Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 130

TODAY IN HISTORY: Tocqueville's America

Happy Birthday, Monsieur Tocqueville (born July 29, 1805; died April 16, 1859)

Observing a Choctaw tribe—the old, the sick, the wounded, and newborns among them—forced to cross an ice-choked Mississippi River during the harsh winter, Alexis de Tocqueville once wrote,

"In the whole scene, there was an air of destruction, something which betrayed a final and irrevocable adieu; one couldn't watch without feeling one's heart wrung." The Indians, he added, "have no longer a country, and soon will not b

An American History Reading List

Every so often, news stories and other events converge to create a "teaching moment." This is one of those moments when you can curse the darkness or light a candle. I will try and shed some light.

Patrick Buchanan's recent "white men built America" rant on MSNBC (subject of an earlier post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kenneth-c-davis/an-american-history-lesso_b_239108.html); the arrest of Harvard Professor Henry Gates in his home and the President's reaction to it; and my own research on a curr

Don't Know Much About Literature

"What you don't know," the somewhat obscure English writer Sydney Smith once noted, "would make a great book."

And what you don't know about great books would make a really great book!

So here it is — What You Need to Know About the World's Great Books and Writers but Never Learned.

Downbeat about the Beats?

Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Don't know your Keats from your Yeats?

I am thrilled to announced that I've written a book with my daughter Jenny. Using the quick quiz format that was the hallmark of

Don't Know Much About "Papa"

Oops! From "The better late than never Dept." It should be noted that yesterday, July 21, was the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, born this date in Oak Pak, Illinois in 1899.

They called him "Papa." One of America's most successful and admired novelists, Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) once compared his bare-bones style to an iceberg:

"There is seven-eighths of it under water for every part that shows."

Beneath Hemingway's famously understated prose, which often celebrated such traditionally masculine p

TODAY IN HISTORY (Besides the Moon Landing) "The Bonus Army"

Bonus Army Marches on Washington 1932

After seeing the tear gas in Tehran last month, it is worth remembering another group of protesters who were gassed on July 20 1932 –American veterans of World War I who had come to Washington, D.C. to get what they deserved. Instead they got tear gas.

In the summer of 1932, the Depression's worst year, 25,000 former "doughboys"—World War I infantrymen, many of whom were combat veterans—walked, hitchhiked, or "rode the rails" to Washington, D.C. Organizing the

TODAY IN HISTORY: The "Glory" Charge –Fort Wagner

I did not hear right wing talking head Pat Buchanan's remarks on African American history the other day on MSNBC. According to an account on the Huffington Post, Buchanan and host Rachel Maddow had a hot exchange during which Buchanan said:

"White men were 100% of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100% of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close to 100% of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a

Don't Know Much About "Holden Caulfield"

Holden Caulfield joining AARP! Now there's a thought.

The Catcher in the Rye was published  on July 16, 1951. So the perennial 17-year-old, prep school dropout has hit his golden years. As another crop of high school students hits their summer reading list, J.D. Salinger's tale of adolescent alienation is probably still at the top. And as a recent court case proves, its author J.D. Salinger is still very protective of his personal privacy and his most famous character. Salinger was able to preve

Don't Know Much About Emerson

It's not often that a commencement speech to a class of six makes waves. But TODAY IN HISTORY, on July 15, 1838, Ralph Waldo Emerson managed that feat.

In what is known as the "Divinity School Address" a commencement speech made to the Harvard Divinity School's class of six, Emerson questioned Jesus' divinity, discounted biblical accounts of miracles, and argued that moral intuition was more important than religious belief. The leaders of the  Harvard Divinity School –and most Protestant clergyme

TODAY IN HISTORY: Don't Know Much About Bastille Day!

Vive la France!

On July 14, 1789, an angry crowd stormed a state prison in Paris that stood as a symbol of royal tyranny. They surrounded the Bastille in order to seize the gunpowder stored inside. Troops fired on the rebels, but the people overpowered them. The bloody French Revolution had begun. The people of France have come to mark July 14 as their national holiday, the French version of the Fourth of July.

What else do you know about this celebration of "Liberty, Equality and Fraternity?"

Try

TODAY IN HISTORY: Civil War Draft Riots Tear Apart New York

On July 13, 1863, New York City was plunged into five days of  deadly rioting over recently passed draft laws. More than a hundred people, most of them African-American victims of vicious mobs, died in the violence that tore across New York City.

WILLING TO FIGHT FOR UNCLE SAM BUT FOR UNCLE SAMBO!

That was a headline in a Pennsylvania newspaper in the summer of 1863. And it voiced an uncomfortable truth in Civil War America. Many people who believed that the Civil War was being fought for the pres