Culture Watch

Yearning for Comfort: Dogs, Digs, and Dan

by Leonard Steinhorn

"If you want a friend in Washington," Harry Truman once said,"get a dog." And that's exactly what many people not only in Washington but around the country have been doing since September 11, according to news reports as well as my unscientific survey of friends, family and neighbors. Truman was talking about the often cold and cruel world of politics, but his message can be writ large to our nation today. In these times of raw uncertainty and fear, when ordinary decisions and

The Color Line: The Klansman Who Almost Got Away

by John Barnhill

And then there was one. Justice, delayed, cannot be denied. Even though four decades have passed, now that Bobby Frank Cherry is standing trial for the 1963 bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, Alabama, that sordid and painful episode will finally close. Nineteen sixty-three seems a lifetime ago, and it is a world away. For nearly a decade since the school desegregation cases in Brown v. Topeka, federal actions had slowly begun to tear down the walls of

A Cautionary Tale For The Student Of Any Age: Don't Take Interpretations Of History Uncritically (Even Mine)

by Keith Miller

Think for yourselves! That should become, if it is not already, your motto. And, with the help of such excellent web sites as this one--the History News Network--along with many fine libraries coast-to-coast in this country, as enhanced through such services as that of interlibrary loan, you can easily do your own thinking about history (and not only American) through your own research.Any study"worth its salt" demonstrates a truth (one which must be learned, and never

The West: "I'll Not Kiss You Anymore, Until Next Time": Making the Hills and Mountains Ring in the Appalachian West

by Keith Miller

Read a good story not long ago from B. A. Botkin, ed., A Treasury of Southern Folklore: Stories, Ballads, Traditions, and Folkways of the People of the South (New York: Crown Publishers, 1949), pp. 10-11. It goes like this; the Republicans in an unspecified county of Kentucky were holding a rally shortly after a gubernatorial election. At the time a young woman, watching and listening from her front porch, had, as she claimed, a young man, whom she scarcely knew, hug an

We Remember the Wrong Tom on July Fourth

by By William C. Kashatus

As Americans celebrate the 225th anniversary of the United States, Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence will, once again, command center stage. It will be quoted and read in its entirety at small-town gatherings, picnics and dedication ceremonies across the nation. But one truth that is not so self-evident to the American people is that it was the words of another Thomas -- Thomas Paine -- that served to mobilize the masses for revolution and inspired Jefferson's Declaratio

Why Does America LoveThe Da Vinci Code?

by Jonathan Rees

"[D]on't read and don't buy The Da Vinci Code," pleaded Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, a close advisor to the late Pope John Paul II, in a Vatican Radio broadcast last month. If you are not one of the estimated 20 million people who have read author Dan Brown’s thriller about murder, art and the true nature of Jesus Christ, this appeal might have seen strange to you. After all, it’s only a no

Why Johnny Carson Was More than Just a TV Entertainer

by Derek Alger

You know someone is not a mere celebrity when the death of that person can knock Donald Trump’s wedding off the front page of major newspapers, and that was certainly the case with Johnny Carson. Carson, who died at the age of 79, was not a simple celebrity, not simply a transient personality saturated throughout the media one day and gone just as suddenly. No, Johnny Carson was a social and cultural centerpiece of society for multiple generations of Americans for more t

The Long Battle Over Fahrenheit 9/11: A Matter of Politics, Not Aesthetics

by Robert Brent Toplin

Michael Moore won’t go away, and neither will his film, Fahrenheit 9/11. On January 7th when the American Historical Association’s convention featured Film & History’s session on “Michael Moore: Cinematic Historian or Propagandist?” the news media were filled with reports about the filmmaker’s likely influence on recent deliberations in the U.S. Senate. Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer, evidently affected by the emotion-laden footage at

Post-Colonial Museums ... How the French and American Models Differ

by Herman Lebovics

Two new museums dedicated to a “postcolonial” representations of captured heritages are opening soon. With the dedication on 21 September of the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington , the United States will

Women Warriors Are the Rage in Hollywood--But What Was the Truth?

by Jennifer Gaboury

Casting women as warriors in film is all the rage. With contemporary roots in The Terminator and Alien, this trend can be spotted in such varied places as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xena: Warrior Princess, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kill Bill and Alias. It is an effect of feminism which has changed the way we think about women, particularly in the present or future tense as we might imagine a future or fictionalized world in which women might be astronauts

Michael Moore's 9-11

by Ron Briley

The film the Disney Corporation didn’t want you to see is doing quite well at the box-office. Fahrenheit 9/11, filmmaker Michael Moore’s indictment of the Bush administration’s mishandling of the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq, is the number one film in America; with its first weekend release receipts exceeding the $21.6 million total gross of Moore’s Bowling for Columbine.Fahrenheit 9/11 has already earned the wrath of some

Why Even Bush Critics Should Be Ashamed to Endorse Michael Moore's Movie

by Gil Troy

Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is sharp, biting, often funny and consistently clever. Fahrenheit 9/11 is also relentless, vicious, usually manipulative and consistently misleading. Produced by a first-rate propagandist, this cinematic polemic is to a standard documentary what Cheese Whiz is to Camembert; the ingredients are similar – the footage is real -- but the processing yields an artificial product. The uncritical gushing Moore’s screed trigge

Review of Eric Alterman's and Mark Green's The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads America

by Anders Lewis

George Bush has many supporters. He also has many critics - on both sides of the political aisle. Some conservatives have raised concerns about Bush’s inability to trim domestic spending. They are alarmed over the large deficit. Others have questioned his moderate immigration policy. Many have commented on the allegedly intrusive nature of Bush’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) education law. A few have even questioned the war in Iraq. In The American Conservative, for examp

The Fall of the Liberal Establishment

by Jim Sleeper

Review of The Guardians: Kingman Brewster, His Circle, and the Rise of the Liberal Establishment, by Geoffrey Kabaservice. Kingman Brewster Jr., the grand, wily, sometimes wacky eminence who ran Yale from 1964 to 1977, wanted it to produce each year 1,000 "leaders in their generation … who will have a constructive impact on our society thirty years later." Although his notions of leadership ran deeper than the electoral, he'd have been pleased with hi

The Messages You May Have Missed Reading Dr. Seuss

by John Fea

Yet another generation of moviegoers and read-to children have been introduced to The Cat in the Hat. I wonder whether these millions of new fans and their parents know that Theodor S. Geisel was born one hundred years ago this month. Who?While most of us have probably never heard of Theodor Geisel, we know his work well. Writing under the name "Dr. Seuss" (Seuss was his middle name), Geisel unveiled to millions of children the values that have defined the

The Wider Significance of the Fight Over Mel Gibson's Movie

by Juan Cole

The phenomenon of Mel Gibson's The Passion, about the death of Jesus of Nazareth, has provoked a lively debate about the dangers of anti-Semitism. Historians are well aware that medieval passion plays (which shared the sado-masochistic themes of Gibson's movie) often resulted in attacks on Jews. The concern of American Jewish leaders is therefore entirely valid. Some of the problem goes back to the Gospel writers, who wrote many years after the fact and depict the Jewish lead

Mel Gibson Has a Right to His View of History

by William C. Kashatus

When I was in graduate school, my dissertation adviser returned an early draft of my thesis -- a treatment of how Quaker theology influenced the origins of public schooling in Philadelphia -- and remarked: "You're religious! What else is wrong with your thinking?" While my passion to defend my Quaker faith was admirable, my bank account wasn't. So I yielded to his demand to abandon my own interpretation and adopt his in order to secure my doctorate. Only those who are tr

Super Bowl Patriots: A New Dynasty?

by Derek Catsam

It is almost as if they are the anti-Red Sox, these Patriots from New England . Led by their matinee idol quarterback with the Joe Montana bearing, and relying on their indomitable defense, opportunistic special teams, and guru-stocked coaching staff, the Patriots took out the upstart (but very game) Carolina Panthers 32-29 in a Super Bowl destined simultaneously to go down as an instant classic in the realms of sport and smut. To be honest, in this day and age, a singular bar

How Complicated Was MLK? Far More than Time Magazine Thought When It Chose Him as Man of the Year in 1963

by Ralph Luker

Forty years ago, Martin Luther King, Jr., was Time's"Man of the Year." Oddly enough, as I re-read that year's cover story recently, Dick van Dyke's lively song and dance routine in Mary Poppins ran in my head. Step in time, step in time Step in time, step in time Never need a reason, Never need a rhyme, Step in time, step in time We step in time. Mary Poppins premiered in 1964, but tha

James Wechsler: The Editor Who Dared Challenge J. Edgar Hoover

by Murray Polner

Few today remember the quintessential Cold War liberal newspaperman James Wechsler, the erstwhile voice of the once resolutely liberal (pre-Rupert Murdoch) New York Post. Since his death in 1983, he has fallen into undeserved obscurity because of liberalism's equally unmerited fate. Not only do politicians dread any identification with the infamous L-word but also because to admit that liberals opposed Stalinism while defending freedom at home is, for many now in power, sheer heresy.