"They Recognized That He Was One-Eighth Indian, but He Had Served the Interests of White People for a Long, Long Time"

"'The one thing that might have lightened the persecution of Curtis was that he was half white,' Brooks says. 'He's light-complected, he's not dark-skinned like a lot of Kanza. His personality wins people over—unfortunately, racists can like a person of color and still be a racist, and I think that's kind of what happened with Charlie. He was just a popular kid.'" 

Livia Gershon at Smithsonian discusses Charles Curtis, the first Native American to become Vice President of the United States.

The Great Settlement

"For years, people in and around Arkansas City have found artifacts—arrowheads, weapons and cooking utensils. But a translation done in 2013 by the University of California, Berkeley of the Onate expedition provided more details that Blakeslee was able to use to match geographical details with archaeological evidence.
"He began searching the area.
"What he found in Arkansas City, he believes, may rewrite American history."

Beccy Tanner at The Wichita Eagle discusses the newly discovered lost city of Etzanoa in southern Kansas.

Kochs Are It

"Although Schulman leaves out no confirmable damning detail, especially about Koch Industries’ deadly indifference to environmental and safety matters, he grants Charles and David two key concessions: They have sincere political views that go beyond being just a cover for their companies’ interest in lower taxes and fewer regulations, and many of their political activities have been right out in the open, rather than lurking in the shadows. He seems to be almost in awe of Charles, the most mysterious of the brothers, who runs Koch Industries by a system he devised called Market-Based Management. Summarizing, but not dissenting from, the views of Charles’s employees, Schulman calls him 'a near-mythic figure, a man of preternatural intellect and economic prowess,' adding: 'He is unquestionably powerful, but unfailingly humble; elusive, but uncomplicated; cosmopolitan, yet thoroughly Kansan.' It’s noteworthy, Schulman argues, that for decades the Koch family was definitely not welcome in the Republican Party. That they came to stand for Republicanism, at least in the minds of liberals, in 2010 and 2012 is testament to their persistence, to the weakening of the traditional party structures and to their success in making libertarianism a mainstream rather than a fringe ideology."


In The New York Times, Nicholas Lemann reviews Daniel Schulman's Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.

"Class Animus Was—Is—Central to Who They Are and How They Think about the World"

"Maybe I concealed it too well, but this critique of the Democrats was supposed to have been one of the book’s big takeaway points. It was fun to mock the culture-war fantasies of the right but in doing so I also meant to challenge Clintonism. Yes, it had worked wonders in fundraising terms, but in forswearing the economic liberalism that appealed to working-class voters, it brought them electoral disaster. Again, the proof was all around us, in all the embarrassing defeats of those years, not to mention the needless capitulations like Al Gore’s in 2000. The bland centrist style that Democrats held so dear was political poison. To beat the right, I argued, they needed to move left.
"Today this sounds like advising them to dig a tunnel to Tasmania with their bare hands. It sounds preposterous. Not because the problems I wrote about in 'Kansas' have been solved—deindustrialization still defines the rust belt, depopulation is still clearing out the Great Plains, inequality grows worse and worse every year—but because every Democrat knows that the way you deal with a growing right is to make friends with Big Finance and do your part to fill the Big Prison. Left populism might sound nice, but everyone in D.C. knows it can never be a practical solution to any electoral problem."


Thomas Frank in Salon looks back at What's the Matter with Kansas? ten years later.

"I Would Exterminate"

"Although we think of the Civil War as fought by armies, the historian Daniel E. Sutherland has recently reminded us that it was also marked by extensive guerrilla warfare that spread throughout the Confederacy and into Northern border areas. Such fighting occurred first and most virulently in Missouri. Another historian, Matthew C. Hulbert, calls the guerrilla war in Missouri 'hyper-violent,' making it a 'uniquely different wartime experience' from that of ordinary soldiers. Even the name given to the guerrillas, 'bushwhackers,' carried connotations of a different kind of fighting—attacks from ambush. Indeed, Hulbert argues that Quantrill’s biographer 'concocted' the exchange between his subject and Seddon in part 'to legitimize the brutality' of the Missouri guerrillas."

Nicole Etcheson in The New York Times discusses Confederate William Clarke Quantrill.

"The Basic Bargain that Made This Country Great Has Eroded"

"This is the defining issue of our time. This is a make or break moment for the middle class, and all those who are fighting to get into the middle class. At stake is whether this will be a country where working people can earn enough to raise a family, build a modest savings, own a home, and secure their retirement.
"Now, in the midst of this debate, there are some who seem to be suffering from a kind of collective amnesia. After all that’s happened, after the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to return to the same practices that got us into this mess. In fact, they want to go back to the same policies that have stacked the deck against middle-class Americans for too many years. Their philosophy is simple: we are better off when everyone is left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.
"Well, I’m here to say they are wrong."

The Washington Post publishes President Obama's speech on the middle class, given in the same town where Theodore Roosevelt gave his New Nationalism address in 1910.

Ben Soskis and Timothy Noah react in The New Republic.

As does Robert Reich in Salon.

And John Nichols and Ari Berman in The Nation.