Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 98

“In Depth” on Book TV with Kenneth C. Davis

On November 4, 2012, New York Times Bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis sat down for a comprehensive three-hour interview with C-Span’s Book TV. The interview, which included questions from callers and via e-mail, covered Davis’ career as a writer spanning more than 20 years. In the interview, he discussed his approach to writing history in such books as Don’t Know Much About® History. He also described his background, growing up in Mt. Vernon, New York, how he became writer, and his early work, including his first book, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America, which discussed the rise of the paperback publishing industry and the impact of books on American society. Davis also described the success of his “Don’t Know Much About®” series, with its emphasis on making history both accessible and entertaining while connecting the past to the present.

Watch the video here.

Who Said It 11/26

 

Lyndon B. Johnson. Address to the Joint Session of Congress (November 27, 1963) [Source Miller Center-University of Virginia]

On November 27, 1963, President Johnson addressed the nation and a joint session of Congress five days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

 

Don’t Know Much About® the Real First Pilgrims

As we cut through the myth and misconception surrounding the “first Thanksgiving,” it is easy to say that there was nothing new or novel about the October 1621 “harvest feast” celebrated in Massachusetts by the surviving Mayflower passengers. Certainly harvest festivals go back to the dawn of time. And in America, such “thanksgiving days” were surely celebrated by the Spanish in the Southwest and Englishmen in Virginia well before the Mayflower sailed.

But one group has been left out of the picture completely. And their story deserves to be part of the Thanksgiving conversation. They were French and had the good sense to settle in Florida in June instead of Massachusetts in December. They reached the future America in 1564, long before the Mayflower arrived in December 1620 carrying those “Pilgrims.” Like the storied English Separatists, these French Protestants, or Huguenots,  came to America seeking religious freedom in the midst of France’s bloody religious civil wars. But they have been overlooked by most history books. Their plight — and tragic fate– is the subject of an article I wrote for the New York Times. 

TO commemorate the arrival of the first pilgrims to America’s shores, a June date would be far more appropriate, accompanied perhaps by coq au vin and a nice Bordeaux. After all, the first European arrivals seeking religious freedom in the “New World” were French. And they beat their English counterparts by 50 years. That French settlers bested the Mayflower Pilgrims may surprise Americans raised on our foundational myth, but the record is clear.

Here you can read the rest of this Op-Ed, A French Connection which first appeared in the New York Times on November 25, 2008.

[image error]

New York Times Bestseller America’s Hidden History

The complete story of the French Huguenots who settled Fort Caroline in Florida is told in the first chapter of America’s Hidden History.

You can also learn more about the “first Pilgrims” at the Fort Caroline and Fort Matanzas National Park Service sites.

Don’t Know Much About Minute: More Pilgrims 101

20

When Abraham Lincoln signed a Thanksgiving Proclamation in 1863 calling for a day of gratitude on the last Thursday in November, it began an unbroken string of presidential Thanksgiving Proclamations. In 1941, the FOURTH Thursday in November was set as a national holiday by Congress and signed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In my previous video and quiz about Thanksgiving, I told you that there were no black hats with buckles, half of the “pilgrims” weren’t Pilgrims and that the first Thanksgiving was really  in October. Here are a few more pieces of the picture.

And here is a link to a story I wrote for the New York Times about America’s real first Pilgrims, a group of French settlers in Florida who arrived 50 years before the Mayflower sailed.

A day of “Thanksgiving” was officially proclaimed by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. It was the beginning of an unbroken string of Thanksgiving proclamation by American presidents. The last Thursday in November became an official national holiday in 1941, signed into law by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

THE PLIMOTH PLANTATION historical site also offers a good overview of the Pilgrim story:

Thanksgiving Pop Quiz- A Videoblog

With Thanksgiving around the corner, cutouts of Pilgrims in black clothes and clunky shoes are sprouting all over the place. You may know that the Pilgrims sailed aboard the Mayflower and arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1620. But did you know their first Thanksgiving celebration lasted three whole days? What else do you know about these early settlers of America? Don’t be a turkey. Try this True-False quiz.

True or False? (Answers below)

1. Pilgrims always wore stiff black clothes and shoes with silver buckles.

2. The Pilgrims came to America in search of religious freedom.

3. Everyone on the Mayflower was a Pilgrim.

4. The Pilgrims were saved from starvation by a native American friend named Squanto.

5. The Pilgrims celebrated the first Thanksgiving in America.

Read more about the Mayflower and its passengers with your children in Don’t Know Much About the Pilgrims.

Don’t Know Much About® the Pilgrims

And read about America’s real “first Pilgrims”–French Huguenots who landed in Florida more than fifty years before the Mayflower sailed– in America’s Hidden History

The site of Plimouth Plantation is definitely worth a visit.

 

Don’t Know Much About@ History (2011 Revised and Updated Edition)

Answers

1. False. Pilgrims wore blue, green, purple and brownish clothing for everyday. Those who had good black clothes saved them for the Sabbath. No Pilgrims had buckles– artists made that up later!

2. True. The Pilgrims were a group of radical Puritans who had broken away from the Church of England. After 11 years of “exile” in Holland, they decided to come to America.

3. False. Only about half of the 102 people on the Mayflower were what William Bradford later called “Pilgrims.” The others, called “Strangers” just wanted to come to the New World.

4. True. Squanto, or Tisquantum, helped teach the Pilgrims to hunt, farm and fish. He learned English after being taken as a slave aboard an English ship.

5. False. The Indians had been having similar harvest feasts for years. So did the English settlers in Virginia and Spanish settlers in the southwest before the Pilgrims even got to America. And the Mayflower Pilgrims weren’t even America’s “first Pilgrims.” That honor goes to French Huguenots who settled in Florida more than 50 years before the Mayflower sailed.

Don’t Know Much About® Secession?

Since 1892, we’ve been making our schoolchildren say these eloquently simple words: “one Nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” (The “under God” phrase was added in 1954.)

But in the wake of last week’s election, the seemingly sacrosanct Pledge of Allegiance has been shunted aside in a small tsunami of calls for secession –negating the Pledge and dividing the nation.

Secession petitions from a score of states, including one from Texas signed by some 23,000 people, have attracted national attention –even from the White House. Some Americans, unhappy over the election results, want out of the Union.  Social media and the press have been filled with stories about the allure of secession.

While these entreaties are perfectly constitutional under the First Amendment’s “right to petition,” this storm surge of secessionist sentiment begs a simple question: Can they do it?

A war fought 150 years ago, and leading to the deaths of approximately 2% of the American population, was thought to have settled that question.

Before that war began, Abraham Lincoln addressed secession in his first inaugural address in March 1861:

“Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It is safe to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it except by some action not provided for in the instrument itself.”

But the thread of an “indivisible” Union stretches back farther. During the “nullification” crisis in 1832, Andrew Jackson once said if a state could leave the Union, the Constitution was a “rope of sand.” Jackson’s Proclamation Concerning Nullification, written by Secretary of Sate Edward Livingston, stated:

“Secession, like any other revolutionary act, may be morally justified by the extremity of oppression; but to call it a constitutional right, is confounding the meaning of terms, and can only be done through gross error, or to deceive those who are willing to assert a right, but would pause before they made a revolution, or incur the penalties consequent upon a failure.”

And when the very ratification of the Constitution was being debated 225 years ago, and with it the “right to withdraw,” Alexander Hamilton argued in Federalist 6 that disunion was impractical and historically disastrous.

“A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.”

But the simple answer to the question of “Can states secede?” is, constitutionally speaking, “No.”

In 1869, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Texas v White, a case related to bonds issued by Texas during the Civil War. In the majority decision, Salmon Chase, who had been Lincoln’s wartime Treasury Secretary, wrote:

“Considered therefore as transactions under the Constitution, the ordinance of secession, adopted by the convention and ratified by a majority of the citizens of Texas, and all the acts of her legislature intended to give effect to that ordinance, were absolutely null. They were utterly without operation in law. The obligations of the State, as a member of the Union, and of every citizen of the State, as a citizen of the United States, remained perfect and unimpaired. It certainly follows that the State did not cease to be a State, nor her citizens to be citizens of the Union.” (Emphasis added)

The Constitution, to oversimplify, is like any contract. Or marriage. One party can’t opt out without the consent of the other party or parties.

No, not even Texas – where some claim a legendary “right” to secede—has a Constitutional leg to stand on. Other commentators throughout history have argued that there is only one way out for “dissatisfied countrymen” –in Lincoln’s phrase—and that is revolution.

So for those seeking to leave the Union, there is the “Romney option” –self-deportation. Or as patriotic Americans often said during the Vietnam era, “Love it or leave it.”

Read more about the secession crisis in America before the Civil War in Don’t Know Much About® the Civil War and the response of Jackson and Lincoln in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents[image error]

Who Said it 11/12/12

 

Abraham Lincoln, from the Gettysburg Address, delivered November 19, 1863 (Source: Avalon Project-Yale Law School)

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us–that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion–that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Read more about the Gettysburg Address at Our Documents (National Archives) and 273 Words to a New America (Library of Congress)

11-11-11: Don’t Know Much About Veterans Day–The Forgotten Meaning

The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

On Veterans Day, a reminder of what the day once meant and what it should still mean. (This is a repost of a piece written for Veterans day in 2011. The meaning still applies.)

That was the moment at which World War I largely came to end in 1918. One of the most tragically senseless and destructive periods in all history came to a close in Western Europe with the Armistice –or end of hostilities between Germany and the Allied nations — that began at that moment. Some 20 million people had died in the fighting that raged for more than four years since August 1914. The complete end of the war came with the Treaty of Versailles in June 1919.

The date of November 11th became a national holiday of remembrance in many of the victorious allied nations –a day to commemorate the loss of so many lives in the war. And in the United States, President Wilson proclaimed the first Armistice Day on November 11, 1919. A few years later, in 1926, Congress passed a resolution calling on the President to observe each November 11th as a day of remembrance:

Whereas the 11th of November 1918, marked the cessation of the most destructive, sanguinary, and far reaching war in human annals and the resumption by the people of the United States of peaceful relations with other nations, which we hope may never again be severed, and

Whereas it is fitting that the recurring anniversary of this date should be commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations; and

Whereas the legislatures of twenty-seven of our States have already declared November 11 to be a legal holiday: Therefore be it Resolved by the Senate (the House of Representatives concurring), that the President of the United States is requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the officials to display the flag of the United States on all Government buildings on November 11 and inviting the people of the United States to observe the day in schools and churches, or other suitable places, with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

Of course, the hopes that “the war to end all wars” would bring peace were short-lived. By 1939, Europe was again at war and what was once called “the Great War” would become World War I.  With the end of World War II, there was a movement in America to rename Armistice Day and create a holiday that recognized the veterans of all of America’s conflicts. President Eisenhower signed that law in 1954. (In 1971, Veterans Day began to be marked as a Monday holiday on the third Monday in November,  but in 1978, the holiday was returned to the traditional November 11th date).

Today, Veterans Day honors the duty, sacrifice and service of America’s nearly 25 million veterans of all wars. We should remember and celebrate those men and women. But lost in that worthy goal is the forgotten meaning of this day in history –the meaning which Congress gave to Armistice Day in 1926:

to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations …

inviting the people of the United States to observe the day … with appropriate ceremonies of friendly relations with all other peoples.

The Veterans Administration website offers more resources on teaching about Veterans Day.

Read more about World War I and all of America’s conflicts in Don’t Know Much About History and Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents

[image error]

Don’t Know Much About History (Anniversary Edition, paperback)

Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents-now available in hardcover and eBook and audiobook

 

 

Who Said It 11/5/12

All will, of course, arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that, having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions . . . . We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.

 

Thomas Jefferson. First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1801)  Source: Avalon Project at Yale Law School.

Jefferson’s first inaugural was delivered after the controversial, bitterly divisive and hard-fought election of 1800 in which Jefferson and Aaron Burr defeated President John Adams, but were tied in the electoral vote. The election was decided in the House of Representatives.

Thomas Jefferson, third president (Source: White House)

 

Sunday -Noon (ET)- “In Depth” Book TV

In Depth – In Depth: Kenneth C. Davis – Book TV.