"There's a Mystical Aura to It"

"'When I was a kid, he was the hero,' said Philbrick. 'Because I had seen "They Died With Their Boots On," heroic portrayal. But then I think I was a freshman in high school and I saw "Little Big Man," in which Custer is the deranged maniac, a caricature almost of a Vietnam-era imperialist.'"

Mo Rocca on CBS Sunday Morning visits Montana to learn about Gen. G. A. Custer, Sitting Bull, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn.

I Will Fight No More Forever

"Joseph never stopped pressing for land in the Wallowa Valley, and up to his death in 1904, the government kept reopening and reconsidering his claims. Joseph became an inspiration to generations of civil rights and human rights activists due his forceful message of universal liberty and equality. 'We only ask an even chance to live as other men live,' he famously said. 'Let me be a free man—free to travel, free to stop, free to work, free to trade where I choose, free to choose my own teachers, free to follow the religion of my fathers, free to think and talk and act for myself—and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.' It's a strikingly modern expression of the rights that all Americans should expect, marking a bridge from the old values of abolition, the Union, and Reconstruction to the causes of a new century. But Joseph was not simply making a plea for citizenship. He was claiming the right to participate in the contentious, if not unending, struggles built into the American way of governing—the right to speak to the state and be heard."

Slate runs an excerpt of Daniel J. Sharfstein's Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War.

"A Continent-Spanning, Gun-Running Network"

"As his end notes demonstrate, all the evidence has been right there under our eyes for centuries, in expedition narratives, ship manifests, military correspondence and the testimonials of Euro-Americans who spent time as captives of American Indian tribes. It just required a prolific synthesizer who saw the big picture—that the gun frontier 'was a creation of Indian savvy and power, not white American Manifest Destiny.'"

Casey Sanchez in the Los Angeles Times reviews David Silverman's Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America.

Some Men Worked while Others Snored

"A second tragedy in the immediate background of the 1892 Columbus celebration took place in New Orleans. There, on March 14, 1891–only 10 weeks after the Wounded Knee Massacre–11 Italians were lynched in prison by a mob led by prominent Louisiana politicians. A trial for the murder of the New Orleans police chief had ended in mistrials for three of the Italians and the acquittal of the others who were brought to trial. Unhappy with the verdict and spurred on by fear of the 'Mafia' (a word that had only recently entered American usage), civic leaders organized an assault on the prison to put the Italians to death. This episode was also troubling to the U.S. Government. These were legally innocent men who had been killed. But Italians were not very popular, and even Theodore Roosevelt was quoted as saying that he thought the New Orleans Italians 'got what they deserved.' A grand jury was summoned, but no one was charged with a crime. President Harrison, who would proclaim the Columbus holiday the following year, was genuinely saddened by the case, and over the objections of some members of congress he paid reparations to the Italian government for the deaths of its citizens."

William J. Connell in The American Scholar defends Columbus Day.

"Too Big to Fit on a Lapel Pin"

"Consider this: The Lakota Sioux offered some of the most fierce resistance to the United States in the 1860s and 1870s, but in the decades that followed, Lakota artists regularly incorporated the design of the U.S. flag into their beadwork, painting and weaving. What those stars and stripes meant to the Lakota artists could vary widely: In their hands, the U.S. flag could be a gesture of their new allegiance, a plea for justice from the U.S., a symbol of the nation for which their young men were now fighting or simply a decorative motif they knew to be popular with collectors. It might have been all of these things at the same time."

In the Los Angeles Times, Michael A. Elliott considers Native-American patriotism on the 132nd anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn.


"If conservatives tend to see patriotism as an inheritance from a glorious past, liberals often see it as the promise of a future that redeems the past. Consider Obama's original answer about the flag pin: 'I won't wear that pin on my chest,' he said last fall. 'Instead, I'm going to try to tell the American people what I believe will make this country great, and hopefully that will be a testimony to my patriotism.' Will make this country great? It wasn't great in the past? It's not great as it is? "The liberal answer is, Not great enough. For liberals, America is less a common culture than a set of ideals about democracy, equality and the rule of law. American history is a chronicle of the distance between those ideals and reality. And American patriotism is the struggle to narrow the gap. Thus, patriotism isn't about honoring and replicating the past; it's about surpassing it."

And Peter Beinart in Time compares liberal and conservative patriotism.