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Category Archives: History

You heard it here first

In what should come as no surprise a panel of experts polled by the Los Angeles Times opines that while Biden is a respectable 16th best in the list of presidents, Trump is dead last: Trump’s position at the bottom of our rankings, meanwhile, puts him behind not only Buchanan and Johnson but also such […]

They don’t know much about history, but they still get to write it

Scott Lemieux, over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, notes that some in the media have now started to both sides the insurrection. The headline of the piece to which he links reads: One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry. The text he excerpts from the […]

Nothing new under the sun

My professorial son got me Stacy Schiff’s The Revolutionary Sam Adams for Christmas. It’s actually the third Adams biography I’ve read, but being the geezer that I am, I can’t recall whether the previous biographies emphasized the part of Adam’s history about which I’m writing now. Adams was a prolific writer/propagandist. He started what might […]

Tom Paine to get his due

I just stumbled upon this article, which I consider somewhat shocking (given our current march toward fascism) but great and long past due news. The Thomas Paine Memorial Association (TPMA) is pleased to announce that on December 27, 2022, President Biden signed a congressional bill to endorse a monument dedicated to the life and work […]

It was 20 years ago today…

Anyone who lived through it will never forget where they were when they first heard the news, or what they were doing. I remember that my office shut down because as what had happened sunk in, people sort of went into a state of shock and just left. It was, as Paul Krugman pointed out […]

Another crushing defeat for Trump

Some might think, judging by the title of this post, that I will be bloviating about the recent indictment of the Trump Organization. While that might be well worth the bloviating, this post bloviates elsewhere: Historians: Trump Was Only the Fourth-Worst President of All Time Today, C-SPAN released its Presidential Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, […]

Some Good News

It is an odd thing that while some truly horrible things are going on in plain sight, though for reasons unknown our media tends to ignore or downplay the worst of them, like the President of the United States contemplating stealing an election by declaring martial law,other things are happening that should give us at […]

A bit of history

I have never listened to the music of Hamilton, much less seen the Broadway show, but my reaction to what I heard about the play was always pretty much the same as that of Eric Loomis, over at Lawyers, Guns & Money. I was both mystified and irritated that anyone would portray Hamilton as some […]

You read it here first!

I just came across this: It is easy to imagine [Trump] is the worst leader the US has ever had. It is a view endorsed by the American Political Science association, which canvassed some 170 historians who ranked Trump dead last—a largely bipartisan verdict, too, since even self-identified Republicans on the panel rated him fortieth against the […]

A Monumental Modest Proposal

As the statues of the traitors and assorted genocidal monsters come down, it seems fitting that we consider raising monuments to people who deserve our recognition, which brings me to the book I am currently perusing, The Slaves Cause, by Manisha Sinha. It is a densely written history of the Abolitionist movement, and through its […]