[Mr. Fitzhugh is the founder of the Concord Review.]

The National Endowment for the Arts has released a new study of studies of the decline of reading in the United States. Some kinds of reading were apparently not considered.

Zeus and Mnemosyne [Memory] were the parents of the nine Muses. Calliope was the muse of epic poetry, Clio was the muse of history, Erato was the muse of love poetry, Euterpe was the muse of music, Melpomene was the muse of tragedy, Polyhymnia was the muse of sacred poetry, Terpsichore was the muse of dance, Thalia was the muse of comedy, and Urania was the muse of astronomy.

Of these nine, two are now off the reservation. Urania has clearly taken Astronomy over to the Science side of the Arts, and Clio has had the misfortune of presiding over history and nonfiction, and so, at least for the National Endowment for the Arts, has evidently lost her status among the Arts.

In 2004, the National...

Amid a slow, low-boiling, and mostly Texas-based controversy regarding the potential location of a future George W. Bush Presidential Library, a significant issue regarding such a future institution is being completely overlooked: Should there be federal support of the Bush Presidential Library, in light of the fact that President Bush has refused to comply with the 1978 Presidential Records Act?

Presidential libraries and records are on my mind because I attended a conference sponsored by all presidential libraries that was held at Franklin Roosevelt's Library in Hyde Park, New York. The conference addressed Presidents and the Supreme Court, but a question about presidential records arose during my panel. In addition, in conversations with presidential library professionals (of all political persuasions), I found that they are deeply troubled by Bush's and Cheney's actions regarding presidential records.

Previously, I have written about how Bush's Executive...

[HNN Editor: The focus of this article is on the Civil War.]

... Between 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt transferred the Civil War battlefields from the War Department to the Department of the Interior, and the late 1990s, the NPS avoided all mention of the causes of the war in its exhibits, films, and publications. Eighty years after the 50th reunion at Gettysburg in 1913, the agency still adhered to Governor William Mann's admonition that "we came here, I say, not to discuss what caused the war of 1861–65, but to talk over the events of the battle here as man to man."3 In a small exhibit inside Fort Sumter installed in 1995, the National Park Service first connected slavery with the coming of the war.

Three years later, battlefield superintendents decided, as the country approached the 150th anniversary of the war, that it was time the NPS began presenting the causes of the war to the visiting public. Once word of the meeting and its "radical...

[Allen Esterson is the author of Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud.]

The story so far: In 2003 the US Public Broadcasting Service first broadcast the documentary “Einstein’s Wife” (co-sponsored by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), which purports to present evidence that Einstein’s first wife, Mileva Marić, was a brilliant mathematician and scientist who co-authored his epoch-making 1905 papers, and whose major contributions to his work had been carefully concealed throughout the twentieth century. In fact, as Alberto A. Martínez has demonstrated,[1] the film is a travesty of the historical record. I belatedly came across the film and accompanying PBS website in late 2005, and, following a close examination of the historical evidence, in March 2006 I submitted a complaint to the PBS Ombudsman, providing documentation of the falsehoods, misconceptions and tendentious misrepresentations in the film[2] and on the website[3].

After...

These are tough times for, and in, America. We are at war, and we find that war highly controversial. Many of our political leaders have record-low approval ratings and too many are held in ignominy. Washington — our nation’s capital — is held in contempt, as a laugh line by comedians. But perhaps a greater tragedy than all of this is that we seem to no longer have any kind of reference point. For indeed, we are not living in the toughest of times, we are not living in the worst of times, nor are we fighting the toughest of wars. But try telling that to our nation’s young people; too many of them absorb too much of the negativism taught by our culture to know this.

The truth is, we’ve been in far worse shape in terms of what we’ve had to endure in this country — but we may not have been in far worse shape in terms of what we know about our country. Too many of our high-school students do not graduate high school, and of those who do, too many do not know the basic facts of...

In the years leading up to Barry Goldwater's death, conservatives wondered what had happened to their hero. They had wondered for some time, actually—since at least 1976, when Goldwater endorsed moderate incumbent Gerald Ford over insurgent conservative Ronald Reagan for the Republican presidential nomination. Back then, conservative activist John Lofton suggested Goldwater must not be in his right mind,"still in an ether fog" from recent hip replacement surgery:"Possessed of all his faculties, he would never say the things he has been saying about Reagan."

But by the early '90s, there could be no doubt: Goldwater damned the Religious Right at every opportunity, spoke out for abortion rights, and not only supported letting gays serve openly in the military, but even lent his name to an effort to pass federal antidiscrimination laws for homosexuals—quite a turnabout for a man who as a senator had once stood on federalist grounds against the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

Goldwater's...

If you live in the United States and want to start a war, the first step is to compare the foreign leader to Adolf Hitler. This technique was on display in a recent PBS NewsHour debate between Norman Podhoretz, a foreign policy adviser to Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, and Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek International. At least four times during the debate, Podhoretz likened the clerical regime in Tehran to the Nazis. He argued that there is a danger that Iran may"replace [the existing global order] with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism."

This is a ridiculous claim, and it exalts Iran to status it does not deserve. Podhoretz and his confreres have a sad and curious track record of crying wolf, seeing Hitlers and appeasement nearly everywhere. The danger of embracing the Munich analogy as a catch-all analytical tool for international politics is that it overstates the implications of each international...

[Tom Brokaw is the author of four bestsellers: The Greatest Generation, The Greatest Generation Speaks, An Album of Memories, and A Long Way from Home. From 1976 to 1981 he anchored Today on NBC. He was the sole anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw from 1983 to 2004. www.boom-brokaw.com ]

In 1962, I had an entry-level reporter's job at an Omaha television station. I had bargained to get a salary of one hundred dollars a week, because I didn't feel I could tell Meredith's doctor father I was making less. Meredith, who had a superior college record, couldn't find any work because, as one personnel director after another told her, "You're a young bride. If we hire you, you'll just get pregnant before long and want maternity leave."

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early Sixties seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest...

Summary: On his radio show, Limbaugh claimed that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"were right on the money, and nobody has disproven anything they claimed in any of their ads, statements, written commentaries, or anything of the sort." In fact, most of the allegations the Swift Boat Veterans made about Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam War service during the 2004 presidential campaign have been thoroughly discredited, often by official military records, but also by the Swift Boat accusers themselves, who struggled to keep their stories straight.

On the November 7 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, Rush Limbaugh claimed that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth"were right on the money, and nobody has disproven anything they claimed in any of their ads, statements, written commentaries, or anything of the sort." Limbaugh made his comments on the same day reporter...