[HNN Editor: David Brooks is here taking on fellow NYT columnist Paul Krugman, who charges in his book, The Conscience of a Liberal, that Reagan began his campaign in 1980 near Philadelphia, Mississippi to signal to white Southerners that he was in sympathy with their feelings of deep disaffection.]

Today, I’m going to write about a slur. It’s a distortion that’s been around for a while, but has spread like a weed over the past few months. It was concocted for partisan reasons: to flatter the prejudices of one side, to demonize the other and to simplify a complicated reality into a political nursery tale.

The distortion concerns a speech Ronald Reagan gave during the 1980 campaign in Philadelphia, Miss., which is where three civil rights workers had been murdered 16 years earlier. An increasing number of left-wing commentators assert that Reagan kicked off his 1980 presidential campaign with a states’ rights speech in Philadelphia to send a signal to white...

[Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the New York correspondent for the Guardian and the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Mississippi) and Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States (New Press). He is also a contributor to The Notion.]

If Beale Street could talk, as James Baldwin famously imagined, then somewhere around Memphis's South Fourth Street it would let out an agonizing cry. Facing east, the garish neon commodification of the blues stands behind you--a trap for tourists and an insult to the legacy of a great musical tradition. Commerce here is thriving from a culture it doesn't respect. Ahead sprawls the desolation and poverty of the communities that gave blues its meaning and to whom the blues returned some dignity.

A block away at the Martin Luther King Jr. Labor Center, around eighty people have gathered to prevent the pilfering of yet more local...

[Mr. Rauchway is associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis, is the author of Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America.]

This November 8 marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of Franklin Roosevelt's election as president of the United States. Chosen to resolve the worst non-military crisis in the nation's history, Roosevelt led the country through the Great Depression as well as its greatest military crisis since the Civil War. Americans have memorialized him on the dime and in Washington, DC. Yet for some reason Republicans want to run against his legacy. It's a fight Democrats should let the GOP pick.

Three-quarters of a century ago this week, about a quarter of the American workforce was officially unemployed and around half of those working had only part-time jobs. In the summer of 1932, the U.S. Army dispersed veterans of the Great War who had gathered in Washington to ask for relief. Americans watching the...