"How Do We Get Rid of You?"

"'A historical perspective is the key to democratic politics, which if denied can bury the real issues and confine news coverage to high-level gossip about the rich and the powerful, reducing us to the role of spectators of our fate, rather than active participants,' he argued. 'The obliteration of the past strengthens the short-term calculations that pass for political thought, and for me the real heroes are those few who try to explain the world in order to help us to understand what we can best do to improve our lot.'"

John Nichols at The Nation marks the one-hundredth anniversary of Tony Benn's birth.

"Historians Find Evidence Of Nation's Founding Lobbyists' Campaign To Influence Constitution"

"Evidence also suggests that the original lobbyists were skilled in dampening opposition to their clients' agendas. Recovered ledgers revealed that an early attempt at universal healthcare—via a welfare clause in Article IV—was voted down after an advocate for the Apothecaries Guild procured front-row duel tickets for the entire Pennsylvania delegation.According to witness accounts of the time, the Constitution's authors were regularly spotted in the colonies' most exclusive taverns, where a different member of the wax or beaver pelt lobbies would cover their exorbitant three-figure tabs and lavish them with exquisite silk garments and spices from beyond the Orient. Preserved woodcuts depict a number of Founding Fathers relaxing on the palm-lined beaches of Hispaniola as they and their families enjoyed luxury accommodations courtesy of the sugarcane industry."

From The Onion.

"Ingersoll Dies Smiling"

"While today’s GOP is associated with public displays of faith, the Republican party of Ingersoll’s day was more likely to be the home of freethinkers, such as the churchless Abraham Lincoln. The American public wasn’t ready for overt atheism in elected or appointed office, but Ingersoll’s talent on the stump made his endorsement valuable. Jacoby persuasively argues that Ingersoll fits into the classical liberal tradition, a thread that remains visible, if controversial, in the fabric of the modern Republican party."

Katherine Mangu-Ward in The Weekly Standard reviews Susan Jacoby's The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought.

"Neither a Man nor a Crowd nor a Nation Can Be Trusted to Act Humanely or to Think Sanely under the Influence of a Great Fear"

"Like Father Coughlin, Billie James Hargis, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, and so many other right wing media crusaders before them, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Laura Ingraham understand that for many religious Americans, 'evil' is not just an adjective but also a noun. When the Puritans first arrived in New England, they believed they were reclaiming a wilderness from Satan. Many traditionalists on the right, whether Christian Millennialists or not, feel much the same way.
"To them, Godless Communism or Secular Humanism isn't the absence of a religious orientation so much as they are Satanic religions in and of themselves, whose acolytes glorify evil, promote the slaughter of innocent, unborn babies, and persecute believing Christians. Blue State America is Rome in the time of Christ. Whether its depravity is manifested in the form of sexual libertinage, income redistribution, spiritual or economic incontinence, blasphemy, women's and gay rights, or the threat of 'race mixing,' anathema and even violence are completely appropriate responses to it."

The Atlantic runs an excerpt of Arthur Goldwag's The New Hate: A History of Fear and Loathing on the Populist Right.

The World's Greatest Englishman

"In the first years of the 19th century political radicals latched onto Paine's attacks on 'Old Corruption' and how they might dismantle the privileged aristocratic rule inherited from the 18th century. These ideas spoke to artisans and small producers and laid the foundations to 19th-century examinations of wealth and its distribution, even if Paine's analysis which attacked the landed aristocrat would later be replaced by an indictment of the capitalist."

David Nash in History Today recalls Thomas Paine on the bicentennial of Paine's death.

Tory, Tory, Tory

"At least one in five Americans is believed to have remained loyal to Britain during the war. They expressed their opinions passively and actively: refusing to forswear allegiance to the king, signing petitions or joining loyalist military regiments—as nearly 20,000 men did—to defend their vision of British America. In retaliation, they faced harassment from their peers, most vividly (if rarely) by tarring and feathering. Some would suffer for their loyalty in open battle; others faced sanctions from state legislatures, which could strip them of their land and possessions, imprison them or formally banish them."

In The New York Times magazine, Maya Jasanoff recalls the experience of Loyalists during the American Revolution.

The Rights of Reason

"As the 19th century progressed, Paine's inspiration resurfaced, and his influence was felt in the movement for reform of parliament in England, and in the agitation against slavery in America. John Brown, ostensibly a Calvinist, had Paine's books in his camp. Abraham Lincoln was a close reader of his work, and used to deploy arguments from The Age of Reason in his disputes with religious sectarians, as well as more general Paineite themes in his campaign to turn a bloody civil war into what he called 'a second American revolution'. The rise of the labour movement and the agitation for women's suffrage saw Paine's example being revived and quoted. When Franklin Roosevelt made his great speech to rally the American people against fascism after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he quoted an entire paragraph from Paine's The Crisis beginning: 'These are the times that try men's souls ...'"

Christopher Hitchens in The Guardian assesses the world's greatest Englishman.