History
Apparently we’re at the point in Campaign 2012 where we play the game of dissecting political statements for “gotcha moments.” The pols have to be ready for the questions, so they should work to make sure they mitigate damage by reading up beforehand. That being said, of all the things to talk to a Presidential…
On behalf of no recognized or legitimate authority whatsoever (i.e. staying true to my blogging roots), I invite United States Congresswoman and possible long-shot Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann to round out her knowledge of New England history by paying a visit to my neighborhood, the Edgewood and Pawtuxet sections of Cranston and Warwick, Rhode Island,…
The Thomas B. Fordham Institute has studied various State-level U.S. History Standards and come up with a report (PDF). For the most part, they didn’t like what they found with a “majority of states’ standards are mediocre-to-awful.” And, surprise, of all the states, Rhode Island was the only state to receive an N/A (Incomplete). Why?…
A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation by David W. Blight. A Slave No More is many books in one. The heart and soul of the work are the never-before-published emancipation narratives written by Wallace Turnage and John Washington. Blight provides historical context by matching their…
Note Bene: One of the ancillaries of having a history blog was receiving, from time to time, a review copy of a book from its publisher. Well, although the aformentioned blog is now dormant, I still occasionally receive books and I think offering the occasional Sunday review seems appropriate. Life is more than politics and…
Once again, I find I must recommend an inaccessible article in National Review, this one by Gettysburg College history professor Allen Guelzo: The antidote to slavery, Lincoln insisted, was also economic free labor. In the 19th century, free labor was the shorthand term for a particular way of viewing capitalism: as a labor system, in…
During my time as a college English student, with professors being predictably as you can imagine they were, I was struck by how powerful a set of letters “nigger” could be — first, as a dehumanizing attack and, later, as a literary marker of the speaker’s ignorance. Particularly in postbellum literature, and especially in certain…
It doesn’t diminish the fields of history and science to express fascination that it’s entirely possible for some bones or fragments thereof to reorder the entire history of man: A Tel Aviv University team excavating a cave in central Israel said teeth found in the cave are about 400,000 years old and resemble those of…
This is very neat; an animated chart of global health and wealth over two hundred years. The discouraging aspect is the continued struggle within Africa to advance. On a different note, Hans Rosling breaks some nations into regions to illustrate differences; it’d be interesting to see a similar effort covering the individual states of the…
Thanks to the folks at Reason.com for reminding people that political campaigns have been dirty for quite some time (say, a couple hundred years, at least).