OVERVIEW
COMMENTARIES
Commentaries
accompany and amplify timelines by giving more information about the specific
subject related to an event. For example, the date in which the Pentagon Papers
were “leaked” or published is in the timeline. A commentary giving more
background and a link to further on-line information is provided so that the
reader can get even more information if they wish.
Commentaries
are sourced from a popular book, journal or magazine or from an on-line
reference. Sometimes, they are excerpts
from the source material in order to
give the reader a “feeling” for what life was like in that era.
A
“Source” page accompanies each timeline and lists the publication, page number
and/or online link.
Here
are some examples of Commentaries included which go beyond a simple description
but give the reader a feeling-based sense of the era.
1860 - 1865
1857 – New York City,
Frederick Douglass Corrects the Record Regarding the Constitution and Slavery. "’We, the people’" – not we, the white people – not
we, the citizens, or the legal voters – not we, the privilege class, and
excluding all other classes, but we, the people; not we the horses and cattle,
but we, the people – the men and women, the human inhabitants of the United
States, do ordain and establish this Constitution, etc.”[1] “Constitutionality and Slavery, Frederick
Douglas Sets The Record Straight,” From “Dred Scott
Decision”, Lapham Quarterly
1861 – The American People Call For Prayer
and Thanksgiving – “ABRAHAM
LINCOLN: In the 1840’s – Sarah Hale (Editor of Godey’s
Lady Book magazine) – through the power
of her spirit and her pen – organized some 29 states and territories to unite
in a common Thanksgiving celebration. From
as far away as Dallas, Texas in 1861 – came reports that people were taking up
Sarah Hale’s dream of uniting all faiths in prayer.”
1862 - Imagine A New Recruit In The Civil
War – At Gettysburg - Lt. Col.
Dave Grossman, “The Civil War soldier was, without a doubt, the
best trained and equipped soldier yet seen on the face of the earth. Then came
the day of combat, the day for which he had been drilled and marched for so
long.” What happened stunned the Generals.
1862 – Battle Of Gettysburg. Lt. Col
Dave Grossman - 27,574 MUSKETS RECOVERED FROM THE
BATTLEFIELD. Ninety percent (24,000)
were loaded. 12,000 were loaded more than once. 6,000 had three to ten loads.
One was loaded twenty three times. Grossman tells why.
1865 - 1885
1870s
- Commercial Food Processing - “The next 30
years, until 1900, saw perhaps the worst malnutrition England had ever known.
Deficiency diseases became widespread in the country as well. It took decades
to understand the connection to the processing of food.”
1886 - 1907
1887
– Rev. Henry Ward Beecher Obituary By Sinclair
Lewis
– “When the
Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) was sued on a charge of adultery with the
wife of his friend Theodore Tilton, the America of 1871 was ecstatically
shocked.”
Schooling In The 1890s – Ursula K, Leguin – “To
look at school books from 1892 or 1910 can be scary; the level of literacy and
general cultural knowledge expected of a 10-year-old was rather awesome. Such
texts, and lists of the novels kids were expected to read a nice girl to the
1960s, leads one to believe that Americans really wanted their children not
only to be able to read, but to do it, and not to fall asleep during it.”
1908 - 1928
1920s
– Walter Lipmann Writing During WWI – “We are not used to a complicated
civilization, we don't know how to behave when personal contact and eternal
authority have disappeared.”
1920s
– Gene Autrey “THE COWBOY CODE” – “Autrey’s
radio program reached millions and implanted the American code of conduct
called “fair play.” This is the kind of thing Aristotle
would have suggested to young Athenian “cowboys” with his admonition, to “Be
Good, Do Good.”
1924 - Thomas
Midgley, Jr. – The Scientist Who Gave Us “SILENT SPRING” And GLOBAL WARMING – “Environmental
historian J. R. McNeill opined that
Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism
in Earth's history",[19] and Bill Bryson remarked that
Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost
uncanny".[20]”
1925
– “William
Jennings Bryant: An Obituary” by H.L. Mencken – (As only Menken could.) “It
has been marked by historians that the late William Jennings Bryan’s last
secular act on this earth was to catch flies? A curious detail and not without
sardonic overtones.”
1929 - 1946
1946 – Ernie Pyle, David
L. Brooks, The Road To Character – “The knowledge of
victory was charged with sorrow and doubt as with joy and gratitude.”
1947 - 1963
1950 -
“What Was It Like?”, Ursula K. Leguin – “My friend at NARAL asked me to tell you what it was
like before Roe V Wade. They asked me
to tell you what it was like to be 20 and pregnant in 1950….”
1951
– W.E.B DuBois - “A great silence has
fallen on the real soul of this nation.” -
“W.E.B DuBois was handcuffed, fingerprinted and
searched for concealed weapons was brought to trial for not registering as a ‘subversive’”.
1951 – “ONE LONELY NIGHT”, by Mickey
Spillaine - Mickey Spillane’s One Lonely Night sold 3 million copies in 1951. In it the hero Mike
Hammer Says: ‘I killed more people
tonight than I have fingers on my hand. I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed
every minute of it... they were Commies, Lee.’
1954
– Top Secret Report to President Eisenhower by General Doolittle On War With
the Soviets – “We must develop effective
espionage and counter-espionage services and must learn to subvert, sabotage
and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated means than those
used against us.”
1962 - “The Obligation To
Endure”, from SILENT SPRING by Rachel Carson – “How
could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method
that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and
death even to their own kind?”
1963 – “Eulogy
For The Young Victims Of The 16TH Street Baptist Church Bombing”,
Martin Luther King, Jr. – “Indeed
this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its
conscience. (Yeah)”
1964 - 1984
1970s – FUNDAMENTALISM: The
Major Trend of Religious Right Activists – “Making
History Right Again”, Anti-Defamation League, “The
New Right was sparked by young conservative strategists dissatisfied with the
array of issues that engaged activist Christians.”
1971 –
The Pentagon Papers – “Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the report was initially charged with conspiracy,
espionage, and theft of government property, but the charges were later
dismissed after prosecutors investigating the Watergate scandal discovered that the staff
members in the Nixon White House had ordered the so-called White House Plumbers to engage in unlawful efforts
to discredit Ellsberg.[5]
1971 –
The State Of Texas is #1 – Molly Ivins – “The state of Texas is Number One among the 50 states in oil
production. It is Number One in gas production, Number One in cattle, and
Number One in cotton. … In 1969, we were Number One in infectious
syphilis, but have since fallen to a mere fourteenth.”
1975
– The Redesign of The Military As Business – “Robert
McNamara reacted to the fall of Vietnam and the loss of the war like any
excellent businessman, he saw that war needed a re-design if war itself. Arms
production has become the leading export business for ‘irregular wars’ which
pop up around the world.”
1975 – PTSD
And Vietnam, Lt. Col. Dave Grossman, “Thus,
the long-term legacy of the Vietnam War upon American society is not just hundreds
of thousands of troubled veterans, it is also hundreds of thousands of troubled
marriages impacting women, children and future generations.”
1980s
Ron and Nancy – “Ron and Nancy.
Let's face it, they were the 80s. Okay, so his mind is mired somewhere in the
dawn of social Darwinism and she is a brittle, shallow woman obsessed with
appearances, but then, it was that kind of decade, wasn't it?”
1984 –
Bophal India, Geographical Reality, “The CEO
of Union Carbide flew in to (Bophal) to sympathize. He was arrested. He was
horrified that the profession of manager could be confused with that of ethical
responsibilities for the actions of the corporation.”
1984 – Iran – Contra, CIA Crack Cocaine Smuggling
- The Reagan administration
hired staff to publicize the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 as part of a
strategic effort to build public and legislative for the war (on drugs). The
media campaign was an extraordinary success. Almost overnight, the media was
saturated with images of black “crack whores,” “crack dealers,” and “crack
babies” - images that seemed to confirm the worst negative racial stereotypes
about impoverished inner-city residents. The media bonanza surrounding the “new
demon drug” helped catapult the War on Drugs to an actual war.
Disinformation Campaigns – “The word disinformation did
not appear in English dictionaries until the late-1980s.[1][2] English use
increased in 1986, after revelations that the Reagan
Administration engaged in disinformation
against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.[9] By 1990 it was
pervasive in U.S. politics;[10] and
by 2001 referred generally to lying and propaganda.[11][12]”
1985 - 2004
1985 – CIA Cocaine Smuggling – “Most people assume the War on
Drugs was launched in response to the crisis caused by crack cocaine in
inner-city neighborhoods. This view holds that the racial disparities in drug
convictions and sentences, as well as the rapid explosion of the prison
population, reflect nothing more than the government’s zealous – but benign – efforts to address rampant drug
crime in poor, minority neighborhoods. This view, while understandable given
the sensational media coverage in the 1980s and 1990s is simply wrong…”
1985 – “Our enemies are internal” – “…drugs, guns, the widening gap
between poor and elite, and lots more competition for jobs.” A student from
Nashville quoted by Gail Sheehey
1987 – Jules
Pfeiffer (b. 1929), “Truth Hurts” – “A description
of one of Pfeiffer’s ‘everyman’ cartoons by Molly Ivins.”
1990 – Context Clues, Angela Y. Davis – “What kind of society is this which creates this
hall of horrors where jail is allowed to
turn to freedom and freedom into jail? This is one of the many
contradictions that you will have to examine.”
1992 – “The
Battle For The Soul Of Our Country” – Pat Buchanan - “I am not here to talk surrender terms,
but to talk about how to fight and win the war for the soul of our country.”
[Multiculturalism is] “…an across the board assault on our Angle-American
heritage!”
1992 – Restore American Greatness Through Moral
Strength – Pat Robertson – Republican Convention Speech – “The campaign before us is not just a
campaign for an office, but for the destiny of America.”
1993 Media
Sensationalism Driven By Profit Motive – “More
colorfully, Nancy E. Bernhard of Harvard Divinity School put it this way in
1993: “With or without the reporter’s intent, such coverage reinforces
mainstream norms about religious and social behavior and creates the impression
that all nontraditional or exotic belief is lecherous, moronic or illegal.”
1994 – The
Republican “Contract With America” – Newt Gingrich – Eight reforms
and 10 bills - “During the crafting of the Contract,
proposals were limited to "60% issues", i.e. legislation
that polling showed garnered 60% support of the American people, intending for
the Contract to avoid promises on controversial and divisive matters like abortion and school prayer.[1][3]”
1995 – Religious
Freedom Under Attack – “French
Parliamentary Commission On Cults and Sects releases a report naming hundreds
of religious groups as purported “dangerous cults.” The list was generated by
former members and anti-cult groups. The list was used for raids by SWAT teams,
harassment and created a public atmosphere of intolerance.”
1995 – The Cult
Of Violence, Vigilantes and Vengeance – Lt. Col. Dave Grossman – [After the
Oklahoma City Bombing] “ if we look into
the mirror provided by the television screen, the reflection we see is one of
the nation regressing from a society of law into a society of violence,
vigilantes, and vengeance."
2000 – Business
Magazine Covers “The New Media
Redefinition Of Heroism” – David L. Brooks – “[Business
executives] are photographed [on magazine covers] looking like mellowing
rock stars, wearing expensive collarless linen shirts or multicolored sweaters
and rag-wool socks under funky expensive sandals.”
[1] From “The Dred Scott Decision". Douglas,
who had escaped to freedom in 1838, delivered this address to the American
Abolition Society; four years later came the first shots of the Civil War. LAMPHAM
QUARTERLY, Volume XI, Number 2, Spring 2018
“Rule Of Law”, pages 44 – 48
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