Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 131

Don't Know Much About Hiroshima

"We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world. It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates valley Ersa, after Noah and his fabulous Ark." (Harry Truman, from his diaries, as quoted in The Making of the Atomic Bomb).

Okay, Mr. President. Here's the situation. You're about to invade Japan's main islands. Your best generals say hitting these beaches will mean half a million American casualties or more. Based on horrific battle experience—from Guadalcanal to

"Loving" the 14th Amendment: A Videoblog

Today's videoblog is about the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Ratified after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment is one of the three "Reconstruction" Amendments and it granted full citizenship rights to former slaves. It also established the very important judicial concepts of "due process of law" and "equal protection." Both of these clauses have been central to some of the most important Supreme Court decisions in recent history including Brown v Board of Education and Roe v Wade.

Here is a

The Exciting Launch of the Don't Know Much About Minutes

Got a minute?

Today I am launching a new venture in the Don't Know Much About series: the "Don't Know Much About Minute."

Starting with today's inaugural videoblog, these short videos are my way of starting a conversation. In just a few, short minutes, we'll bust some myths, reveal some "Hidden History," talk about books, geography, the Bible, holidays. Everything you need to Know! And More. I'll connect the past with the headline events that influence our lives. And we'll have fun doing it.

These

Pop Quiz: How's Your Literary IQ?

It's summer. Do you know where your IQ is?

For most school age kids, summer means vacation, camp, the pool. You know: A few months of fun. "No more teachers, No more books."

But that last part is not true. Summer also means the often dread Summer Reading List. Many parents spend the summer in an endless harangue, telling their kids to read.

But there is actually a good reason for that nag. A recent survey cited by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof supports the summertime enforced reading co

Don't Know Much About the Brontë Sisters

"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells;" (Wuthering Heights, 1847)

Happy Birthday, Emily Brontë! (Born July 30, 1818)

As children, the literary sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë, along with their brother Branwell, created fantasy kingdoms with names like "Gondal" and "Angria," and made them the settings for elaborate, ongoing poems and stories.  This "juvenilia"—a fancy term for the work artists produce in their younger ye

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