History Archive

Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents - Dwight Garner, the brilliant and trustworthy New York Times book critic, is not known to gush, and yet this is the first paragraph of a recent review: “’Caste’ is an

Elizabeth and Hazel: Two Women of Little Rock - Elizabeth Eckford and Hazel Bryan were yoked together in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957, when 15-year-old Elizabeth was one of nine African American students trying to integrate a high school

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Super Power - GUEST BUTLER LYNNE REYNOLDS has led an artistic double-life: she writes and makes art. Educated at Rhode Island School of Design and California College of the Arts, she holds a

George Orwell: The Orwell Reader - SUPPORTING BUTLER: Since the start of 2023, Amazon seems to have gone on a quiet campaign to rid itself of small sites that, collectively, generate revenue worth noticing — and

Great Houses, Modern Aristocrats - When we tell our family stories, most of us can’t go back more than three or four generations before we’re talking about an ancestor who crossed an ocean. Not so

Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment - I tried hard to duck this one. But my friend can be annoyingly persistent, and it was a book of photographs taken by Dorothea Lange, whose pictures of the 1930s define

Is Paris Burning? - GUEST BUTLER PIMM FOX, the creator and news anchor of "Taking Stock," a program of business interviews and financial news analysis broadcast daily on Bloomberg TV and radio, is currently

John F. Kennedy: A Nation of Immigrants - “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.” - Oscar Handlin, in “The Uprooted," winner of a

Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed: The Story of the Village of Le Chambon and How Goodness Happened There - Two French policemen, acting on the orders of their Nazi masters, came to the little village of Le Chambon on a February evening in 1943. Their purpose: arrest the minister,

Little Caesars: How Wall Street & Big Business Conspired to Overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and Install a Fascist Dictator — and the Patriot Who Stopped Them - Rachel Maddow has a new book, Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism, and a podcast that dissects historical efforts to bring Fascism to America. Along the way, she synopsizes the

MOSAIC: War Monument Mystery - War is, by definition, an indictment of a flaw in the character of nations and human intelligence, a tragedy, a defeat no matter who wins. Of America’s post-World War II

Obama: An Intimate Portrait - This isn’t fair. For sanity’s sake, you try not to think about this guy. For sanity’s sake, if you're like everybody I know and pretty much everybody you know, you

On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century - In November of 2016, Timothy Snyder's piece, Him: his election that November came as a surprise, read like a surprise. It sounded like recent history. The rallies. The racism.

Questions: How did we get here? What next? Clues: 12 books, 1 movie. - America woke up on November 9th to surprise and unease. How did this unlikely candidate win the election? When did the country become so divided? What can we do about

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Last Interview, and Other Conversations - Her father came to America from Russia when he was 13. He went to night school to learn English. He never had any formal education except Hebrew school in any

See you in September? Yes, but I leave these for you - SHOPPING ON AMAZON: The business model of this site is Amazon. You start here, buy something there, Butler gets a commission. And not just on the item reviewed. Anything you

The 1964 Civil Rights Murders: Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney - On June 21, 1964, Andrew Goodman, Mickey Schwerner and James Chaney were murdered in Mississippi. Other civil rights workers were killed in the 1960s, but this was different. Two of

The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America’s Soldiers - JULY, 2022 UPDATE : In June, the House passed the PACT Act, which would finally give VA coverage to veterans whose illness was caused by toxic exposures suffered in

The Confidence Men: How Two Prisoners of War Engineered the Most Remarkable Escape in History - Margalit Fox --- you know her byline because, over two decades, she wrote 1,400 memorable obituaries for The New York Times --- loves great stories that have been overlooked. A

The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote - GUEST BUTLER JILL SWITZER last reviewed a biography of Sandra Day O’Connor/. She has been a member of the State Bar of California for 40 years and now is a