Major General Gouverneur Warren, wrote to his wife, “If there were no limit to the number of men we could continually waste in battle I might be more hopeful. Читать дальше...

When the subject of history arises in a conversation, rarely does one think of the present. Rather, what may come to mind is a boring textbook or some funny dressed individual, whose style would remind our contemporaries of a Halloween costume. Contrary to misconceptions that suggest history is irrelevant, it truly is a part of our everyday experience. One could even dare to say that we experience a part of history while browsing social media sites on our phones, as one of the most significant influences throughout history has been words. Читать дальше...

As a young man, William James studied a range of fields, from chemistry to literature. He focused especially on physiology, psychology, and philosophy. In the 1860s and 1870s, the future psychologist and philosopher was sorting out his own philosophy of life and sampling career paths. Each offered plausible insights, but none was decisive or beyond some criticism, especially as amplified by his temperamental indecisiveness. The swirl of choices, and the dramatically different ways of understanding the world... Читать дальше...

In their book How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt write that “the norms sustaining our political system [have] rested, to a considerable degree, on racial exclusion,” pointing to the Compromise of 1877 that led the North to end Reconstruction and leave the South. In the aftermath, the South implemented a whole series of Jim Crow laws that stripped African-Americans of their rights. The political rapprochement Levitsky and Ziblatt describe between Democrats... Читать дальше...

The release of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary “Death of a Nation” is the latest iteration of an alt.right mission to reinforce its recent rise to power by popularizing particular and deeply politicized visions of the American past. The most obvious evidence of political bias is D’Souza’s counter-factual insistence that the Democratic Party hasn’t changed since its proslavery antebellum days, and, in a contradiction that only the most contorted imaginings can conjure, that Donald Trump will save... Читать дальше...

National security. The term has become integral to a constant refrain from the Trump White House over the past six months in justifying a number of political, military and economic decisions. The United States is being threatened on multiple fronts, we are told, and only aggressive responses can maintain our safety.

Football season has arrived again. And returning too are the protestsby players which have caused such debate since Colin Kaepernickfirst chose to kneel rather than stand for the national anthem in 2016. Despite the threats and criticism that have been thrown their way, players continue to protest injustice by remaining in the tunnel, sitting, kneeling, or raising a fist during the playing of the national anthem. And as the protests continue, no doubt too will the criticism. So it might be worth... Читать дальше...

Related Link Nixon, Trump and the Strange Career of the Madman Theory By Jeff Kimball

Presently, we have the oldest first term inaugurated President of the United States, Donald Trump, who was inaugurated at 70 years and a bit more than seven months old in January 2017.

Of the various revelations to emerge from Bob Woodward’s bestseller, Fear: Trump in the White House, the veteran journalist’s new book about the chaotic current administration, the president’s reported dismissal of Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a “dumb Southerner” and “mentally retarded” in a conversation with then-White House staff secretary Rob Porter is one of the least surprising. More than suggesting the staying power of tired put-downs about the region, by equating southernness with stupidity... Читать дальше...

Related Link What historians are saying about the Kavanaugh nomination 

If you did not know where it was, you would stroll right past the ruins of the Roman Theater in Cartagena, Spain, one of the largest and best-preserved amphitheaters of the Roman Empire, a theatrical and historical wonder.

It whitewashes FDR's response to the Holocaust.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has just published a 2019 calendar that focuses on the museum’s new exhibit about Americans’ responses to the Holocaust. Remarkably, two-thirds of the calendar has nothing do with Americans’ responses to the Holocaust. This stark discrepancy is a small but striking illustration of a disturbing bias that has crept into some of the museum’s work in recent years.

Several of the months in the calendar... Читать дальше...

Recently Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO the infamous Texas energy company Enron, was quietly released from prison and placed into a halfway house. To some, the news might offer a satisfying conclusion to the Enron story. The details of the company’s 2001 collapse, involving a massive accounting fraud, were so outlandish that Skilling’s prison term seemed as if justice had been served. After all, many Enron employees lost their retirements when the company went under. The problems with Enron... Читать дальше...

In the run-up to World War II, Latin America was up for grabs and countries that would become the Axis held the upper hand. Latin skies were ruled by airlines owned by German immigrants, some still loyal to the fatherland. Or by Italians, who flew a route that transported spies back and forth and delivered contraband vital to the war effort, like industrial diamonds and platinum, to the heart of the Reich. Mexico sent oil to Hitler and Mussolini, Germany and Japan bought up Brazilian rubber. 

As the nation commemorates and honors Senator John McCain after his passing on August 25, 2018, giving him the kind of attention and reverence often only given to former Presidents of the United States, this is a good time to reflect on the Republican Party and the US Senate since 1950.

“Colonel Roosevelt and his Rough Riders at the top of the hill which they captured, Battle of San Juan”

“A horse leach, a ferret, a pole-cat, a weasel.” This was how editor William Cobbett painted American humanitarian Dr. Benjamin Rush in a 1793 newspaper editorial in Philadelphia, then the nation’s capital. 

Perhaps not unlike other prominent politicians of his time, Thomas Jefferson had an ambivalent relationship with the press. That ambivalence expressed itself in an unflagging theoretical commitment to free presses with growing practical recognition as he advanced in years that free presses seldom concerned themselves with truth. Thus, while he recognized that public papers were often put to use for political posture, in spite of the strictures of the First Amendment, he also recognized that a... Читать дальше...

Inauguration ceremony for Franklin D. Roosevelt on March 4, 1933

“A steadily degenerating confidence in the future which had reached the height of general alarm. . . . We are in a pitiful position.” The American Dream “appears to lie shattered.” Words from the present Trumpian times when political rancor and divisiveness are rampant and our president continues to attack his predecessor’s legacy and despoil our environment? Nope. The quotes are from Herbert Hoover and a popular historian... Читать дальше...