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To mark 50 years since the assassination of president Kennedy, I repost here a piece that appeared on the blog in January 2011. Randall Stephens On November 23, 1963 the New York Times announced "Leftist Accused: Figure in a Pro-Castro Group is Charged--Policeman Slain." Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Bureau, Dallas Police Department, linked Lee Harvey Oswald to the left-wing "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Such connections proved more complicated than originally imagined. Oswald lied and was, by any account, a shiftless loser. Journalists and commentators grasped for a motive in the chaotic hours and days after President Kennedy's assassination. Texas, and Dallas in particular, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy feeling and theories of a right-wing plot circulated widely. (Replace Texas then with Arizona now and some striking similarities in public discussion are apparent. Tea Partiers and John Birchers . . . anti-immigration and anti-communis...

Kevin M. Levin* [Crossposted from the Civil War Memory blog] Last week's post on the Civil War Memory blog about the unveiling of three plaques honoringVirginia’s post-Civil War black politicians has me thinking about my old buddy, William Mahone. While Mahone is best remembered as the “ Hero of the Crater ” his role in launching and leading the state’s most successful third-party political movement has largely been forgotten. In Virginia it was intentionally ignored because what came to be known as the Readjuster Party (1879-83) was bi-racial. The arc from Mahone’s role in preventing a Union breakthrough outside Petersburg that left scores of black Union soldiers massacred on the Crater battlefield to creating an opportunity for the largest number of black Virginians to vote, go to school and serve in positions of local and state government just a few short years later could not be more striking. Could anyone in 1865 anticipate that it would be a former Confederate general who...

Randall Stephens The Response by Sir William Goscombe John. Unveiled by the Prince of Wales in 1923. Ernest Hemingway didn't mince words.  The author of A Farewell to Arms claimed that World War I "was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied . So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought."  Seeing the ravages of war up close, he served with distinction as an ambulance driver in Italy .  Gertrude Stein coined the phrase "lost generation," which applied to Hemingway and other wayward souls like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. What accounts for the gap between Hemingway's tone and the gallant, heroic one of war memorials?  Did region have a role to play in war remembrance?  How do we make sense of the conflict now that the last veterans have passed away ? As we near the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I Don Yerxa has been conducting a s...

Randall Stephens Today is the 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington "For Jobs and Freedom." So, to continue with the theme of Monday's post --concerning history/historians, activism, and civil rights--I excerpt below part of Sheldon Hackney's 2009 essay in Historically Speaking , "C. Vann Woodward, Dissenter." Here Hackney discusses C. Vann Woodward's political outlook, civil rights work, and the parameters of dissent in the 1960s. Hackney is the Boies Professor of U.S. History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the former president of the University of Pennsylvania (1981-1993) and the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (1993-1997). He is the author of a variety of books and articles, including Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton University Press, 1969) and Magnolias without Moonlight: The American South from Regional Confederacy to National Integration (Transaction Publishers, 2005): One of t...

Eric Schultz I was fortunate in early July to attend three days of the 150th commemoration of the Battle of Gettysburg, including a number of events sponsored by the Gettysburg Foundation . It was busy, colorful, sometimes somber but always tropical, a good reminder of what conditions were like in July 1863.  The battlefield itself, nearly 6,000 acres and sometimes called the “symbolic center of American history,” is both inspiring and beautiful.  The 150th commemoration included a retelling of the battle and featured first-person accounts. Events included a spectacular retelling of the battle (focused on first-person accounts), and the grand opening of the Seminary Ridge Museum at which visitors could climb its historic cupola to get a bird’s eye view of the battlefield and town. As I attended various gatherings, however, it struck me that Gettysburg was nothing less than a kind of living laboratory for how people access history. For example, there were lots (and lots) of fo...