"It Might Express the Idea That All History Is Revisionist"

"And politics makes memory. So does the formal study and writing of history, of course, but the relationship between the discipline of history and memory—or broadly shared cultural assumptions—is complicated. Conventional wisdom shapes historians, who often reinforce it with their work; on the other hand, many challenge it by marshaling evidence and arguments that, on occasion, change the public mind and seep back into politics. I don't mean, then, that we need a historiography museum, but one that traces the intertwining of the popular imagination and the professional study of history. It would go beyond the question, 'What happened?' to ask 'How did we come to believe that this is what happened?' The answer to the latter can be just as important as to the first."

T. J. Stiles at History News Network calls for a "Museum of the History of American History."

The Legend of Newton Knight

"'When you grow up in the South, you hear all the time about your "heritage," like it's the greatest thing there is,' he says. 'When I hear that word, I think of grits and sweet tea, but mostly I think about slavery and racism, and it pains me. Newt Knight gives me something in my heritage, as a white Southerner, that I can feel proud about. We didn't all go along with it.'"

In anticipation of the new movie Free State of Jones, Richard Grant in Smithsonian visits Jones County, Mississippi.

"All One Thing or All the Other"

"I'm a fifth-generation Southerner, though long expatriated, and I know the wounded indignation with which the folks back home react to any suggestion that the South is no longer—or maybe never was—an entirely separate region. What about our hound dogs, our verandas, our charm, our football worship, our slow-moving 'way of life'? Outsiders who have visited the South, going back to Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted or even further, have usually agreed with the natives about the South's distinctiveness, though they have often seen it as something to condemn, not admire. How can the South be so American if it feels (and smells, and sounds, and looks) so Southern?"

Nicholas Lemann in The New Yorker reviews recent books about the South.

"What Was Wrought by White Supremacy"

"Today, Mississippi is politically polarized along racial lines. Whites are Republicans, blacks are Democrats, and the former controls state politics. Public investment isn't just disdained, it's attacked as racially suspect. 'The Republican Party has never been the food stamp party, or the party of pork until desperation set in with Thad Cochran's re-election bid,' said state Sen. Angela Hill during the Mississippi Senate Republican primary, in reference to Sen. Cochran's outreach to black voters. The state is harshly carceral—jailing more people per capita than almost anywhere in the country, the majority of them black—and has a huge number of all-white private schools while the public school system is largely segregated.
"You can understand all of this in terms of ordinary conservatism—and many people do—but this is a particularly strong conservatism shaped by a particularly brutal racial history. It's a small-government philosophy that has its roots in the pro-slavery thought of John C. Calhoun, emerged as resistance to Reconstruction, resurfaced in the fight against civil rights, and is now mostly ideological, if attenuated—but not separate—from its roots."


Jamelle Bouie in Slate looks at Mississippi.

"A Pivotal Moment That Helped Fracture the Civil Rights Movement’s Tenuous Unity and Spur Black Political Radicalism"

"The black radical politics of the 1960s and subsequent decades had roots long before 1964. But it was amplified by the events of that summer, precisely at the moment when a new generation of young activists and intellectuals like Carmichael were coming into their own, and those events sent them in a direction far beyond the nonviolent political vision outlined by King a year earlier during the March on Washington."


Peniel E. Joseph in The New York Times looks back at Freedom Summer.

I Dream of Free Agency

The Los Angeles Times publishes obits for actor Larry Hagman, boxer Hector "Macho" Camacho, activist Lawrence Guyot, and union leader Marvin Miller.

Hellhound on His Trail

"'If you want to know where he died, where he lived, where he was born, where he was poisoned—any factual information, I'll tell you,' said LaVere, who moved from Glendale, Calif., to Greenwood about 10 years ago after spending more and more time there working on Johnson-related matters. 'But don't ask me about that crap about the crossroad.'"

Randy Johnson in the Los Angeles Times considers Robert Johnson upon the centennial of the bluesman's birth.

Patient Zero

"There is no longer much dispute, however, about the broad outlines of what constitutes a case of autism. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the so-called bible of psychiatry—draws a clear map of symptoms. And to a remarkable degree, these symptoms still align with those of one 'Donald T,' who was first examined at Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, in the 1930s, the same boy who would later amaze a mentalist and become renowned for counting bricks.
"In subsequent years, the scientific literature updated Donald T’s story a few times, a journal entry here or there, but about four decades ago, that narrative petered out. The later chapters in his life remained unwritten, leaving us with no detailed answer to the question Whatever happened to Donald?
"There is an answer. Some of it we turned up in documents long overlooked in the archives of Johns Hopkins. But most of it we found by tracking down and spending time with Donald himself. His full name is Donald Gray Triplett. He’s 77 years old. And he’s still in Forest, Mississippi. Playing golf."

In The Atlantic, John Donvan and Caren Zucker visit "the first person ever diagnosed with autism."

I Never Lost Control

"The main problem with Handy is one of image. Formally trained, he taught music on the college level, and through the blues compositions he astutely copyrighted and published out of an office on Broadway, he became internationally renowned and prosperous. Handy exuded erudition, urbanity, polish and affluence. That statue in the park off Beale Street portrays him well, dressed fastidiously in a double-breasted suit and tie, smiling and looking less like our received version of the Father of the Blues than the Moneyed Out-of-Town Uncle of the Blues. Maybe if he hadn’t been so rich and fey, people like Joni Mitchell would have been familiar with what he played."

In The New York Times, David Hajdu reviews David Robertson's W. C. Handy: The Life and Times of the Man Who Made the Blues.

I Am Talking

"'A lot of people recorded my songs.' says Allison. 'Georgie Fame was the first one. He did some of my material in the early ’60s. After that several of them did it.' From the Bluesbreakers’ mouth-harp assault on 'Parchman Farm,' to the Who’s windmill through 'Young Man Blues,' the list of renditions--also including the Yardbirds, Cactus, Blue Cheer and a whole tribute album by Van Morrison--is staggering. Says Allison: 'I think people should do what they want, because I do the same thing with other people’s songs.'
"Is there a wrong way to cover one of his tunes? 'The only wrong way is to not get the mechanical licenses.'"

Sean O'Connell in Los Angeles City Beat interviews musician Mose Allison.

All in All Is All We Are

"There was a time when this newspaper–and many others across the south--acted with gross neglect by largely ignoring the unfairness of segregated schools, buses, restaurants, washrooms, theaters and other public places.
"We did it through omission, by not recording for our readers many of the most important civil rights activities that happened in our midst, including protests and sit-ins. That was wrong. We should have loudly protested segregation and the efforts to block voter registration of black East Mississippians."

The editors of The Meridian Star in Mississippi apologize for their newspaper's coverage of the Civil Rights Movement.