The “New Classics”?

Posted on May 11th, 2013

MONDAY MAY 13 7 PM ET

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literature

A “Classic,” as Mark Twain memorably defined it, is “a book which people praise but don’t read.”

Twain’s definition came to mind when I recently came across a “Recommended Reading List for College Bound Students” posted by the National Endowment for the Humanities on its Edsitement website.

The list includes many worthy titles from the fields of government, mythology, philosophy and religion, along with fiction, poetry and drama.

The fiction list ranges (alphabetically) from the late Chinua Achebe down to Eudora Welty. And yes, Mr. Clemens –Mark Twain—is on it.

The complete list is filled with noteworthy names, titles and significant documents that should be familiar to any well-read, educated person –particularly those who want to audition for Jeopardy. They all belong in the so-called “Canon” or “Great Books.” And I am sure that Edsitement doesn’t mean to suggest that this is ALL you need to read.

But…. It is also a list that could have been published when I graduated from high school in 1972 –the modern Dark Ages. While most of the fiction titles still deserve to be there, the most recent novel on the list is One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967.

Similarly, in the nonfiction area the most recent titles include Profiles in Courage and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. And in the Mythology category, I will respectfully call Edith Hamilton’s Mythology “dated.”

So, teachers of Social Studies and English, here is the question: What are the “new classics?”

What books written during the past 50 years do you assign or recommend for Social Studies? Or English classes? What books written since 2000 do you include on your personal “Recommended Reading List for College Bound Students?”

In the fiction category, there is a dearth of black, Native American, Latino, and overseas voices. To begin with, I might suggest Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine, Beet Queen).

When it comes to nonfiction, the possibilities are endless. How about more recent titles on race, class, the digital world and the contemporary American experience? How about Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed? Fast Food Nation? Is Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father as significant a book today as John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage was in the 1960s?

I could go on. But I am more interested in what you are doing in class. Let the #sschat conversation begin.

Don’t Know Much About Harry S. Truman

Posted on May 8th, 2013

The famed mistaken headline from the Presidential election of 1948

The famed headline from the Presidential election of 1948 when Truman came from behind to grab victory (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress-American Memory)

I graded him an “A” in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents. But America was not always so generous towards Harry S. Truman, America’s 33rd President, born on May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Missouri.

Truman inherited the Oval Office on April 12, 1945 after First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told him that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was dead. The following day, a shaken Truman said to reporters:

Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.

The only president with combat experience in World War I, Truman was a relatively obscure Senator from Missouri who had been picked to fill out Roosevelt’s ticket for the unprecedented and successful fourth run at the presidency in 1944. As FDR’s fourth term opened, the war in Europe was nearing its conclusion but the brutal and deadly fighting in the Pacific continued –with a potential invasion of Japan on the horizon.

With the overwhelming task of replacing the dominant political figure of the 20th century, Truman was immediately faced with a daunting choice: whether or not to use the atomic bomb– a weapon Truman did not know existed until he became president. The fateful decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains his most controversial action.

In FDR’s unfinished term and his own term, that followed a come-from-behind victory in 1948, Truman would make other controversial and unpopular decisions about war and peace that were all part of his “The Buck Stops Here”* legacy:

•desegregating the armed forces

•recognizing Israel’s statehood

•”containing” Communism as the Cold War heated up

•entering the war in Korea

•firing the popular General Douglas MacArthur

•setting in motion the “Marshall Plan” to rebuild war-torn Europe

When he left office in 1953, his popularity was in shreds. But Truman’s common sense, honesty, and decisiveness have left “Give “em Hell” Harry with a much better historical legacy. Truman died on December 26, 1972. (His New York Times obituary.)

Read more about Truman in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents.

*”The Buck Stops Here” was the famed saying on a plaque that Truman kept on his Oval Office desk.

“A lover’s quarrel with the world”-Robert Frost

Posted on March 26th, 2013

Robert Frost (Courtesy American Memory Collection (Library of Congress)

In honor of his birthday on March 26, 1874, a video tribute to Robert Frost.

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world

Robert Frost’s epitaph

One of my favorite places in Vermont is the Frost gravesite in the cemetery of the First Church in Old Bennington -just down the street from the Bennington Monument. This video was recorded there.

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 England, Frost (1874-1963) spent much of his life working and wandering the woods and farmland of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. As a young man, he dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, then drifted from job to job: teacher, newspaper editor, cobbler. His poetry career took off during a three-year trip to England with his wife Elinor where Ezra Pound aided the young poet. Frost’s language is plain and straightforward, his lines inspired by the laconic speech of his Yankee neighbors.

But while poems like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are accessible enough to make Frost a grammar-school favorite, his poetry is contemplative and sometimes dark—concerned with themes like growing old and facing death. One brilliant example is this poem about a young boy sawing wood, Out, out–

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

The first poet invited to speak at a Presidential inaugural, Frost told the new President:

Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age. Don’t be afraid of power.

A brief biography of Robert Frost can be found at Poets.org, where there are more samples of his poetry. It includes an account of Frost and JFK.

Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963. He had written his own epitaph, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.

Here is the NYTimes obituary published after his death.

This material is adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature written in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

Pancakes, Politics and the Civil War

Posted on March 21st, 2013

Vermont Maple Country
(Courtesy Vermont Maple Sugar Makers)

Pancakes and Politics?

Spring in Vermont. As the temperatures and sap rise, you see the web of sap lines descending from the woods to galvanized vats beside the roads. Dense clouds of wood smoke billow from sugar houses, large and small. This weekend (March 23-24), Vermont celebrates the season with an Open House Weekend at sugar houses around the state.

But the maple sugar season has another historical meaning. Some 70 years before the war began on April 12, 1861, people had looked to maple sugar –both as a political and economic weapon against slavery. The idea was simple –replace cane sugar, produced by slave labor, with maple sugar and it would be a blow to the slave system.

One of the first to advocate the idea was Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration and an early voice of abolition in America. With the Quakers of Philadelphia, Rush proposed using maple sugar as a means of hastening the end of slavery by replacing one of the key products manufactured by slave labor. (Rush also opposed the death penalty, was a proponent of public education, and advocated for the humane treatment of the mentally ill.)

In 1788 Rush had published an essay on the “Advantages of the Culture of the Sugar Maple Tree” in a Philadelphia monthly. In 1789 he had founded, with a group of Philadelphia Quakers, the Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree. He had even staged a scientific tea party to prove the potency of maple sugar. The guests – Alexander Hamilton, Quaker merchant Henry Drinker, and “several Ladies” – sipped cups of hyson tea, sweetened with equal amounts of cane and maple sugar. All agreed the sugar from the maple was as sweet as cane sugar. (Source: The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia)

Their aim was simple, as Rush’s 1788 essay put it: “to lessen or destroy the consumption of West Indian sugar, and thus indirectly to destroy negro slavery.”

Dr. Rush found an enthusiastic disciple in Thomas Jefferson, who explored the concept of an American maple sugar industry during a journey to Vermont and even attempted–unsuccessfully it would turn out– to import sugar maple trees to Monticello.

Jefferson and other conscientious consumers could now … “put sugar in (their) coffee without being saddened by the thought of all the toil, sweat, tears, suffering and crimes that have hitherto been necessary to procure this product.” (Source: The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia)

Dr. Rush and other Abolitionists were ultimately disappointed as the maple sugar idea failed to gain a foothold and speculation in maple forests actually created a “maple bubble” which burst before this “sugar substitute” could prove itself an economic weapon against slavery.

Abolitionists continued to pursue the cause of maple sugar in the 19th century. The American artist Eastman Johnson attempted to make maple syrup a political statement through a collection of works showing the sugaring process was not only a part of New England’s social fabric, but a way to strike a blow for freedom.

This failed effort to make what we buy and eat a political act may have been a quixotic disappointment. But the thought of putting maple syrup and sugar to use in a noble cause only makes them taste a little sweeter. And the fundamental idea that taking care in what what we purchase and consume can make a difference is still a valuable principle.

(Note: This is a revised version of a post originally written in March 2011.)

Cherry-Picking Thomas Paine

Posted on March 8th, 2013

Thomas Paine-Reproduction of a ca. 1859 painting attributed to Bass Otis, possibly after the Thomas Thompson copy or from the William Sharp engraving after a 1792 painting by George Romney.

Thomas Paine: Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540

Thirty years ago, on March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech to a group of evangelicals in Orlando, Florida.

Most of what Reagan said that day has been overshadowed by a single, memorable phrase: he called the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” Within a decade, of course, that “empire” had fallen and the “Cold War” disappeared from view.

Reading Reagan’s text uncovers more fully what the speech was about as America was in the midst of a very hot “Culture War.” Reagan spoke about ending abortion and passing a constitutional amendment that would once again permit prayer in public schools. Only near the conclusion of his remarks did he turn his sights to the Soviet Union.

Reagan’s text was peppered with cherry-picked references to America’s Christian past and quotes from some of the “Founding Fathers” –William Penn, Washington and Jefferson among them. But these remarks to an evangelical group led to an odd choice as Reagan concluded:

“One of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, said, ‘We have it within our power to begin the world over again.’”

The pamphleteering Paine is best known as the author of Common Sense and The Crisis, among other works that supported the cause of independence. But after the Revolution, Paine ended up in France and was caught up in the bloody Revolution there, winding up in a French prison cell, facing the prospect of the guillotine.

After eventually being freed, Paine wrote an open letter in 1796 angrily denouncing President George Washington for failing to do enough to secure his release. This was a serious case of bridge burning and Paine fell from grace in America. But apart from dissing the Father of the Country, Paine had also fallen from favor for his most famous work after Common Sense. In 1794, he had published The Age of Reason (Part I), a deist assault on organized religion and the errors of the Bible. In it, Paine had written:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

(Source: USHistory.org)

That essential part of Thomas Paine’s philosophy was notably missing from Reagan’s words about the role of church in America.

You can read more about Thomas Paine, his relationship with Washington and his ultimate fate –as well as Ronald Reagan’s presidency– in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents.

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

Posted on March 7th, 2013

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 a 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.

Don’t Know Much About® Executive Order 9066

Posted on February 19th, 2013

Photo of Japanese-American grocery store on the day after Pearl Harbor
Dorothea Lange
(Source: Library of Congress)

Franklin D. Roosevelt famously told Americans when he was inaugurated in 1933:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself

But on February 19, 1942 –a little more than two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor– President Roosevelt allowed America’s fear to provoke him into an action regarded among his worst mistakes. He issued Executive Order 9066.

The result of this Executive Order was the policy of “relocating” some 120,000 Japanese Americans, and a smaller number of German and Italian Americans, into “internment camps.”

I have written about the subject of the internment of the Japanese American population in the past. I relink these today, including this post on the birthday of Ansel Adams, who photographed the internment camp at Manzanar, and another on photojournalist Dorothea Lange, who also documented the period. Both of these posts include links to other resources on the history of “Internment.”

Among these resources is a site devoted to the War Relocation Camps –a Teaching With Historic Places Lesson Plan from the National Park Service called “When Fear Was Stronger than Justice.”

Don’t Know Much About® George Washington

Posted on February 18th, 2013

Yes, I cannot tell a lie. The day we celebrate on the third Monday in February is really called “George Washington’s Birthday.” Ask the National Archives.

Want to learn a little more?
Here is the website for the National Park Service’s Birthplace of Washington site.

And here is the National Park Service website for Fort Necessity, scene of Washington’s surrender and “confession.”

It is NOT Presidents Day. Or President’s Day. Or Even Presidents’ Day.

Posted on February 15th, 2013

So What Day Is it After All?

Okay. We all do it. It’s printed on calendars and posted in bank windows. We mistakenly call the third Monday in February Presidents Day, in part because of all those commercials in which George Washington swings his legendary ax and “Rail-splitter” Abe Lincoln hoists his ax to chop down prices on everything from mattresses and linens to SUVs.

But, really it is George Washington’s Birthday –federally speaking that is.
The official designation of the federal holiday observed on the third Monday of February was, and still is, Washington’s Birthday.

I wrote My Project About Presidents in 3rd Grade when I was 9. Even then I was asking questions about history and presidents

You can also check out my videoblog on George Washington.

But Washington’s Birthday has become widely known as Presidents Day (or President’s Day, or even Presidents’ Day). The popular usage and confusion resulted from the merging of what had been two widely celebrated Presidential birthdays in February –Lincoln’s on February 12th, which was never a federal holiday– and Washington’s on February 22.

Created under the Uniform Holiday Act of 1968, which gave us three-day weekend Monday holidays, the federal holiday on the third Monday in February is technically still Washington’s Birthday. But here’s the rub: the holiday can never land on Washington’s true birthday because the latest date it can fall is February 21, as it did in 2011.

There is a wealth of information the First President at Mount Vernon.

Washington’s Tomb — Mt. Vernon (Photo credit Kenneth C. Davis 2010)

dkmap

Don’t Know Much About® Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday

Posted on February 11th, 2013

February 12 used to mean something — Lincoln’s Birthday. It was never a national holiday but it was pretty important when I was a kid and we got the day off from school in my hometown.

The Uniform Holidays Act in 1971 changed that by creating Washington’s Birthday as a federal holiday on the third Monday in February. It is NOT officially “Presidents Day.”

But it is still a good excuse to talk about Abraham Lincoln. especially since his real birthday is on the calendar. And this year marked the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863. And it looks like President Lincoln may have a good night at the Oscars, thanks to Steven Spielbrg’s film 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

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

And you can read much more about Lincoln in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents, Don’t Know Much About History and Don’t Know Much About the Civil War.

The newly revised, updated and exapnded edition of the New York Times Bestseller now in hardcover from HarperCollins

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

The paperback edition had been released witha new cover to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil war.