Scott Boehmer

Category: History

  • Those Who Remember Dictatorship

    The events in South Korea, and this trip to Portugal, has me more convinced than ever that the United States is an innocent teenager when it comes to our development as a nation, and our tendency to let the market choose our politics and our economic policy for us is exactly what millions of citizens in Portugal, South Korea, Colombia, Turkey, Uganda, and dozens of other nations would warn us about. And for me the most shocking part was that as a journalist of 25 years, I know so little about their experiences.

    Jacob Ward

    Those Who Remember Dictatorship (The Rip Current)

  • Thanksgiving and the Civil War

    In 1841 a book that reprinted the early diaries and letters from the Plymouth colony recovered the story of that three-day celebration in which ninety Indigenous Americans and the English settlers shared fowl and deer. This story of peace and goodwill among men who by the 1840s were more often enemies than not inspired Sarah Josepha Hale, who edited the popular women’s magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book, to think that a national celebration could ease similar tensions building between the slave-holding South and the free North. She lobbied for legislation to establish a day of national thanksgiving.

    And then, on April 12, 1861, southern soldiers fired on Fort Sumter, a federal fort in Charleston Harbor, and the meaning of a holiday for giving thanks changed.

    Heather Cox Richardson

    November 27, 2024 (Letters from an American)