Academic historians have a penchant for tagging simple things with fancy titles. One example is interviewing or seeking out recollections by participants in events. Right after World War I such journalist biographers as Ray Stannard on Woodrow Wils [...]
A few words are in order about this essay's title. It is pilfered from that great American man of letters, Edmund Wilson, who used it for his collection of American writing, The Shock of Recognition.
About presidential reputations, as about much else in American life, Finley Peter Dunne's Irish bartender "Mr. Do oley," said it best. "Have y'ivir wondered, Hinnissy," the philosopher-barkeep asked his straight man, "why Americans build their tri [...]
The most casual visitor to Sagamore Hill, Theodore Roosevelt's home at Oyster Bay, cannot fail to grasp two of the owner's greatest interests. The most immediately striking impression of the interior of the house comes from the plethora of animal [...]
AS the election of 1976 showed, the South has finally trod the road to reunion. Jimmy Carter's election gained added significance by coming one hundred years after the end of Reconstruction. It has taken a century since the nation was supposedly res [...]
One day in July 1955 the ground around the town of Messines, Belgium, trembled from an underground shock. It was not an earthquake. It was the explosion of a cache of munitions buried nearly 40 years before. For eleven months, during 1916 and 1917, [...]
No academic career in American history, possibly in all history, has attracted as much attention as Woodrow Wilson's. Two reasons account for such extensive interest. First, during 25 years as a professor, writer about politics and history, and pres [...]
0 Comments