Historical and Legal Commentary
The Wages of Mendacity
Fed up with bestselling authors who plagiarizes and just make up facts? Me, too. I let it rip on Huffington Post today. After a day spent struggling with the microfilm readers at the Library of Congress, trying to nail down the facts for my new project, I was stunned to read how Ben Mezrich wrote the book…
Read MoreReconstruction, 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…
Read MoreBook 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…
Read MoreStranger 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…
Read MoreForgetting 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.
Read MoreRiding 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,…
Read MoreWhat to do with the judges?
Just put a piece on Huffington Post on this question, which was prompted (for me), by having two potential impeachments against federal trial judges: Judge Thomas Porteous of New Orleans, who has been under investigation for a long time for a variety of peccadilloes over the years, including bankruptcy fraud and some very shaky dealings…
Read MoreMonster Mao
Mao: The Untold Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Holliday, has a spectacular first sentence: Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader. The book is wicked long (don’t…
Read MoreGovernor Scoundrels, Part II
One impeached-and-removed state governor stands out from the pack for sheer vitality and no-holds-barred assaults on his political adversaries. Governor John Walton of Oklahoma lasted only ten months in office in 1923, but they were action-packed. Sticking with the highlights: A “radical” Democrat with Socialist allies, Walton made his inauguration a people’s celerbration. More than…
Read MoreThe President Game
The historians participating in C-Span’s survey for ranking the presidents revealed one thing: even the pros are a little shaky about what to make of some of our nation’s leaders. Oh, the 64 historians who took part were pretty solid on the good presidents (Lincoln, Washington, the Roosevelt boys), and the rotten ones (Buchanan, Andrew…
Read More