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A biographer speaks up for Calvin Coolidge

Coolidge is, in American memory, a cluster of anecdotes, a minor legend embraced largely for its irony: the taciturn figure at odds with the jazzed-up, boozing, and crazily acquisitive decade over which he came to preside; a tortoise reigning over hares, cutting budgets while the citizenry bought their way, on margin, toward doom. Only a few years after the Great War turned the United States into a world power, he set out to shrink the size and reach of its government, to hark back instead of race forward.

William Allen White, the Kansas newspaperman, nicely captured the mismatch between President and nation in the title of his Coolidge biography, “A Puritan in Babylon” (1938). As White saw it, America felt moved to “erect this pallid shrunken image of its lost ideals and bow down before it in subconscious repentance for its iniquities.”

In Coolidge’s time, the nation had not yet piled high its commitments to the sick and to the poor and, especially, to the old, whom we will have with us—who will be us—for longer and longer stretches. Coolidge was indeed able to “swing it,” but in a world that we have since—gradually, deliberately, and with a fundamental bipartisanship—exchanged for another. If he did come back to us in a dream, and looked up at the fiscal cliff over which we teeter in mutual bad faith, he would likely offer no more than an uncomprehending shake of the head and a disbelieving question: “You built that?”

In the New Yorker, Thomas Mallon urges us to reconsider Cal

150 Years of Misunderstanding the Civil War

It’s hard to argue with the Gettysburg Address. But in recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs?

“We’ve decided the Civil War is a ‘good war’ because it destroyed slavery,” says Fitzhugh Brundage, a historian at the University of North Carolina. “I think it’s an indictment of 19th century Americans that they had to slaughter each other to do that.”

…Recent scholarship has also cast new light on the scale and horror of the nation’s sacrifice. Soldiers in the 1860s didn’t wear dog tags, the burial site of most was unknown, and casualty records were sketchy and often lost. Those tallying the dead in the late 19th century relied on estimates and assumptions to arrive at a figure of 618,000, a toll that seemed etched in stone until just a few years ago.

But J. David Hacker, a demographic historian, has used sophisticated analysis of census records to revise the toll upward by 20%, to an estimated 750,000, a figure that has won wide acceptance from Civil War scholars.

Read the Atlantic’s reassessment of the Civil War

The Wild, Wild West: Rioting in Western China

At least 27 people died in rioting in far western China on Wednesday, when protesters attacked a police station and government offices and the police fired on the crowd, state media said. It was the worst spasm of violence for years in Xinjiang, a region troubled by tensions between Uighurs, an overwhelmingly Muslim ethnic minority, and China’s Han majority…

“This clash did not happen by chance,” said the spokesman, Dilxat Raxit, who lives in Sweden. “There have been sweeps and crackdowns in the area, leading to many Uighur men disappearing, and the authorities have refused to give information about their whereabouts,” he said, citing recent phone conversations with residents…

The government has placed blame for past violence in Xinjiang on groups it accuses of using terror to seek independence for the region, including the East Turkestan Islamic Movement. But advocates of Uighur self-determination and some foreign scholars say the discontent has local causes and is not orchestrated from abroad.

Photoessay: American West, 150 Years Ago

In the 1860s and 70s, photographer Timothy O’Sullivan created some of the best-known images in American History. After covering the U.S. Civil War, O’Sullivan joined a number of expeditions organized by the federal government to help document the new frontiers in the American West. The teams were composed of soldiers, scientists, artists, and photographers, and tasked with discovering the best ways to take advantage of the region’s untapped natural resources. O’Sullivan brought an amazing eye and work ethic, composing photographs that evoked the vastness of the West. He also documented the Native American population as well as the pioneers who were already altering the landscape. Above all, O’Sullivan captured — for the first time on film — the natural beauty of the American West in a way that would later influence Ansel Adams and thousands more photographers to come. [34 photos]

It’s a Myth That Entrepreneurs Drive New Technology

A telling 2012 article in the Economist claimed that, to be innovative, governments must “stick to the basics” such as spending on infrastructure, education, and skills, leaving the rest to the revolutionary garage tinkerers.

Yet it is ideology, not evidence, that fuels this image.

Apple is a perfect example. In its early stages, the company received government cash support via a $500,000 small-business investment company grant. And every technology that makes the iPhone a smartphone owes its vision and funding to the state: the Internet, GPS, touch-screen displays, and even the voice-activated smartphone assistant Siri all received state cash.The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency bankrolled the Internet, and the CIA and the military funded GPS. So, although the United States is sold to us as the model example of progress through private enterprise, innovation there has benefited from a very interventionist state.

More at Slate

Long Hidden, Vatican Painting Linked To Native Americans

This recently restored painting in the Vatican, created in 1494 by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio, has a small depiction of naked men with feathered headdresses. This may be the first European depiction of Native Americans. The scene, just above the tomb of Jesus, is too small to be seen in this view of the entire painting but is shown in the photo below.

For close to 400 years, the painting was closed off to the world. For the past 124 years, millions of visitors walked by without noticing an intriguing scene covered with centuries of grime.

Only now, the Vatican says a detail in a newly cleaned 15th century fresco shows what may be one of the first European depictions of Native Americans.

The fresco, The Resurrection, was painted by the Renaissance master Pinturicchio in 1494

How a blunder finished off the Wal

The intention was to announce the changes overnight and phase in the new rules the next morning. Instead one of the Politburo members, Guenter Schabowski, blurted out the plans during a televised press conference – and compounded his error by adding the new rules would come into force “immediately”.

Live press conferences were a novelty in communist days, and Mr Schabowski was becoming something of a celebrity through his appearances. Mr Modrow is still scathing about Mr Schabowski’s preening in front of the media.

“The order wasn’t to be published until 0400 in the morning. But Mr Schabowski didn’t notice. He went into an international press conference. And he was so arrogant and full of himself. We had no idea this was happening.”

Booker T. and W.E.B.

Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois

By Dudley Randall

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“It shows a mighty lot of cheek
To study chemistry and Greek
When Mister Charlie needs a hand
To hoe the cotton on his land,
And when Miss Ann looks for a cook,
Why stick your nose inside a book?”

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
“If I should have the drive to seek
Knowledge of chemistry or Greek,
I’ll do it. Charles and Miss can look
Another place for hand or cook,
Some men rejoice in skill of hand,
And some in cultivating land,
But there are others who maintain
The right to cultivate the brain.”

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.,
“That all you folks have missed the boat
Who shout about the right to vote,
And spend vain days and sleepless nights
In uproar over civil rights.
Just keep your mouths shut, do not grouse,
But work, and save, and buy a house.”

“I don’t agree,” said W.E.B.
“For what can property avail
If dignity and justice fail?
Unless you help to make the laws,
They’ll steal your house with trumped-up clause.
A rope’s as tight, a fire as hot,
No matter how much cash you’ve got.
Speak soft, and try your little plan,
But as for me, I’ll be a man.”

“It seems to me,” said Booker T.–

“I don’t agree,”
Said W.E.B.

How China Made the Tiananmen Square Massacre Irrelevant

China has achieved the impossible: They’ve made Tiananmen Square irrelevant.
China is a much better place to live now for most people. Young Chinese people now have far more freedom to pursue the career of their choice, travel abroad, and marry whomever they choose (provided their spouse is of the opposite sex, though China has also become much more tolerant of homosexuality in recent years). Far more Chinese citizens than before have access to the country’s social safety net, including a rudimentary health care system, and a much greater proportion of the China’s population can realistically obtain a university education. These advancements do not excuse China of its continued human rights violations, but they do explain how the Party can remain popular despite repression, corruption, and other problems.

Take the Impossible “Literacy” Test Louisiana Gave Black Voters in the 1960s

Most of the tests collected here are a battery of trivia questions related to civic procedure and citizenship. (Two from the Alabama test: “Name the attorney general of the United States” and “Can you be imprisoned, under Alabama law, for a debt?”)

But this Louisiana “literacy” test, singular among its fellows, has nothing to do with citizenship. Designed to put the applicant through mental contortions, the test’s questions are often confusingly worded. If some of them seem unanswerable, that effect was intentional. The (white) registrar would be the ultimate judge of whether an answer was correct.

Try this one: “Write every other word in this first line and print every third word in same line (original type smaller and first line ended at comma) but capitalize the fifth word that you write.”

Voting Test 1

Why do popular histories of the War of Independence ignore modern scholarship?

If you bought a popular book on science, one that came with a similar sheen of intellectual prestige, and learned that it essentially ignored years’ worth of scholarship, you’d demand your money back. Why should history be any different?

…These pop histories make arguments I haven’t seen scholars of the Revolution make in years. Implicit in all of them is the notion that the founders’ professed ideas of liberty and equality truly rallied colonists to their cause. It’s a comforting thought, but one that flies in the face of the latest research. For most of the war, the majority of colonists probably wanted nothing to do with the conflict, an argument emphasized at a recent Penn conference of leading scholars. Battlefield successes and Britain’s heavy-handed tactics may have boosted the patriots’ appeal, but it’s misleading to call their cause genuinely “popular.” To gain supporters, local patriot leaders often relied on fear and intimidation, not appeals to hearts and minds. In most towns, for instance, patriots created vigilante groups, called Committees of Safety, that forced colonists to take loyalty oaths, swearing to turn in anyone deemed suspicious. During the war, in other words, colonial America may have felt more like the Soviet Union than a free and open republic.

More at Slate

King’s Dream Remains an Elusive

A new survey by the Pew Research Center finds that fewer than half (45%) of all Americans say the country has made substantial progress toward racial equality and about the same share (49%) say that “a lot more” remains to be done.

The analysis finds that the economic gulf between blacks and whites that was present half a century ago largely remains. When it comes to household income and household wealth, the gaps between blacks and whites have widened. On measures such as high school completion and life expectancy, they have narrowed. On other measures, including poverty and homeownership rates, the gaps are roughly the same as they were 40 years ago.

See this startling collection of data from Pew.

How the Soviets Used Our Civil Rights Conflicts Against Us

June 1963 memo that summarizes Soviet media coverage of the growing American conflicts over civil rights. These Soviet broadcasts, which reached audiences in Asia, Africa, and South America, tried to turn global public opinion against the United States.

A few major arguments of these broadcasts, as Hughes summarized them: Capitalism provided a natural environment for racism, which would never end so long as the American system needed cheap labor. The federal government’s policy of limited intervention in Southern conflicts was tantamount to support of Southern racism. The United States could not claim to be the leader of the free world while hypocritically refusing to support civil rights within its borders.

In the most politically damaging line of reasoning, Soviet broadcasters argued that American domestic policy toward its black citizens was “indicative of its policy toward peoples of color throughout the world.” Emerging African, Asian, and South American nations, in other words, should not count on Americans to support their independence.

See the memos here

Putin in Women’s Underwear Seized in Russian Raid

Police in Russia have confiscated a painting of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in women’s underwear from an art gallery in the city of St Petersburg.

The artwork depicts President Putin combing the hair of the prime minister.

The gallery owner said he had been given no formal warrant or explanation for the removal of the paintings.