That word took a whole new terrible meaning on April 7, 1862, when Union forces led by Gen. Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Confederates at the Battle of Shiloh in Tennessee, near Corinth.

Coming nearly one year after the Civil War began with the bombardment of Fort Sumter, the battle was the most horrific and costly of the war to that point. In a report on the battle two days later, the New York Times account said,

The slaughter on both sides is immense.

Some 100,000 men fought at the battle of Shiloh (or Pittsburg Landing). Nearly one in four was a casualty.
In this single battle, fought over the course of two days, 3,477 men died –more than all who died in the battles of the Revolution, the War of 1812, and the war with Mexico- combined!

Here are the accounts of the battle from New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0407.html#article

Besieged by rumors of drunkenness spread by another Union General, General Grant was reassigned after the Union victory. Denounced as a “butcher,” he later noted:

Up to the battle of Shiloh I, as well as thousands of other citizens, believed that the rebellion against the Government would collapse, suddenly and soon if a decisive victory could be gained over any of its armies… but I gave up all idea of saving the Union except by complete conquest.

Here is a link to the National Park Service pages for the National Military Park at the Shiloh battlefield
http://www.nps.gov/shil/index.htm

You can read more about the events at Shiloh, including an account of a woman pressed into service as a battlefield nurse in Don’t Know Much About the Civil War

On March 31, 1492, Isabella and Ferdinand issued the royal edict that forced Jews to convert and be baptized or leave Spain.

Born in April 1451, this remarkable queen was the daughter of Castille’s King Juan. She came of age in a Europe with one foot in the medieval age and one in the blooming Renaissance. The modern nation called Spain did not yet exist at Isabella’s birth and her adolescence came during the Moorish occupation of Granada, the southernmost region of Spain and the last bastion of Islamic power on the Iberian peninsula. In Isabella’s century, there was only one goal, one holy quest –la Reconquista and the removal of the “heathens.”

After her father’s death, the convent-educated Isabella was brought to the court of her older half-brother, King Enrique IV, a notoriously open homosexual and childless. Named heir to Castille’s throne, she set out to find a husband herself, and settled on a match with her second cousin, Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Aragon.

Younger than Isabella by a year, the prince was in modern parlance, “a hunk.” The tall, blue-eyed beauty Isabella and the muscular Ferdinand would have been People magazine’s dream Royals.

In 1469, the 18-year-old Isabella wed 17-year-old Ferdinand, with an assist from a papal dispensation that allowed the marriage despite their close blood ties. Rodrigo Borgia, the most infamous of that notorious family, had arranged for the “Bull of Dispensation” that enabled the cousins to marry and he was rewarded with a dukedom for his eldest son. Father of Lucrezia Borgia, Rodrigo Borgia was elevated as Pope Alexander in fateful 1492.

As part of their unprecedented “pre-nup,” Isabella held equal authority –an astonishing role for a woman in those times. Their shared power was expressed in an official motto, Tanto monta, monta tanto –Isabel como Fernando. (“It comes to the same thing, Isabel is the same as Fernando.”)

Supported by Spain’s powerful clerics, Ferdinand and Isabella aimed to unite Spain. Late in 1491, with an army that bridged the medieval world of armored knights and lancers with the new era’s first artillery weapons, they surrounded Granada. A force of some eighty thousand men, including ten thousand knights, began the siege that would complete la Reconquista in January 1492.

But ridding Spain of the Moors was only part of their holy war. In their quest for a kingdom free of heathens and heresy, los reyes catolicos viewed Jews and other “unbelievers” as another threat. In 1478, they had brought the Inquisition –the “Holy Office”– back to Spain, urged on by clerics who claimed that many of the Spanish Jews who had converted –conversos– secretly continued practicing their religion, posing a grave threat to Christianity. The notorious court that imprisoned, tortured or killed those suspected of heresy was led by Isabella’s confessor, Tomas de Torquemada, a descendant of a converso himself whose name became synonymous with the Spanish Inquisition’s worst excesses.

Torquemada wrote the royal edict of March 31, 1492 that ordered the Jews from Spain, unless they were baptized. Over time, some thirteen thousand people were found guilty of carrying out secret Jewish practices, often making their confessions after torture. During this time, at least 2,000 people were executed for heresy by the Inquisition. Thousands of others were imprisoned or had their properties confiscated. The number of Jews expelled from Spain is uncertain, and old estimates ranged from 200,000 to as many as 800,000. Contemporary historians argue that such numbers were exaggerated by centuries of English propaganda aimed at Spain and Roman Catholicism –the so-called “Black Legend.”

Some of those expelled Jews found a welcome, although an expensive one, in Rome where Pope Alexander received them, as long as they could meet his price for sanctioning their conversions.

To Isabella, the Inquisition was a useful political tool as well, consolidating the power of the “Catholic monarchs.” As James Reston, Jr. wrote in Dogs of God, “Of particular interest to Ferdinand was the provision in the pope’s bull which authorized the crown to fine the culprits and confiscate their holdings, and to deposit the sizable proceeds into the hard-pressed royal treasury.”

In other words, the Spanish Inquisition and the banishment of the Jews financed the war against the Moors. It would also help underwrite the voyages of Columbus and Spain’s New World empire.

(This material is adapted from America’s Hidden History

“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

How about a national holiday today, celebrating poetry, in honor of Robert Frost –born March 26, 1874.

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.

Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963. He had written his own epitaph, the words above, etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.

Stop here a moment and take this Frost quiz.

1. In what city was Robert Frost born?
2. What Yankee saying does Frost’s neighbor repeat in the poem, “Mending Wall”?
3. Which President chose Frost to read a poem at his inauguration?
4. At that inauguration, why did Frost recite “The Gift Outright”?

Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

Here is the NYTimes obituary published after his death.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0129.html#article

And this is a videoblog I made at Frost’s gravesite last August:
http://www.dontknowmuch.com/2009/08/touch-of-frost-a-videoblog/

This is the website of Frost House adn Museum in Franconia, N.H. http://www.frostplace.org/html/museum.html
Answers
1. San Francisco, California.
2. “Good fences make good neighbors.”
3. John F. Kennedy, in 1961.
4. He had written a new poem called “Dedication,” but couldn’t read it in the January glare; instead, he recited the 1942 poem, which he knew by heart.

Slate published this collection of personal recollections of the author on the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road in 2007.
http://www.slate.com/id/2173279/nav/tap1
Think you know your Kerouac? Try this quick quiz (adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature)

TRUE or FALSE (Answers Below)

1. Kerouac was a star football player in high school.
2. Jack Kerouac typed his On the Road manuscript on a single, 120-foot-long scroll of paper.
3. Kerouac spent seven years trying to find a publisher for On the Road.
4. English was not Kerouac’s first language.
5. The Dharma Bums is based on Kerouac’s travels with fellow beat poet Allen Ginsberg.
6. Kerouac was a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War.

Answers
1. TRUE. He attended Columbia University on a football scholarship.
2. TRUE. He created the scroll so that his flow would not be interrupted by having to change typewriter paper.
3. TRUE. Publishers repeatedly told him again and again that the book was unpublishable.
4. TRUE. Kerouac first learned joual, a dialect of French spoken in Quebec.
5. FALSE. It’s about a mountain-climbing trip Kerouac took with Gary Snyder, the Zen poet known best for his nature poems.
6. FALSE. Kerouac was politically conservative, and he supported the war in Vietnam.

And what was the “Boston Massacre,” class?

A mob of unemployed, angry (and probably three-sheets to the wind) dockworkers got into a shouting match with some of the much-hated British soldiers then quartered in Boston –and competing for jobs at the port in their off-duty hours. Curses were exchanged, snowballs thrown, then rocks. In an instant, shots rang out and several of the Boston men fell dead. A Paul Revere engraving of the event quickly became a patriot icon and a propaganda coup – a graphic image of the brutality and tyranny of British rule.

Then came a trial of the men accused of murdering these “townies.” Undoubtedly, these eight British soldiers and the officer in command were as reviled as “jihadists” and “Guantanamo detainees” are in America today. Which brings us to the question at hand.

What sort of man would possibly defend such heinous “killers?” It is a question that has taken on new poignancy with the recent controversy over the attacks by Elizabeth Cheney and other “conservatives” from “Keep America Safe” on the attorneys who have defended some of the Guantanamo detainees.

The attorney who defended those British soldiers was also assailed in his time. He knew his business would suffer from taking on such unpopular clients. But he did it –and for very little compensation, the colonial equivalent of a Legal Aid attorney. His name was John Adams.

In spite of the public grief he took –including some from his more radical and outspoken cousin, Samuel— 34-year-old attorney John Adams took the case of defending the soldiers on principle. And he stated that principle himself at the time:

“The reason is, because it’s of more importance to community, that innocence should be protected, than it is, that guilt should be punished.”

Adams was successful in the two trials. In the first, the officer in command was found not guilty. In the second, six soldiers were completely acquitted and two were found guilty of manslaughter for which they were branded on their thumbs.

Adams would be publicly assailed over his decision and later said he lost half of his business. For his part, Samuel Adams mostly kept quiet about the case realizing that this very public display of fairness looked good for the then-blossoming patriot cause. A lynch mob might well have been a disaster for the Americans.

In his old age, Adams looked back at the case and wrote that his part in the defense of the British soldiers was

“one of the most gallant, generous, manly and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.”

True Conservatives have traditionally professed to respect the rule of law, honor the ideals of the “Founders” and hold high the notion that individual rights are to be protected against the possible tyranny of a despotic government. The so-called “conservatives” attacking the Guantanamo attorneys might want to brush up on their middle school American History. As John Adams himself told the jury back then,

“Facts are stubborn things and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

On March 3, 1931, The Star Spangled Banner, with words written in 1814 and set to an old drinking song, became the national anthem.

It was September 13, 1814, American was at war with England for the second time since 1776. Francis Scott Key was an attorney attempting to negotiate the return of a civilian prisoner held by the British who had just burned Washington DC and had set their sights on Baltimore. As the British attacked the city, Key watched the naval bombardment from a ship in Baltimore’s harbor. In the morning, he could see that the Stars and Stripes still flew over Fort McHenry.

But here’s what they didn’t tell you:

Yes, Washington, D.C. was burned in 1814, including the President’s Home which would later get a fresh coat of paint and be called the “White House.” But Washington was torched in retaliation for the burning of York –now Toronto—in Canada earlier in the war.

Key wrote words. But the music comes from an old English drinking song. Good thing it wasn’t 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.
Here’s a link to the original lyrics of the Drinking song via Poem of the Week
http://www.potw.org/archive/potw234.html
The Star Spangled Banner did not become the national anthem until 1916 when President Wilson declared it by Executive Order. But that didn’t really count. In 1931, it became the National Anthem by Congressional resolution signed by President Herbert Hoover.,

Now, here are couple of footnotes to the Francis Scott Key story—his son, Philip Barton Key, was a District attorney in Washington. DC. He was shot and killed by Congressman Daniel Sickles. Sickles was acquitted with the first use of the defense of temporary insanity in 1859. And went on to serve as a Civil War general –and not a very good one.
And speaking of the Civil War, Key’s grandson was later imprisoned in Fort McHenry along wit Baltimore’s Mayor and other pro-Confederate sympathizers.

Here are some places to learn more about Fort McHenry, Key and the Flag that inspired the National Anthem.
http://www.nps.gov/archive/fomc/home.htm
The images and music in this video are courtesy of the Smithsonian Museum of American History: http://americanhistory.si.ed/starspangledbanner/

This version of the anthem is on 19th century instruments:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/starspangledbanner/mp3/song.ssb.dsl.mp3

If you were Theodor S. Geisel, get a friend to publish the book. Thus was born Dr. Seuss. Actually born on this date, March 2, 1904, Theodore Seuss Geisel first turned his knack for words and pictures to advertising and editorial cartoons. But Dr. Seuss influenced entire generations of children with his nonsensical poems that put “See Spot run” on the endangered species list.

So what do you know about Seuss? Heaven Save Us/Try this quick quiz.

1. Inspired by the rhythmic sound of an ocean liner’s engine, what was Seuss’s first book?
2. Which Seuss classic used just 225 words?
3. Boris Karloff once made his voice rather scary/But in a remake, he was played by Jim Carey. Who is he?
4. Here’s a clue that may surprise you/What did Seuss do/during the War known as Two?

Dr. Seuss died in 1991.

Here is a link to the informative and whimsical Dr. Seuss Memorial Sculpture Garden in his birthplace, Springfield, Mass.
http://www.catinthehat.org/history.htm

Answers
1. And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street. The idea came to Seuss on an ocean cruise.
2. The Cat in the Hat, written in response to the 1954 reports of poor reading in America.
3. The Grinch.
4. He drew anti-Nazi and anti-Japanese propaganda cartoons, images sharply at odds with his whimsical drawings for children.

People ask me two questions all the time: Why don’t we know much about History?
And why is so much of America’s History Hidden?
To the first the answer is simple. It was boring.
And to the second, we lie.
Sometimes these lies are little white lies –like Washington and the Cherry Tree. But sometimes they are Big Lies.
Let me give you an example of a BIG LIE. I was in a wonderful historical village in Florida, doing some research. A Spanish mission, with a neighboring Indian village, it featured an enthusiastic, well-versed staff in period costume. It was exactly the kind of place I like to suggest to parents and teachers to take their kids to get them excited about history.
Then I went into their “educational center.” On the wall was a time chart of Florida’s history and under the date 1565, I saw this legend: “The French are banished from Florida.”

Not so fast… The French Protestants, or Huguenots who were America’s real first pilgrims, were not “banished.” They were massacred by the Spanish. And not because they were French but because they were Protestants–”heretics.” It happened in September and October 1565.

October is also the month in which those folks who brought you the Salem Witch Trials executed a couple of Quakers –who had been banned from Boston and the Bay Colony in October 1656. A year later, another Quaker named Mary Dyer was executed and a fourth was hung in 1661 –simply for the crime of being a Quaker.
They left that part out of the Thanksgiving Story, didn’t they? These are some of the “hidden history” moments that we don’t talk about when we discuss America as a so-called “Christian nation” and the Puritans coming for freedom of religion. That meant their religion not anyone else’s.
We hide our history when the truth is ugly. We like to paint a picture of that that makes history tidy and acceptable. But our history isn’t tidy or bloodless. And it certainly isn’t boring as these stories prove.

You can read more about the French Pilgrims and the Quakers in America’s Hidden History

Here is a link the national monument at Fort Matanzas, site of the Massacre:
http://www.nps.gov/foma/index.htm
This is a brief biography of Mary Dyer from teh Masschusetts stae website:
http://www.mass.gov/?pageID=mg2terminal&L=6&L0=Home&L1=State+Government&L2=About+Massachusetts&L3=Interactive+State+House&L4=Inside+the+State+House&L5=Statues+in+Bronze&sid=massgov2&b=terminalcontent&f=interactive_statehouse_statue_dyer&csid=massgov2

John Steinbeck built his reputation writing about the struggles of down-and-out people: Dust Bowl farmers and pearl divers, prostitutes, jobless migrants, and Depression-era hobos. Before his death in 1968, Steinbeck became one of America’s most popular storytellers and among his many works are the epic classic The Grapes of Wrath and the brief but memorable Of Mice and Men.

In later years, he signed all his letters with a “pigasus” logo: a funny stamp of a little round pig with wings.Around the pig, Steinbeck added the words, Ad Astra Per Alia Porci, or “To the stars on the wings of a pig”—an apt motto for an author who portrayed the goodness, even holiness, of the common man. What do you know about the man who won a Nobel Prize in 1962? Try this quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature

1. What did Steinbeck study at Stanford? (Hint: he returned to this subject in his non-fiction book, Sea of Cortez, 1941, with Edward F. Ricketts.)
2. Who wrote and performed the song, “The Ballad of Tom Joad,” inspired by the main character in The Grapes of Wrath?
3. What Biblical story inspired the family drama in East of Eden?
4. Which of John Steinbeck’s novels have been adapted into Oscar-winning films?
5. Steinbeck wrote the screenplay for what biopic (for which Anthony Quinn won an Oscar)?

Here’s a link to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas, CA. with a brief biography and other information
http://www.steinbeck.org/Bio.html

Answers
1. Marine Biology.
2. Woody Guthrie. Bruce Springsteen also wrote a song inspired by The Grapes of Wrath: “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” released on an album of the same name.
3. The story of Cain and Abel.
4. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) won two Oscars (Best Actress and Best Director) out of five nominations. East of Eden (1955) won Best Actress. Of Mice and Men (1939), Tortilla Flat (1942), Lifeboat (1944) (based on a Steinbeck short story), and A Medal for Benny (1945) (another short story) all received Academy Award nominations.
5. Viva Zapata!

By now, I hope we all know that the cherry tree story is a legend, made up by a pseudobiographer but chiseled into American folklore.
But there is a true story about a young George Washington that most of us never hear. It is the story of his first actual military experience and his signing of a “murder confession.” It is not only more interesting than the cherry tree story but a lot more revealing.

The incident began in late May 1754, with England and France in a brief respite from bouts of relentless war. Relying upon knowledge garnered from reading military manuals, the wet-behind-the-ears Washington was in command of a crew of militiamen dispatched to build an outpost in western Pennsylvania’s contested wilderness.

Encountering a detachment of French soldiers, Washington followed the advice of an ally he barely trusted –an Indian chief known to the English as the Half King. Tossing caution to the wind, the untested Washington defied orders and ambushed the French. When the smoke cleared, one Virginian and several Frenchmen lay dead or wounded; the rest were taken prisoner. “I heard bullets whistle,” Washington later told his brother, famously adding that the sound was “charming.”

What happened next was anything but charming. A wounded French officer frantically waved some papers at Washington. He was, in fact, a diplomat, carrying letters to the British. But before Washington could make sense of this, the Half King buried his tomahawk in the Frenchman’s brain. The Indians fell on the other captives, leaving few alive.

Following this massacre, a French army set off in hot pursuit of Washington. Outnumbered, Washington’s men cobbled together a small wooden shed, surrounded by sharpened stakes, in a meadow about 60 miles south of what is now Pittsburgh. It was called “Fort Necessity” —but “Desperation” would have been more fitting. The Half King’s warriors took one look and beat a hasty retreat.

On a rainy July 3d, the French surrounded Fort Necessity and poured gunfire down on Washington’s hapless troops. Their powder wet, their trenches filling with mud and gore, some of the Virginians ransacked the rum stores. By the morning of the 4th, Washington had no choice. Fortunate he wasn’t shot on the spot, he accepted terms. Among them was signing what amounted to a murder confession. His admission sparked the Seven Years’ War—history’s first true “world war.” (The North American phase was the French and Indian War.)

Insubordinate, incompetent, an admitted murderer who had surrendered in abject defeat –Washington should have been done in by any of these blows to his reputation. But instead, he flourished. The first “Teflon” hero in American history –nothing stuck to the young George Washington.

Clearly, he possessed uncanny survival skills. He had proven that in 1753, during a dangerous trek through the Ohio River Valley wilderness when he was shot at by an Indian and later plunged into an icy river. By all rights, Washington should have died of exposure. But he lived to tell the tale and made a name for himself.

Just as intriguing as this public reversal of Washington’s failures is how they escaped inclusion in your schoolbooks. Maybe it is this simple: his “youthful indiscretions” never fit the tidy “I-cannot-tell-a-lie” image of young Washington that many Americans still cherish. Many Americans still cling to the mythic version of history with heroes as perfectly polished as the marble monuments in the nation’s capitol.

Yet the tale of “Washington’s Confession” is not simply revisionism meant to tarnish an icon. Washington emerged as the “indispensable man” who saw combat at its worst, learned well the politics of war, and was surely shaped by these disastrous misadventures.

“Washington’s Confession” is just one piece of America’s “hidden history,” a reminder that winners tell the tales. And Washington was a winner. Even though –as he surely knew– it is often the defeats and disasters that can teach us the most.

Here is a link to the National Historic site at Washington’s “Fort Necessity”
http://www.nps.gov/fone/index.htm
You can read more of the story of “Washington’s Confession” in America’s Hidden History

When I was a kid, we got two holidays: one for Lincoln’s Birthday and another for Washington’s. Now, we have to make do with a three day weekend in February for Presidents Day.
Think you know about the Father of Our Country?
This video contains a few things that might surprise you.

Want to learn a little more?
Here is the website for the National Park Service’s Birthplace of Washington site:
http://www.nps.gov/gewa/index.htm

And here is the National Park Service website for Fort Necessity, scene of Washington’s surrender and “confession.”
http://www.nps.gov/fone/index.htm

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
–Notice at the opening of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

America doesn’t have a national holiday to honor a writer. But if we did, maybe it should be one devoted to Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Missouri on November 30, 1835. And maybe we could make it today, February 18, in honor of Huck Finn.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in America on this date in 1885. (It had been published first in London a few months before.) An excellent website devoted to “Huck” and Twain can be found at the University of Virginia’s site:
http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/huckfinn.html

http://etext.virginia.edu/twain/huckfinn.html

(Writers take note of some of the reviews. They were not gentle.)

Best known by his pen name, and often viewed as the creator of such young adult classics as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain was much more. In a distinctly American style, Twain wrote biting satire that poked fun at America’s manners and corrupt politics. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), his master work, is now a controversial classic.

But Twain would surely remind people that he once said that a classic is, “A book which people praise and don’t read.” Although he famously told a newspaper in 1897, “The report of my death was an exaggeration,” Twain in fact died in 1910. What else do you know about one of America’s greatest writers? Take this quick quiz (adapted from Don’t Know Much About Anything Else.)

1. Where did he get his pen name “Mark Twain”?
2. How did Twain serve during the Civil War?
3. What short story gave Twain his national fame?
4. Which famous general’s autobiography did Twain publish?

There are two biographies of Mark Twain I would highly recommend:
Mark Twain: A Life by Ron Powers
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography by Justin Kaplan

Answers
1. As a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, he knew this phrase meant that the water is two fathoms (12 feet) deep.
2. In 1861, Clemens joined a group of irregular Confederate cavalry from Missouri, deserting after a few weeks time. The experience served as the source of a short memoir, “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed.”
3. “The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), based on a tale Twain heard while working in the California gold fields, was a national sensation.
4. His firm, Charles L. Webster, published Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs, a critical and commercial success.

With Presidents Day around the corner, it seems like a good time to think about some other great books about the Presidents and Presidency. Here is a short list of some of my favorite Presidential biographies –all what I call “must reads.” Obviously, this not an exhaustive list, and some may already be familiar. Not all of them focus on the presidential years of the subjects. But this is a good place to start with a collection of accessible and fascinating views of the lives and careers of some of the most significant Commanders in Chief –all told by great storytellers, great writers and great historians.
Since Presidents Day exists to honor Washington and Lincoln, I’ll start with them–

Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington by Richard Brookhiser. Fairly brief, mostly admiring but honest, and to the point, Brookhiser of the National Review, cuts through the mythology but keeps Washington firmly in place as “Father of Our Country.”
Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves and the Creation of America by Henry Wiencek. Rather than an exhaustive biography, this is a study of Washington’s complicated relationship to slavery and his views on emancipation.

Speaking of Emancipation, The Lincoln Library is enormous. But if I had to pick one single-volume biography of “The Great Emancipator,” I choose With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Stephen B. Oates. I like it for its readability and utterly human portrait of one most mythologized of Presidents. A close second to Oates is Lincoln by David Herbert Donald. Lincoln: An Illustrated Biography by Philip B. Kunhardt. Jr., Philip Kunhardt III and Peter W. Kunhardt is a beautiful volume, a “coffee table” book that won’t just sit on the coffee table. It might be especially valuable for households with children, as is Lincoln: A Photobiography, an award-winning book for children by the appropriately named Russell Freedman.

Mornings on Horseback: The Story of an Extraordinary Family, a Vanished Way of Life and the Unique Child Who Became Theodore Roosevelt by David McCullough is one of my favorite biographies, although it focuses not on TR’s astonishing Presidency but on his youth. A magnificent book.
For Teddy Roosevelt’s Presidency, read Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris

For the “other Roosevelt, another of my all time favorite books is Doris Kearn Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II. It focuses life in the White House during the war years and is the perfect combination of scholarship and great storytelling
Because FDR’s historic “First Hundred Days” got so much attention recently, I would also recommend this fairly slim but excellent overview of the Depression and Roosevelt’s controversial, much-debated response to it: The First Hundred Days by Anthony Badger

For FDR’s successor, the gold standard is Truman by David McCullough

Master of the Senate by Robert Caro. Until Caro finishes the fourth installment of his epic biography of Lyndon Johnson, this book, covering Johnson’s years as the Senator from Texas will have to do.

President Reagan: The Role Of A Lifetime by Lou Cannon. A California journalist, Cannon covered Reagan for years and this is an even-handed assessment.

A comprehensive reading list of these and Presidential biographies can also be found in Don’t Know Much About History

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
http://www.nps.gov/ABLI/index.htm

This link is to the Emancipation Proclamation page at the National Archives:
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/featured_documents/emancipation_proclamation/

Here is the original NYTimes story about that protest and what it started.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0201.html#article

Howell Raines, who covered the civil rights movement for the Times wrote an op-ed on the subject:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/opinion/01greensboro.html

The act of ordering coffee at a Woolworth’s lunch counter was not a “random act of kindness,” that clichéd panacea for the world’s ills. It was a deliberate act of defiance. and that got me thinking about deliberate defiance today.
What should we be defying?
The two wars?
The discrimination against Americans who want to marry or serve in the military?
Hope is a nice word. So is Change. But if we really hope to change anything, what should we be doing that would be as earth-shaking as ordering a cup of coffee?

[The news story about the Tea Party Convention: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/us/politics/26teaparty.html?src=tptw]

It began as a populist uprising against –surprise, surprise—the bankers and lawyers who were making the rules back in Boston, men derided as “thieves, knaves and robbers” by the average people of Massachusetts. During the first economic crisis in a nation then ruled by the Articles of Confederation, sweeping foreclosures threatened farms and businesses, unfair tax systems were crushing American families, and there was no credit to be had. Sound familiar? Plus ça change…

Fighting back, hundreds of these average men came together under the leadership of Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays and came to be called Shays’s Army. The politicians called them “insurgents.”

Many of the men, like Shays, were veterans of the Revolution and had fought in every battle from Bunker Hill to Yorktown. Some had suffered through the winter at Valley Forge. Now some of them had been told they couldn’t vote. So they began their second American Revolution in the winter of 1786 and the early winter of 1778. On January 25th, after a raging storm left four feet foot of fresh snow in the Berkshire hills, more than a thousand of these men – farmers, tradesmen, shopkeepers – marched on the federal arsenal in Springfield, hoping to take the artillery and muskets stored inside, and continue on to Boston to overthrow the state government.

Apparently, they believed these words from the Declaration of Independence:

“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it . . .”

Lightly armed and poorly organized, the “Shaysites” were repulsed by a small militia army, bought and paid for by the power brokers of Massachusetts. Among those in power was patriot icon Samuel Adams, who said of the rebellious farmers,

“In monarchies, the crime of treason and rebellion may admit of being pardoned or lightly punished, but the man who dares rebel against the laws of a republic ought to suffer death..”

Indeed a few of the rebels did die that day in Springfield. Several volleys of grapeshot killed a handful of men; the others scattered in panic. More federal troops eventually rounded them up. Daniel Shays, an outlaw, made his way to the “Republic of Vermont,” not yet a state. (Eventually pardoned, he lived out the rest of his life as a struggling farmer in upstate New York.)

The “horrid and unnatural Rebellion and War,” as the Massachusetts legislature called the uprising, ended with a few small bangs and a whimper. And Americans killing each other.
Thomas Jefferson, hearing the news in Paris, wrote back to America,

“What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

George Washington was not so philosophical. “Are your people mad?” an incredulous Washington wrote to one of his former aides in New England. The prospect of more Shays Rebellions provided the urgency for Washington, James Madison, and other “Framers” to collect in Philadelphia to draft the Constitution. The angry “teabaggers” of western Massachusetts had pressed America to become “a more perfect Union.”

“Shays’s Rebellion” was far from the first time populist anger boiled over violently in America. There had been numerous uprisings throughout colonial America in which the poor and powerless struck out at the earliest generation of American “Elites.” And populist anger has remained a constant throughout our history. It is anger born of economic dislocation, but is often fueled by darker streaks — race and religion have frequently stoked the coals of populist rage. And these tales are usually untold in our schoolbooks. They don’t fit the tidy picture of American History.

In the past, populist movements like the “Tea baggers” have usually flamed hot before burning out –co-opted or absorbed by the major parties. Whether the fractious and increasingly fractured “Tea Party” is one more of these flameouts remains to be seen. But the history of populist anger is a real one. And as the Senate race results in Massachusetts –scene of Shays’s Rebellion– recently proved, people are mad. The bloodletting may be symbolic this time. But Jefferson’s “Tree of Liberty” may be refreshed with more political bloodshed before too long.

You can read more about Shays’s Rebellion and its impact in America’s Hidden History

Romance, scandal and ruin among New York socialites—long before this was the stuff of People, and “Gossip Girl,” it was the subject matter for Edith Wharton’s most famous works. In such novels as The Age of Innocence (1920) and The House of Mirth (1905), Wharton painted detailed, acid portraits of high society life. In doing so, she created heartbreaking conflicts beneath the façade of wealth and manners. Again and again, characters like Newland Archer and Lily Bart were forced to choose between conforming to social expectations and pursuing true love and happiness. Her most famous work set outside the realm of high-tone New York was Ethan Frome (1911), set in wintry, rural Massachusetts. Know your Wharton? Try this quick quiz–

TRUE or FALSE (Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature. Answers below)

1. Edith Wharton wrote about wealthy New Yorkers to escape the poverty of her own upbringing.
2. Though Edith Wharton was unhappily married, she could not get divorced because it was socially unacceptable.
3. In addition to her fiction, Wharton published several books on interior decorating and landscaping.

Here is a link to The Mount, Wharton’s restored home in the Berkshires in Massachusetts:
http://www.edithwharton.org/

Edith Wharton died in France in 1937. Here is her obituary from theNew York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0124.html

Answers
1. FALSE. Wharton was born to wealthy New Yorkers, and summered in Newport, Rhode Island. She grew up traveling through Europe, and was educated by private tutors. After an official debut into society, she married a rich banker twelve years her senior.
2. FALSE. She divorced Teddy Wharton in 1913.
3. TRUE. Her first book was The Decoration of Houses. She also wrote about Italian landscaping and architecture in Italian Villas and Their Gardens, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.

Coincidentally, President Lyndon B. Johnson died the same day. Here is the New York Times front page reports of both stories, with the text of the Roe v Wade story below.
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/big/0122.html#article

Why did “Jane Roe” sue Wade? (Adapted from Don’t Know Much About History)
There are few issues more emotionally, politically, or legally divisive in modern America than the future of abortion rights.

Many Americans thought the question was settled on January 22, 1973. That was the day the Supreme Court decided, by a seven-to-two margin, that it was unconstitutional for states to prohibit voluntary abortions before the third month of pregnancy; the decision also limited prohibitions that states might set during the second three months.

The decision grew out of a Texas case involving a woman who, out of desire to protect her privacy, was called Jane Roe in court papers. “Roe” was Norma McCorvey, a single woman living in Texas who became pregnant. She desired an abortion, but was unable to obtain one legally in her home state of Texas, and so she gave birth to a child she put up for adoption. Nonetheless, she brought suit against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade in an attempt to overturn the restrictive Texas abortion codes. The case ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which made the decision in the case known as Roe v. Wade.

For sixteen years the Roe precedent influenced a series of rulings that liberalized abortion in America. To many Americans, the right to an abortion was a basic matter of private choice, a decision for the woman to make. But to millions of Americans, Roe was simply government-sanctioned murder.

The mostly conservative foes of legal abortion—who call their movement “pro-life”—gained strength in the 1980s, coalescing behind Ronald Reagan and contributing to his election. And it may ultimately be the conservative legacy of his and the appointments of George Bush and his son George W. Bush to the Supreme Court who determine the future of Roe v. Wade. In the summer of 1989, the Supreme Court decided five to four, in the case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, to give states expanded authority to limit abortion rights. The Court also announced that it would hear a series of cases that would give it the opportunity to completely overturn the Roe decision.

In 1998, McCorvey announced a conversion to Christianity and a complete break with the pro-choice movement. Henry Wade, the Dallas prosecutor she had sued and who also prosecuted Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, died in 2001.

From Justice Harry A. Blackmun’s majority decision in Roe v. Wade:

The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however . . . the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. . . . They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage; procreation; contraception; family relationships; and child rearing and education.
The right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. . . . We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

With little formal education, he became a writer, printer, philanthropist, philosopher, political leader and scientist. Franklin, alongside Thomas Jefferson, was probably the best example of the American Enlightenment Man. And, like Jefferson and other men of his times, Benjamin Franklin was skeptical of organized religion.

But proponents of America as a “Christian nation” and those who favor public prayer often cite Benjamin Franklin’s entreaty that the Constitutional Convention –then seemingly at an unbreakable impasse– open its daily debates with a prayer. What they conveniently leave out is what actually happened following that suggestion.

Alexander Hamilton first argued that if the people knew that the Convention was resorting to prayer at such a late date, it might be viewed as an act of desperation. Nonetheless, Franklin’s motion was seconded. But then Hugh Williamson of North Carolina pointed out that the convention lacked funds to pay a chaplain, and there the proposition died. Franklin later noted,

The convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary.

Late in his life, Franklin wrote what could almost pass for a modern New Age statement of faith:

“Here is my creed. I believe in one God, creator of the universe.
That he governs it by his Providence. . . . That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. . . . As to Jesus of Nazareth. I think the system of morals and his religion . . . the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have . . . some doubts as to his divinity.”

He added, “I have ever let others enjoy their religious sentiments. . . . I hope to go out of the world in peace with all of them.”

Franklin died on April 17, 1790.
Here’s a link to a Library of Congress website celebrating Franklin on his 300th birthday in 2006.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/franklin/introduction.html

You can read more about Franklin and his accomplishments and impact in Don’t Know Much About History and America’s Hidden History

Why is there a statue of Benedict Arnold’s boot?

Years ago, I was asked that question on a radio call-in show and honestly did not know the answer. Nor was I even aware at the time there was such a statue. But there it is — part of the Saratoga National Park in Saratoga, New York. The “boot” is actually anonymous, citing the “most brilliant soldier in the Continental Army.” But there is no question it honors American history’s greatest villain, born this day in 1741.

The “Boot Monument” is part of the park tour:
http://www.nps.gov/archive/sara/tour-7.htm
http://www.nps.gov/sara/index.htm

History books like to make people into heroes or villains. Benedict Arnold was easily characterized as a villain, the most notorious traitor in American History for his attempt to betray the patriot cause when he was in command of the strategic post at West Point, overlooking the Hudson River. But he might have been one of the nation’s greatest heroes. And that is what makes history so compelling. Not the black and white of dates and “facts,” but the more subtle gray complexities of ego, ambition and human frailty.

Born on January 14, 1741 in colonial Norwich, Connecticut, Arnold had a biography that reads like that of a character out of Dickens. The son of a wealthy, successful ship’s captain and merchant, young Benedict Arnold was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth. He was sent off to the best boarding school by his father, owner of the finest home in town. Then it fell apart. Yellow fever took his sisters while he was at school. Alcoholism then took his father. The fall was stunning as the elder Arnold became the town drunk and lost his fortune. At 14, young Benedict Arnold became an indentured servant. As a teenager, he ran away on several occasions to try and join the British-American forces then fighting France in the French and Indian War. Through pluck and generous relatives, Arnold eventually became a wealthy young merchant himself and was soon immersed in patriot politics, even traveling to Philadelphia to observe the First Continental Congress.

When the fighting began in 1775, he led Connecticut’s militia to Boston to join the rebel army gathering there. Arnold soon won honors for his role in the capture of Fort Ticonderoga on Lake Champlain. With George Washington’s approval, he led a daring but disastrous march through Maine to unsuccessfully attack Quebec. Later, he built a small navy to battle the British on Lake Champlain, helping save the patriot cause. But it was at Saratoga in October 1777 that he made his greatest contribution, leading a charge that turned the tide in what would become the most important American victory of the Revolution to that point.

Admired by Washington, Arnold also made a great many enemies. Seeing others promoted and advanced before him made him bitter and ultimately led to his fateful decision to join the British side.

After his plot was uncovered, Arnold did join the British side, fighting against his onetime countrymen. He later moved to Canada and eventually to London where he died and was buried in June 1801 at the age of 60. His remains were accidentally –and fittingly?– moved to an unmarked grave.

You can read more about Arnold and his exploits in the chapter called “Arnold’s Boot” in America’s Hidden History

Gazing at this enormous and dazzling display of lights, I could only ponder anew an old question: There weren’t any evergreen trees in Bethlehem. Why do people decorate Christmas trees in honor of the birth of Jesus?

Once again, we have the pagans to thank, as I’ve been describing in this series about Christmas and its mythic roots. In writing about the Roman Saturnalia in my post about December 25th, I mentioned Attis, an agricultural god worshiped in Rome, whose celebration date was December 25th and his symbol — a pine tree.

From pre-Christian times, evergreen boughs and other evergreen vegetation represented life in the midst of the dead of winter. While it was true in both ancient Greece and Rome where houses were decorated with evergreens as symbols of life, it was especially true in the Nordic and Germanic countries. The evergreen or fir tree was significant to the Norse, who burned a Yule log, and celebrated trees as sacred.

In medieval times, after Christianity arrived in the Norse and German world, that idea took hold in a German tradition called the miracle or Paradise Play, in which an evergreen was brought inside and represented the tree in the Garden of Eden and was decorated with apples— eventually hanging shiny red balls on the tree went together. The German Tannenbaum is really the source of the familiar Christmas tree. By the way “Tannenbaum” is translated as “Christmas tree” but its literal meaning is “fir tree.”

As for the lights, legend has it that Protestant Reformer Martin Luther was in the woods on a winter evening and looked up to see the stars shining through the trees and was inspired to put lights in the Christmas tree. Of course, he used candles which is not a good idea.

So who brought the Christmas tree to America?
The first Christmas trees in America were used in the early 1800’s by German settlers in Pennsylvania. Although the German soldiers, or Hessians, who were in Trenton, New Jersey back during the Revolution may have been sleeping around their Tannenbaum when George Washington crossed the Delaware to attack them on Christmas morning. King George III of England was German and had Christmas trees in England but it was not a widely popular Christmas tradition in America until the mid-19th century, as the great influx of immigrants to America began to bring the many Christmas traditions that had been suppressed by the Puritans of Massachusetts.

So whether you call it a Christmas tree or a “holiday tree,” when you admire that great big evergreen, it’s just one more way we all bring out our inner Viking!

And about that Rockefeller Center tree– The first of these now iconic trees was set up by construction workers who were building Rockefeller Center during the Great Depression. Then, as now and as it was for the Norse, it was a symbol of hope!

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.”

So says Henry Tilney, the charming young clergyman in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, defending a genre that was taken about as seriously in Austen’s time as drugstore romances and “beach reads” are today. Novels, to high-minded nineteenth-century readers, were trashy and sentimental, and only filled women’s heads with nonsense. Born on Deceember 16, 1775, Austen (d.1817) herself came from a family of voracious readers; she said they were “not ashamed” to read novels. Austen’s works, including favorites like Emma, Pride and Prejudice, and Sense and Sensibility, are marked by a focus on young women in situations similar to her own: educated and imaginative daughters of the middling-rich. Unlike her heroines, who depended on marriage to secure their social standing, Austen (as well as her only sister, Cassandra) never married.

Test your Austen “Sense & Sensibility” with this quick quiz (Answers below and pretty easy at that!):

1. Under what name were Austen’s novels published during her lifetime?
2. What is the name of Austen’s last, never-completed novel?
3. What was the profession of George Austen, Jane’s father.
4. Which of Austen’s novels became a movie starring Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, and Hugh Grant?
5. What film transformed Pride and Prejudice into a Bollywood-style musical?
6. Who called Austen “the most perfect artist among women”?

The largest website devoted to all things Austen is “The Republic of Pemberley:
http://www.pemberley.com/

Answers
1. None—they were published anonymously, “By a Lady.”
2. Sanditon. Several contemporary writers have “completed” the novel and there are versions of these “finished” books.
3. Rector. The Rectory at Seventon, Hampshire, where Jane Austen wrote three of her novels, was destroyed by fire in 1823.
4. Sense and Sensibility.
5. Bride and Prejudice.
6. Virginia Woolf.

That idea is driven home by the fact that in 2009, the Winter Solstice for the Northern Hemisphere will occur on December 21 at approximately 17:47 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) which is 12:47pm on the East Coast of the US. Whether you call it the “shortest day,” or the “first day of winter” or “midwinter,” the Winter Solstice has everything to do with the Christmas season and the importance of the ideas of light and hope coming into the world and a “new year” beginning.

In the ancient world, people understood the solstice. We know that from such ancient sites as Stonehenge and Machu Picchu which clearly were used to mark the solstices and other events in the annual cycle of the Sun. The source of life and light had all but disappeared –especially the further north you are, and with it life itself. But after this day, the Sun gradually began to make its return. The significance of the winter solstice was central to many of the festivals and rituals of the pagan –or pre-Christian — world. And almost every culture told a story to recognize the central importance of this event.

In an earlier blog about the December date of Christmas, I wrote about the significance of an ancient Roman festival celebrating the solstice– the Saturnalia. It was far from unique. The Japanese have a charming story of Amaterasu, the Sun goddess, who had retreated to a cave and was lured out of hiding by the merriment of the other gods who were watching a young goddess dance naked. It is no coincidence that the Jewish “Festival of Lights” coincides with the Christmas season.

But few traditions are more important to western Christmas celebrations than the Norse solstice stories. In the far north land of the Vikings, where the darkness is deeper and lasts even longer, the myth of the Solstice involved the king of the gods, Odin, bringing the Sun back to the world as he rode across the night sky on his eight-legged horse Stepnir. In honor of this event, the Norse lit a burning log to celebrate the return of light to their dark world. It was mean to represent the “Wheel” of the sun –and the Norse word for “wheel” was Yule. The Yule log burned through the Solstice season for as many as twelve days.

It is easy to see how these ancient rituals were transferred to the concept of the birth of Jesus — the miraculous arrival of God on earth, who was bringing Light and Life to the world. It was a lot easier for the early Church Fathers to give these ancient rituals a Christian meaning than get people to surrender ideas they had celebrated for thousands of years.

And that is why, for all the years I was growing up in metropolitan New York City, a television station devoted a commercial free Christmas Eve to playing Christmas carols and an endless loop of a burning log. We were still celebrating the return of the Sun.

So as the Solstice approaches, bring out your inner Viking and light the Yule log. And next time, I’ll tell you some of the other things our Christmas celebration owes to the Vikings.

It’s a red meat issue that is good for ratings and direct mail fund raising. But the fact is, an increasingly secular America celebrates more than just Christmas at this time of year — so “Happy Holidays” is not only appropriate, it makes good business sense. And most religious displays are not banned. Courts simply direct that one religion cannot be favored over another under the Constitutional protections of the First Amendment. Christmas displays are generally permitted as long as menorahs, Kwanzaa displays and other seasonal symbols are also allowed.

In other words, the “War on Christmas” is pretty much a phony war.

But where did this all start? The “war on Christmas” screamers might be interested to know that the first laws against Christmas celebrations and festivities in America came during the 1600s –from the same wonderful folks who brought you the Salem Witch Trials — the Puritans. (By the way, H.L. Mencken once defined Puritanism as the fear that “somewhere someone may be happy.”)

“For preventing disorders, arising in several places within this jurisdiction by reason of some still observing such festivals as were superstitiously kept in other communities, to the great dishonor of God and offense of others: it is therefore ordered by this court and the authority thereof that whosoever shall be found observing any such day as Christmas or the like, either by forbearing of labor, feasting, or any other way, upon any such account as aforesaid, every such person so offending shall pay for every such offence five shilling as a fine to the county.”

–From the records of the General Court,
Massachusetts Bay Colony
May 11, 1659

The Founding Fathers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were not a festive bunch. To them, Christmas was a debauched, wasteful festival that threatened their core religious beliefs. They understood that most of the trappings of Christmas –like holly and mistletoe– were vestiges of ancient pagan rituals. More importantly, they thought Christmas — the mass of Christ– was too “popish,” by which they meant Roman Catholic. These are the people who banned Catholic priests from Boston under penalty of death.

This sensibility actually began over the way in which Christmas was celebrated in England. Oliver Cromwell, a strict Puritan who took over England in 1645, believed it was his mission to cleanse the country of the sort of seasonal moral decay that Protestant writer Philip Stubbes described in the 1500s:

‘More mischief is that time committed than in all the year besides … What dicing and carding, what eating and drinking, what banqueting and feasting is then used … to the great dishonour of God and the impoverishing of the realm.’

In 1644, Parliament banned Christmas celebrations. Attending mass was forbidden. Under Cromwell’s Commonwealth, mince pies, holly and other popular customs fell victim to the Puritan mission to remove all merrymaking during the Christmas period. To Puritans, the celebration of the Lord’s birth should be day of fasting and prayer.

In England, the Puritan War on Christmas lasted until 1660. In Massachusetts, the ban remained in place until 1687.

So if the conservative broadcasters and religious folk really want a traditional, American Christian Christmas, the solution is simple — don’t have any fun.

Read more about the Puritans in Don’t Know Much About History and America’s Hidden History

For starters, the Gospels never mention a precise date or even a season for the birth of Jesus. How then did we settle on December 25?
If a bright light just went off in your head, you’re getting warm. It’s all about the Sun.

In ancient times, a popular Roman festival celebrated Saturnalia, a Thanksgiving-like holiday marking the winter solstice and honoring Saturn, the god of agriculture. The Saturnalia began on December 17th and while it only lasted two days at first, it was eventually extended into a weeklong period that lost its agricultural significance and simply became a time of general merriment. Even slaves were given temporary freedom to do as they pleased, while the Romans feasted, visited one another, lit candles and gave gifts. Later it was changed to honor the official Roman Sun god known as Sol Invictus (“Unconquered Sun”) and the solstice fell on December 25.

Two other important pagan gods popular in ancient Rome were also celebrated around this date. The Roman were big on adopting the gods of the people they conquered. Mithra, a Persian god of light who was first popular among Roman soldiers, acquired a large cult in ancient Rome. The birth of Attis, another agricultural god from Asia Minor, was also celebrated on December 25. Attis dies but is brought back to life by his lover, a goddess whose temple later became the site of an important basilica honoring the Virgin Mary. By the way, the symbol of Attis was a pine tree.

Candles. Gift giving. Pine trees. Dying gods brought back to life. Hmmm. Sound familiar?

All the similarities between Saturnalia and these other Roman holidays and the celebration of Christmas are no coincidence. In the fourth century, Pope Julius 1 assigned December 25 as the day to celebrate the Mass of Christ’s birth –Christ’s mass. This was a clever marketing ploy that conveniently sidestepped the problem of eliminating an already popular holiday while converting the population. Most of our Christmas traditions reflect the merger of pagan rituals, beliefs, and traditions with Christianity. The early church fathers knew that they couldn’t convert people without allowing them to keep some of their ancient festivals and rituals so they would allow them if they could be connected to Christianity. (Catholic authorities disagree and say that December date was arrived at by adding nine months to March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, the day of Jesus’ miraculous conception. But where did that date come from?)

The importance of the winter solstice, then, is crucial to understanding not only the date of Christmas but many of the other “myths” of this season.

While we are talking about dates, the precise year of the birth of Jesus is also a mystery. The dating system we use is based on a system devised by a monk around 1500 years ago and is seriously flawed. The historical King Herod who ordered the massacre of the innocents died in 4 BC (or BCE, Before the Common Era). The “census” ordered by Emperor Augustine is not recorded in Roman history, but a local census did take place in the Roman province of Judea in 6 AD (or CE, the Common Era). Is that all perfectly clear now?

You can read more about the mythic roots of Christmas and the gospel accounts of Jesus in Don’t Know Much About Mythology and Don’t Know Much About the Bible.

Yesterday, December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy—the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
. . . The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. I regret to tell you that very many American lives have been lost.
. . . No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people, in their righteous might, will win through to absolute victory.
–Franklin D. Roosevelt’s War Messsage to Congress (December 8, 1941)

At 7 A.M., Hawaiian time, on Sunday, December 7, 1941, two U.S. Army privates saw something unusual on their radar screens. More than 50 planes seemed to be appearing out of the northeast. When they called in the information, they were told it was probably just part of an expected delivery of new B-17s coming from the mainland United States. They were Japanese warplanes.

At 0758 the Pearl Harbor command radioed its first message to the world. AIR RAID PEARL HARBOR. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. An hour later, a second wave of 167 more Japanese aircraft arrived. The two raids, which had lasted only minutes, destroyed or damaged nineteen ships, eight of them eight battleships, and 292 aircraft, including 117 bombers. And 2,403 Americans, military and civilian, had been killed, with another 1,178 wounded.

No question has tantalized historians and students of the period more than this: Did FDR know the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, and did he deliberately allow the attack that took more than 2,000 American lives in order to draw America into the most deadly, destructive war in history?

Some say FDR was preoccupied with the war in Europe and didn’t want war with Japan. Others hold that FDR viewed Japan—allied to the German-Italian Axis—as his entrée into the European war. The ultimate conclusion to this view is that FDR knew of the imminent Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and not only failed to prevent it, but welcomed it as the turning point that would end obstruction of his war plans.

There is no longer any doubt that some Americans knew that “zero hour,” as the Japanese ambassador to Washington called the planned attack, was scheduled for December 7. According to John Toland’s account of Pearl Harbor, Infamy, Americans had not only broken the Japanese code, but the Dutch had done so as well, and their warnings had been passed on to Washington.

Here is where human frailty and overconfidence, and even American racism, take over. Most American military planners expected a Japanese attack to come in the Philippines, America’s major base in the Pacific; the American naval fortifications at Pearl Harbor were believed to be invulnerable to attack, as well as too far away for the Japanese.

While the conspiracy theorists persist, a convincing case for Roosevelt trying to avoid war with Japan has been made by many prominent historians. Among them, eminent British military historian John Keegan dismisses the conspiracy notion.

“These charges defy logic,” Keegan wrote in The Second World War. “Churchill certainly did not want war against Japan, which Britain was pitifully equipped to fight, but only American assistance in the fight against Hitler. . . .”

The U.S. Navy’s History and Heritage Command has an extensive collection of online documents and resources related to the Pearl Harbor attack:
http://www.history.navy.mil/faqs/faq66-1.htm
This is the National Park Service link to World War II Pacific sites;
http://www.nps.gov/valr/index.htm

Find more on Pearl Harbor and World War II in Don’t Know Much About History

1. What does Santa Claus have to do with Saint Nicholas?

Today, December 6, is the feast of Saint Nicholas. It makes a perfect day to consider one of the first of the “myths” of Christmas. Where does Santa Claus comes from? And what does he have to do with a 4th-century Christian miracle worker from Turkey?
In Christian tradition and legend, Saint Nicholas was an early hero of the church, the archbishop of Myra in what is now Turkey. Legend has it that he once threw gold coins through the window of three poor girls so they would have dowries and get married. Without dowries, their father feared that they would be forced into prostitution. This was just one of many legendary acts of charity attributed to Nicholas, which included putting coins in childrens shoes. Since his feast day — the date of his death on the church calendar– falls in early December, his generosity was eventually connected to the Christmas season, Advent and the idea of the “three kings,” or wise men, who brought gifts to the baby Jesus.
So how did this rather thin, ascetic Turkish bishop –the way he is traditionally depicted in sacred art—morph into a large, bearded man with a red suit and a large sled full of toys pulled by eight flying reindeer?
Many of the Santa Claus traditions can be traced back to the Norse god Odin. The Norse celebrated the winter solstice with a long festival. In their legend, Odin brought the sun god back to the world on the solstice. He rode across the night sky on a horse named named Stepnir –an eight-legged horse. Norse children would put out hay and straw for the horse in their shoes. In the Christian era, the legend of Odin became a Father Christmas figure and was merged with the religious legend of Saint Nicholas. The eight-legged horse became eight tiny reindeer.
The Dutch brought Saint Nicholas to America as SinterKlaas and the name was later anglicized as Santa Claus. In Europe, children still put out their shoes on different nights, but here, the tradition was changed to stockings hung by the chimney with care.

Whether he is called Father Christmas, Pere Noel or Saint Nick, or Odin, for that matter, there is something more important to know:
“Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
Read the text of newsman Frank P. Church’s letter to a small girl in New York that inspired that famous line here (via the Newseum):
http://www.newseum.org/yesvirginia/

And follow this blog over the next few weeks for more about Christmas past. And you can read more about Christmas and its mythic roots in Don’t Know Much About Mythology

History is taught as the record of presidents, kings and generals. But sometimes it is the extraordinary story of an “ordinary” person that history must tell. On December 1, 1955, one woman’s act of defiance changed history. But it wouldn’t be fair to call Rosa Parks, who was born in 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama and died October 24, 2005 at age 92, an “ordinary person.” What do you know about this courageous woman who helped spark the civil rights movement that transformed America? (Answers below)

1. Where and why was Rosa Parks arrested?
2. Before her arrest, was Rosa Parks involved in the civil rights movement?
3. How much education did Rosa Parks, the descendant of slaves, receive?
4. What action did her arrest trigger?
5. Who was elected president of the organization that ran the boycott?

Here is a link to resources about Rosa parks from the Library of Congress:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/rosaparks/rosaparks.html

Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Anything

Answers
1. She refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery, Alabama bus. A city law required that whites and blacks sit in separate rows. The law also required blacks to leave their seats to make room for white passengers.
2. Yes. Rosa Parks had become one of the first women to join the Montgomery Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1943, serving as its secretary until 1956. Employed as a seamstress, she lost her job as a result of the boycott and later moved to Detroit.
3. She attended Alabama State Teachers College.
4. Her arrest triggered a boycott of the city’s segregated bus system that had been planned by local civil rights leaders who were awaiting the right moment. The arrest of Rosa Parks was that moment. For 382 days, thousands of blacks refused to ride Montgomery’s buses and the boycott ended when the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated seating on the city’s buses unconstitutional.
5. A young and unknown Martin Luther King, Jr. –then a Baptist minister in Montgomery– was chosen as president, providing his first national stage.

Read more about Rosa Parks in Don’t Know Much About History and my biography for young readers, Don’t Know Much About Rosa Parks

In my previous videoblog, I told you that there were no black hats with buckles, half of the “pilgrims” weren’t Pilgrims and that the first Thanksgiving was in October. Here are a few more pieces of the picture.
And here is a link to a story Iwrote 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/26/opinion/26davis.html?scp=1&sq=Kenneth%20C%20Davis%20Pilgrims&st=cse

THE PLIMOTH PLANTATION historical site also offers a good overview of the Pilgrim story:
http://www.plimoth.org/features/faqs/mayflower2-faq.php

Four score 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.

Today is Dedication Day, the date on which Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at a ceremony to dedicate the opening of the cemetery at the Gettysburg Battlefield in 1863. On that day, Lincoln was not the featured speaker. The “few appropriate remarks” he was asked to make took about two minutes. Edward Everett, the most famed orator in America, was featured speaker and spoke for two hours. But which Gettysburg Address do we remember?
And no, it wasn’t written in haste on the back of an envelope. Lincoln carefully drafted the speech on official stationery.

Here is a link to the National Park Service’s Gettysburg pages on the cemetery
http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/getttour/tstops/tstd4-23.htm

This is a link to the Library of Congress online Exhibition about the Gettysburg Address:
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/gadd/

Lincoln made five copies of the speech. Two are at the Library of Congress. One is kept at the White House: This is the complete text of the Address, as recorded by Lincoln, in what is called the “Bliss Copy,” generally accepted as the standard version and the one which is inscribed at the Lincoln Memorial.

Four score 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 battle-field 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 can not dedicate…we can not consecrate…we can not 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.

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.

Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Anything Else
And read about America’s real “first Pilgrims” in America’s Hidden History

And here is a link to the site of Plimouth Plantation, definitely worth a visit:
http://www.plimoth.org/

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 teh Mayflower weren’t even the “first Pilgrims.” That honor goes to French Huguenots who settled inFlorida more than 50 years before the Mayflower sailed.

Of course, that means today there will be a lot of speechmaking about honoring our veterans. It will come a day after the Harvard Medical School released a survey showing that more than 2,000 veterans died in 2008 because they lacked health insurance.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/10/2266-veterans-died-in-200_n_353033.html

That news came on top of the fact that many of America’s veterans fill the ranks of the nation’s homeless. According to the VA, one third of America’s adult homeless are veterans.
http://www1.va.gov/homeless/page.cfm?pg=1

These grim facts are troubling enough when it comes to “honoring veterans.” What nobody will say today is what then-Senator Barack Obama said in the spring of 2007, invoking a public spanking: “We now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.”
Senator John McCain said something similar around the same time and both men quickly covered their tracks by claiming they should have said “sacrificed” not “wasted.” In word-wise America, “sacrifice” has triumphed as the socially polite term for referring to the thousands of American lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, with no end in sight.

This parsing of language –the distinction between the honorable “sacrifice” and the taboo “waste”—takes on added poignancy on Veterans Day.

With the memory of Fort Hood’s memorial service achingly fresh, and as Arlington and other cemeteries at home and abroad are festooned in flags and fresh flowers, some might find it inappropriate to question the “W” word. The implication is that ceremonial grieving is no occasion for truth-telling. But what better moment to ask hard questions than when the wounds are freshest?

An American President once made a very public acknowledgment of loss. Recognizing that sacrifices can indeed be wasted, Abraham Lincoln implored war-torn America to,

“resolve that these dead
shall not have died in vain.”

Maybe if the country, and especially its political leadership, honestly acknowledged that all sacrifice is not created equal –that far too many sacrifices are made in vain—America will go a long way towards ensuring that there are fewer fresh graves to decorate next Veterans Day.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle
Anthem for Doomed Youth –Wilfred Owens

Here is a link to a BBC page on the great poet of the World War I era, Wilfred Owens and his poems “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Anthem for Doomed Youth”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/poetryseason/poets/wilfred_owen.shtml