Charles Swift, local historian, is offering his first walking tour of Boston this next Wednesday, June 7. It will cover Beacon Hill, “from its earliest history to current development.” Kudos to Charles for coming up with the idea and offering these. His website is a fount of information, and I’m sure his tours will be […]
I’m long overdue in giving notice to Charles Swift and his excellent City Record and Boston News-Letter. It’s a compendium of Boston history… vanished buildings, forgotten events, context for current debates on planning and urban development. His recent posts - on a 1970s BRA book, Mass. Av in the 1920s, thoughts on the population Census, […]
Mike Tomasky has a quiz.
Looks like I need to brush up on my American history. I only scored 11, and even then my butt was saved by the "well-roundedness" category.
Another interesting political science feature in Sunday’s Ideas section of the Globe, this time about a book from political scientists Richard Johnston and Byron Shafer called The End of Southern Exceptionalism. Sounds like another book to add to the reading list. In short,
[E]conomics, not race… upended the Southern apple cart. As the South boomed and […]
Wow, I’d love to take this course. I need to remind myself I’m no longer a student.
Anne Applebaum had an interesting critique of the Smithsonian’s “America’s Attic” approach last week.
It collects everything from first ladies’ gowns to family photo albums to old ballots. It owns, among other things, Helen Keller’s watch, Cesar Chavez’s union jacket, Thomas Edison’s light bulb, and a copy of Elvis Presley’s first album. Its current exhibits […]
It’s History Week at Slate, with lots of great stuff, including a debate over what secondary education history curricula should look like. I tried to say something about the divide between academic and popular historiography before, but David Greenberg does it so much better.
I came across this paragraph in James Patterson’s Grand Expectations (p.62).
The murder rate had halved by 1945. As became clear later, this situation was abnormal, stemming in part from the fact that the United States had a relatively small cohort of young men - those most prone to crime - at the time. This in […]
At the Economist, Lexington looks at the dearth of Republicans in New York City and muses why this might be:
How the Republicans found themselves in this wretched state dates back to the party’s founding 150 years ago, and reflects its virtues at least as much as its failures. The party was started with vital backing […]
Having seen Gangs of New York recently, I found myself surprised at how many reviewers seemed to give a cliched, aesthetically uninteresting movie a pass because of its attempt to fashion a revisionist liberal history of the nation’s and New York’s origins. (A.O. Scott, whose reviews I generally like, is offender number one here). So […]