Reconstruction, Andrew Johnson and the South

In the last several weeks, I have talked about my book, Impeached, before several groups in the South:  Altanta, Lexington (KY), Nashville, Memphis. I was somewhat anxious about these appearances.  After all, The book (and my talks) are highly critical of Southern policies towards the freed slaves.immediately after the Civil War. I also take a…

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The French Revolution

No, not the decade-long upheaval in Europe that veered between liberty and riot.  The novel set in San Francisco by Matt Stewart, which is being released on Twitter RIGHT NOW, as part of a great new experiment in social media.    The media has had a field day with this story, including the Wall Street Journal…

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Aaron Burr on Writers

In researching my current project on the Aaron Burr Conspiracy of 1805-07, I found the following declaration by Mr. Burr, in a letter to his daughter. Of all races of animals, authors are the vainest, but the sensorium of vanity is in their offspring.  No eulogies of their works can be too gross or too…

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Book TV, Saturday, July 11

On Saturday, July 11, at 1 p.m., C-SPAN’s Book TV will air a panel discussion on the Civil War that I participated in last month at the Printers Row Book Festival in Chicago.  I was talkiing, naturally enough, about Impeached.  The other panelists were Tom Campbell, who has done an interesting book about abolitionists in…

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Stranger than Fiction

I caught a remarkable movie last night on Turner Classic Movies:  “The Baron of Arizona.”  It tells the tale of James Addison Reavis, a swindler in the class of Bernie Madoff.  In the late nineteenth century, Reavis claimed much of the state of Arizona under a bogus Spanish land grant.  Several points in the story…

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C-SPAN 3 — Keep an eye on it!

Totally by accident, I discovered that C-SPAN 3 showed at 8 this evening the tape of my appearance before the National Constitution Center last month, concerning my book, Impeached: The Trial of President Andrew Johnson and the Fight for Lincoln’s Legacy.  C-SPAN 3 does not seem to post much of a schedule ahead of time,…

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Torturing impeachment

I weighed in on whether Judge Jay Bybee of Nevada should be impeached for his authorship of the torture memoranda, and have unleashed some serious anger.  What do you think?

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Bankers Dance the Federalism Tango

A bank investigation in New York has been mired in a dispute over federalism — the constitutional doctrine Americans invented but use only when convenient — all the way to the Supreme Court argument on Tuesday.  My lament for federalism in Huffington Post.

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Forgetting History, California Style

Sure, he was scrawny and not real good-looking, but Thomas Starr King was a giant in California in the turbulent 1860s.  And he’s about to be thrown out of the U.S. Capitol — my objection is at Huffington Post.

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Riding Two Horses at Once

It’s fairly sweet to have my book mentioned in a review of someone else’s book — even if I’m not entirely sure what to think of the description of The Summer of 1787 as a “novelistic narrative.  ” It happened in this morning’s NYT Book Review, and even in the second paragraph of the review,…

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