Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 123

A Presidential Library

The recent success of such award-winning and bestselling presidential biographies as American Lion by Jon Meacham, John Adams by David McCullough as well as Doris Kearns Goodwin's portrait of Lincoln's Cabinet, Team of Rivals, are all excellent reminders of our fascination with the Presidency. And a tribute to the value of great historians.

With Presidents Day around the corner, it seems like a good time to think about some other great books about the Presidents and Presidency. Here is a...

Presidents Day Videoblog #2 Lincoln

Honest Abe. The Railsplitter. The Great Emancipator. You know some of the basics and the legends. But check out this video to learn some of things you may not know, but should, about the 16th President.

Here's a link to the Lincoln Birthplace National Park

http://www.nps.gov/ABLI/index.htm

This link is to the Emancipation Proclamation page at the National Archives:

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/

Ordering Coffee Changes the World

Never underestimate the power of four teenagers.

Fifty years ago, a deliberate act of disobedience by four college kids shook America.

On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students began a sit-in protest at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., where they'd been refused service. Ordering coffee at an all-whites lunch counter was an incredible act of courage. This was a time when young black men were lynched for supposedly looking the wrong way at a white woman.

Here is the original NYTimes

Don't Know Much About Robert Frost

"I had a lover's quarrel with the world."

While contemplating the death of J.D. Salinger, it is worth remembering that another New England transplant, Robert Frost , died on this date January 29 in 1963. He had written his own epitaph, the words above, etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.

Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost's poetry. Known as a poet of New...

"Tea Bagging" through History

A news report that a "Tea Party" convention planned for February shows signs of unraveling reminds me of another group of "tea baggers" from American History. They had also unraveled in late January. But the year was 1778.

[The news story about the Tea party Convention: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/politics/26teaparty.html?src=tptw]

It began as a populist uprising against –surprise, surprise—the bankers and lawyers who were making the rules back then in Boston, men derided as...

Don't Know Much About Edith Wharton

Born today in New York City in 1862: Edith Newbold Jones, who achieved fame as Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921 (for The Age of Innocence).

Romance, scandal and ruin among New York socialites—long before this was the stuff of People, and "Gossip Girl," it was the subject matter for Edith Wharton's most famous works. In such novels as The Age of Innocence (1920) and The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton painted detailed, acid portraits of high society l...

Don't Know Much About Roe v. Wade

On January 22, 1973 –37 years ago– the Supreme Court handed down its historic 7-2 decision in the Roe v Wade case, But the arguments have never stopped.

Coincidentally, President Lyndon B. Johnson died the same day. Here is the New York Times front page reports of both stories, with the text of the Roe v Wade story below.

http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0122.html#article

Why did "Jane Roe" sue Wade? (Adapted from Don't Know Much About History)
There are few issues more...

Don't Know Much About George Washington

When I was a kid, we got two holidays: one for Lincoln's Birthday and another for Washington's. Now, we have to make do with a three day weekend in February for Presidents Day.

Think you know about the Father of Our Country?

This video contains a few things that might surprise you.

Want to learn a little more?

Here is the website for the National Park Service's Birthplace of Washington site:

http://www.nps.gov/gewa/index.htm

And here is the National Park Service website for Fort Necessity...

Presidents Day Videoblog #1

When I was a kid, we got two holidays: one for Lincoln's Birthday and another for Washington's. Now, we have to make do with a three day weekend in February for Presidents Day.

Think you know about the Father of Our Country?

This video contains a few things that might surprise you.

Want to learn a little more?

Here is the website for the National Park Service's Birthplace of Washington site:

http://www.nps.gov/gewa/index.htm

And here is the National Park Service website for Fort Necessity...

Don't Know Much About Ben Franklin

Today is the birthday of America's first international celebrity and most consistently interesting Founding Father. Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706.

With little formal education, he became a writer, printer, philanthropist, philosopher, political leader and scientist. Franklin, alongside Thomas Jefferson, was probably the best example of the American Enlightenment Man. And, like Jefferson and other men of his times, Benjamin Franklin was skeptical of organized...