If you don’t have an agreed-upon national narrative, you cannot accomplish great things in a democracy. One indication of America’s current confusion and disillusionment is that we no longer agree on our national identity, our origin story or our mission. We can chart how we got to this abyss, but it is much harder to imagine how we can lift …
Dr. Edward Watts is a professor of history at the University of California at San Diego. He earned his Ph.D. from Yale and is the author of five books, most recently, “Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny.” The following interview has been edited for clarity and length. Governing: We’re suddenly in this situation where the wear and tear on …
Richard Nixon said it was the “greatest week in the history of the world since the creation.” My parents and my sister and I sat in our den (there were dens then) and watched the entire thing in grainy flickering black and white on our big console color TV. I took a hundred 35mm black-and-white photos of the television screen. …
When I heard a few weeks ago that a new biography of Meriwether Lewis has been published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, I immediately ordered it. It’s called “Bitterroot: The Life and Death of Meriwether Lewis,” and the author is a woman named Patricia Stroud, whom I had never heard of until now. In a sense, the title gives …
Regular readers of this blog (both of you, as my friend, Dan Ulmer, likes to say in his weekly newspaper column, poking fun at himself to remind him not to take himself too seriously — I’m with Dan) will notice that I haven’t been very active here lately. That’s not because there hasn’t been much going on to write about. …
My daughter and I made a date this week to visit my elderly Aunt Junette Henke at Edgewood Vista Assisted Living in Bismarck. I am blessed with many very strong and independent women in my life, and my Aunt Junette stands in front of that line. She is my godmother, my mother’s older sister, and like me, the middle child. …
Alexandria, Va., photographer Jeff Olson recently made his first visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture, a Smithsonian Institution museum established in December 2003. The museum’s building was designed by Davud Adjaye and is on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. The museum has about 37,000 objects in its collection related to such subjects as community, family, the visual and performing arts, religion, …
I’m feeling nostalgic as I write this, a mood brought on by snow falling outside my window. Reminds me of North Dakota. Friends may previously have seen this image, on Facebook or even in person. In 2010, the University of Washington, which owns the original, scanned and printed a copy for display in a historical exhibit I curated, “When the …
Not only is Nick Offerman one of my favorite actors and television talk show guests. Now, it turns out he has become one of my favorite humorists. Some people are just good at everything. (Oh, how I hate people who are good at everything.) His latest book, “Gumption: Relighting the Torch of Freedom with America’s Gutsiest Troublemakers,” is part of my …