"Give In to Them or They Would Starve the Government to Death"

"The riders were about troops and voting, but at issue was the very structure of American government. President Hayes and Minority leader Garfield recognized that if an extremist faction in Congress could force its will on the country by holding government finances hostage, it would erase the power of the president and destroy the basic structure of the American government’s separation of powers. Even moderate Democrats, who didn’t particularly like the idea of troops enforcing black rights, agreed that the threat was truly revolutionary and menaced the Constitution. If the extremists’ tactics worked, this would be only the first of their demands, and the country would fall, as one Democrat said, under 'the absolute despotism of an irresponsible and unrestrained partisan majority' in Congress."

Heather Cox Richardson in Salon looks back to when Southern Congressmen threatened to shut down the federal government in 1879.

"American History Is Messier and More Complicated than We May Prefer"

"'All nations are places,' she writes in her stylish new collection, 'but they are also acts of imagination. Who has a part in a nation's story, like who can become a citizen and who has a right to vote, isn't foreordained, or even stable. The story's plot, like the nation's borders and the nature of its electorate, is always shifting.'"

In the Los Angeles Times, Julia M. Klein reviews Jill Lepore's The Story of America: Essays on Origins.

"General Garfield Died from Malpractice"

"Had Garfield been left where he lay, he might well have survived; the bullet failed to hit his spine or penetrate any vital organs. Instead, he was given over to the care of doctors, who basically tortured him to death over the next 11 weeks. Two of them repeatedly probed his wound with their unsterilized fingers and instruments before having him carted back to the White House on a hay-and-horsehair mattress.
"There, control of the president was seized by a quack with the incredible name of Dr. Doctor Willard Bliss. Dr. Doctor Bliss insisted on stuffing Garfield with heavy meals and alcohol, which brought on protracted waves of vomiting. He and his assistants went on probing the wound several times a day, causing infections that burrowed enormous tunnels of pus throughout the president’s body."

In The New York Times, Kevin Baker reviews Candice Millard's Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine,and the Murder of a President.