Resources on History – Political
Biographer and journalist Robert A. Caro shares glimpses of his life and writing subjects in Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing. Since the 1960s, his professional career has been devoted to biographies of two twentieth century giants: New York City infrastructure planner Robert Moses (though never elected to public office, he became one of the most powerful men in his state for forty years), and Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as president, reshaped American society. Johnson’s accomplishments were breathtaking. Working with Congress, he secured the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 1965 Immigration Act, Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, education bills, and War on Poverty legislation. He dramatically increased the scope of the conflict in Vietnam. Four of the projected…
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Today is the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the commencement of the Allied invasion of continental Europe. Within a year, Hitler was dead and the Nazi reign of terror over. President Ronald Reagan’s 1984 speech at Normandy marked the 40th anniversary of the invasion. Reagan used the opportunity not only to honor the allied soldiers who fought their way ashore, but also to strengthen NATO’s resolve in the face of threatened Soviet nuclear missile deployments to Eastern Europe. I introduced my high school rhetoric and debate students to this speech as one of the great presidential addresses of the 20th century. I recommend listening to the entire 13-minute speech. My father, George Thomas Wingard, Jr., fought in Europe later in…
Read MoreFifty years ago today VMI graduate and Episcopal theological student Jon Daniels was murdered in Hayneville, Alabama. A New Hampshire native, Daniels spent much of the spring and summer of 1965 working in Selma, Alabama’s voter registration campaign. While picketing racially discriminatory businesses in Ft. Deposit on August 14, he was one of a group of protestors arrested and transported to the county jail in nearby Hayneville. In wretched living conditions, Daniels labored for the better part of a week to keep up the group’s spirits, leading his fellow prisoners in prayer and hymn singing. An Episcopal group offered to post bail for Daniels. He declined; there wasn’t enough money to free all the prisoners. He would remain with his colleagues. Unexpectedly and ominously, the prisoners were…
Read MoreIndomitable physical courage, moral strength, and Christian conviction marked the life of Fannie Lou Hamer. Yesterday Lynne and I visited her gravesite at Ruleville in the Mississippi Delta. Mrs. Hamer came to national prominence when she addressed the 1964 Democratic National Convention Credentials Committee. She described the imprisonment and brutal beating she endured during the 1963 summer voter registration drive. Watch a brief historical introduction and then listen to her eight minute speech. The youngest of twenty children, her family were sharecroppers. Her attempt to register to vote in 1962 led to the firing of her and her husband from the plantation where she had worked for eighteen years. Her gravesite is located in the Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden. A few hundred yards to the west is the Fannie…
Read MoreIn Modern Times Paul Johnson chronicles the rise of the Soviet terror state. “The arbitrary nature of the arrests was essential to create the climate of fear which, next to the need for labour, was the chief motive for the non-party terror. An OGPU [the Soviet secret police from 1922-34] man admitted to the Manchester Guardian Moscow correspondent that innocent people were arrested: naturally – otherwise no one would be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe for treason.” (Harperrenial, 2001), 274-275 State-sponsored terrorism and mass murder will be Communism’s enduring legacy. With one of my book clubs, I shared my fear that many Americans are forgetting how…
Read MoreTomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the death of Winston Churchill, arguably the greatest leader of the 20th century. This brief video contains footage of his state funeral. In yesterday’s National Review Online, Victor Davis Hanson argues that “the United States has never owed more to a foreign citizen than to Winston Churchill, a monumental presence 50 years after his death.”
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