America

John Swenson on Treme

By Michelle Rafferty

How real is the HBO series Treme? Here John Swenson reflects on what it was like watching the first season as a resident of New Orleans (he has yet to comment on the second, which premiered last night), as well as what the culture of the city means to its people. As a writer for OffBeat Swenson has written about the musicians returning to NOLA after Katrina, and in his forthcoming book New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival of New Orleans he talks about their crusade to save the endangered city. Swenson himself suggested the song in the video,”Dogs Chase Cats,” from Andy J. Forest’s NOtown Story (2010).

Studying the Civil War through the American National Biography

By Mark C. Carnes
General Editor, ANB

The 150th anniversary of the Civil War will be commemorated in the usual ways. But a truly unique approach is provided by the online—and thus searchable—version of the American National Biography, a 27-million word collection of biographical essays on some 18,731 deceased Americans who played a significant role in the nation’s past.

What might be a constructive vision for the US?

By Ervin Staub

In difficult times like today, people need a vision or ideology that gives them hope for the future. Unfortunately, groups often adopt destructive visions, which identify other groups as enemies who supposedly stand in the way of creating a better future. A constructive, shared vision, which joins groups, reduces the chance of hostility and violence in a society.

A serious failure of the Obama administration has been not to offer, and help people embrace, such a vision. Policies by themselves, such as health care and limited regulation of

Conducting interviews with undocumented workers?

By John A. Neuenschwander

In a recent posting on Oral History listserv a submitter indicated that she was about to begin an oral history project with undocumented workers and wished to put some safeguards in place to prevent unauthorized access. To protect the identities of the narrators several respondents suggested that pseudonyms should be created for each interviewee. One of these respondents recommended that the document containing the pseudonym/real identity matchup be transmitted for safekeeping to a location abroad. Another responder indicated that in addition to the use of pseudonyms the transcripts of the interviews should be stripped of all identifying information and the recordings

Alternative Media – Episode 14 – The Oxford Comment

Are we living in the “anti-60s”? This episode compares the counterculture movement to the blogosphere and pop music today….Bieber vs. Beatles! Hippies vs. Hipsters! Let the showdown begin.

Happy birthday OK: the world’s most-popular word turns 172

Tweet By Dennis Baron By rights, OK should not have become the world’s most popular word. It was first used as a joke in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, a shortening of the phrase “oll korrect,” itself an incorrect spelling of “all correct.” The joke should have run its course, and OK […]

Will John Edwards be indicted?

By Peter J. Henning

The criminal investigation of former Senator and presidential candidate John Edwards for secretly funneling money to his ex-lover Rielle Hunter is moving toward a conclusion, and there is a good chance he will be indicted if federal prosecutors can link the payments to his campaign committee or find that contributors were deceived about the purpose of the donations.

Voicemails released by North Carolina television station WTVD show Edwards’ connection to keeping his affair with Ms. Hunter secret.

Is God woman’s greatest nemesis? (Part 2)

In the second part of my conversation with David Sehat, author of The Myth of American Religious Freedom, we discuss the influence of the moral establishment today – on women as well as the gay community. Read on to find out why evangelical Christian families like to keep “sexy” in the family (i.e. the Sarah Palin effect)! For the back-story, go to Part 1.

Is God woman’s greatest nemesis? (Part 1)

God vs. Woman. One of the world’s longest rivalries and something I wanted to learn a little bit more about this Women’s History Month. So I spoke with author David Sehat, who discusses the influence of the moral establishment on the women’s rights movement in his new book The Myth of American Religious Freedom. See g-chat conversation below!

Happy Birthday, James Madison!

Today would be the 260th birthday of the 4th American president, James Madison. Long honored as the “Father of the Constitution” for his role at the Federal Convention of 1787, Madison is also regarded as the most thoughtful and creative constitutional theorist of his generation. This reputation owes much to his celebrated contributions to The Federalist, the set of essays that he wrote with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay in support of the Constitution. Two of these essays, the 10th and 51st, are widely viewed as paradigmatic statements of the general theory of the Constitution.

The mind works in mysterious ways: unconscious race bias & Obama

By Gregory S. Parks & Matthew W. Hughey

On Tuesday, January 25, 2010, Arab television network Alhurra interviewed Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA). During the interview, Congressman Moran stated that Republicans made big gains this past November because “a lot of people in this country . . . don’t want to be governed by an African American.” To some, these statements were not only controversial, but false. This is because we live in a supposedly post-racial America since

Harlan County – Episode 13 – The Oxford Comment

This week the IFC is playing Barbara Kopple’s Oscar winning film Harlan County USA, so we thought it would be a good time to share an interview with Alessandro Portelli, the oral historian who spent 25 years gathering the stories of the Appalachian community subject in Kopple’s film. The people of Harlan are mostly known for their history of intense labor battles.

The Constitution in 2020: the Caesars or the Tudors?

By Adrian Vermeule

A trope of tyrannophobic political discourse compares the American presidency with the government of the Caesars. T.B. Macaulay addressed a comparison between the Caesars and the Tudor monarchs (Henry VII, his son, and his grandchildren) in terms both withering and illuminating:
It has been said … that the Tudors were as absolute as the Caesars. Never was a parallel so unfortunate. The Caesars ruled despotically, by means of a great standing army, under the decent

Smoking Typewriters and the New Left rebellion

Following the lead of papers like the Los Angeles Free Press, the East Village Other, and the Berkeley Barb, young Americans in the 1960s launched hundreds of mimeographed pamphlets and flyers, small press magazines, and underground newspapers. New, cheaper printing technologies democratized the publishing process and by the decade’s end the combined circulation of underground papers stretched into the millions. Though not technically illegal, these papers were often genuinely subversive, and many of those who produced and sold them-on street-corners, at poetry readings, gallery openings, and coffeehouses-became targets of

Patterns in Presidential Politics

By Elvin Lim

As the race for the Republican nomination warms up, it is too early to tell who would head the party’s ticket next Fall. But there is more to understanding politics than predicting the horse races, and for those ready to look, there are already patterns emerging from the available field of potential candidates.

First, the next Republican nominee is not likely to come from the other end of Pennsylvania avenue. With the announcement of Senator John Thune (SD) that he would not be running, there are no more

International Women’s Day: Charlotte Perkins Gilman

For me, one of the most interesting lines of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper” appears near the very beginning of the story. The words are an aside, a nervous excuse—and the only part of this rambling, uncomfortable tale to be quartered off by parentheses: “John is a physician,” the narrator writes furtively, “and perhaps—(I would not say it to a living soul, of course, but this is dead paper and a great relief to my mind—) perhaps that is one reason I do not get well faster.”