Of the Civil War, exactly 145 years ago today. Fascinating stuff.

Vanity Fair has a tremendous account of Bobby Kennedy’s doomed presidential campaign of 1968 that’s just fascinating in a lot of respects, but I’m most struck by how he was able to articulate so persuasive a moral case against the Vietnam war - words that, but for 40 years, might be repeated today, with the […]

So now, if I hadn’t spent much of the week waiting for two of the three county commissioners to get back to me (ahem) for a story I’m working on for Sunday, I might have liked to swing by the Millersville Holocaust conference, which continues today. As noted here on several occasions, not only am I studying history but […]

Co-worker brought me in his copy of “Downfall,” (Der Untergang), the German movie about the last 10 days of Hitler, deep in his fuhrerbunker as the Red Army fights its way into Berlin. I was interested in the subject long before I started studying history again, but especially now - in that this semester’s class […]

Some of the best letters I get are from people who say they don’t want their name in the paper, but they just wanted to point out this or that. Today comes one from a 72-year-old local gentleman who, upon perusing last week’s bit about Huckabee and the Constitution, tells me that I’m actually treading way […]

Story running in the NYT tomorrow about how J. Edgar Hoover, on the eve of the Korean War, wanted Truman to suspend Habeus Corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty:
Hoover wanted President Harry S. Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to “protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage.” The F.B.I […]

I’d seen parts off Tom Brokaw’s “1968” on the History Channel, enough to catch the shots of the Chicago riots outside the Democratic Convention and, of course, the black-and-white footage of people dancing around in San Francisco. But I didnt’ see enough to catch the overall insinuation:
He shows the electoral map of 1968, saying if […]

Wonks only, below the break.

Discussion in my history class the other evening about the Progressive era, the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th and the movement that in fact realized many of its most ambitious aims - from reforms in the way government related to the people (direct election of Senators, for example) to Prohibition, […]

And apparently, we didn’t even know the half of it.

I’ll bite on this, Helen…
Reading now about the Civil War era in class, the reasons people fought. Which I’ve always considered the most interesting aspect of the Civil War; how is it that the ordinary farmer was motivated to drop his scythe, go pick up a gun and fight for slavery. But of course they […]

Wow. The history behind this photo, taken just over 50 years ago. The anniversay is being marked today.

A second history class last evening, with the discussion focusing on the Missouri Compromise, the role slavery played in the crisis and how these were perhaps the first tears in the national fabric that would lead to civil war.
It’s fascinating stuff for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that when we’re in […]

Victor Davis Hanson - National Review columnist, syndicated columnist, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, professor emeritus at California University, Fresno, and author of books too numerous to mention - has seen fit to respond to this past weekend’s print edition. I told him I’d post the whole e-mail - so here it […]

Fascinating, horrifying, sad: Interview with a former German soldier who by himself may have accounted for about 3,000 American casualties, almost three-quarters of all the US losses at Omaha Beach on D-Day, the anniversary of which was yesterday:
Severloh, then just 20, gasped when he saw the ocean. He was confronted by what seemed to be […]