Dirt on JFK, LBJ, and Nixon

Harvard Crimson Book Review: Morrow probes dirty details of White House occupants’ tactics—and sex lives…

He goes to great length to find similarities among the three main characters. Both Kennedy and Nixon had siblings who died young, for example. JFK and Johnson both had voracious sexual appetites—as Morrow reminds us time and time again. Kennedy said he could not sleep without having had sex. While his wife Jacqueline was delivering their first child stillborn, JFK and a fellow senator were entertaining women on a yacht in the Mediterranean.

Johnson too had many affairs, but he stands out more for his trademark crudeness. “[H]e liked to discomfit ‘the Harvards’… by forcing them to confer with him while he sat on the toilet, and he was a lifelong exhibitionist who in college had dubbed his penis ‘Jumbo,’” Morrow relates.

Nixon, like Johnson, had a habit for making those around him uncomfortable. While drinking cocktails with the owners of the Los Angeles Times in 1967, Nixon blurted: “I probably shouldn’t tell this…But…Why did the farmer keep a bucket of shit in his living room?”

The punch line: “Because he wanted to keep the flies out of the kitchen!” A shocked silence ensued. The hostess said: “You’re right, Dick, you shouldn’t have told that.”

Lecture Notes: English Colonization

From Free University

Classicism and the American Revolution

The symbols, slogans, ideas and architecture of the Founding Fathers were Classicism and the American Revolution. (History Today)

The French Revolution: Ideas and Ideologies

The philosophe may have laid the egg, but was the bird hatched of a different breed? Maurice Cranston discusses the intellectual origins and development of the French Revolution. (History Today)

You Say You Want a Devolution?

For most of the last century, America’s cultural landscape—its fashion, art, music, design, entertainment—changed dramatically every 20 years or so. But these days, even as technological and scientific leaps have continued to revolutionize life, popular style has been stuck on repeat, consuming the past instead of creating the new.

Women and Politics in Democratic Athens

Susan Cole looks at how, though formally excluded from the political process, Athena’s sisters nevertheless made their mark. (History Today)

Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted

Social media can’t provide what social change has always required. (Gladwell from New Yorker)

Why Renaissance? Why Florence?

Jon Cook identifies the mix of factors that helps explain the Florentine Renaissance. (History Today)

When Edmund Blackadder memorably lamented, ‘Baldrick, to you the Renaissance was just something that happened to other people’, it was probably the citizens of Florence to whom he was referring. For nowhere else were the ingredients that enabled the Renaissance to flourish – a politically-active citizenry, a vigorous humanist movement and abundant wealth – better blended. It is these ingredients, in Italy in general and in Florence in particular, that are the subject of this essay.

What the Hell Just Happened? A Look Back at the Last Eight Years

As we move into the next era of American history, , and on how we — and not just George W. Bush — handled them.

We need to reflect on the bizarre sequence of events we’ve experienced since 2000

Unrest in China – A dangerous year

Economic conditions and social media are making protests more common in China—at a delicate time for the country’s rulers (Economist)

Two Invasions of Afghanistan

‘Monumentally bad diplomacy, worse strategy, chaotic military organisation and inept generalship’ – Invasion of Afghanistan. Penned as Soviet tanks rolled into Kabul in December 1979. (History Today)

The Role Ex-Nazis Played in Early West Germany

After World War II, West Germany rapidly made the transition from murderous dictatorship to model democracy. Or did it? New documents reveal just how many officials from the Nazi regime found new jobs in Bonn. A surprising number were chosen for senior government positions.

The Norman Conquest of the English Language

At first the English withstood the Norman attack of 1066. But soonthey succumbed to the invaders, as did their virile language of record. An article by H.R. Loyn. (History Today)

The City and the Democratic Ideal

François Hartog on how urban living has coincided with the advocacy of popular rulefrom Plato through to Machiavelli, Rousseau and 20th-century sociologists. (History Today)

Stalin and the Communist Party in the 1920s

Did the system spawn a monster – or a monster the system? Norman Pereira re-evaluates the road to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union after the Revolution, and Stalin’s part in it.

Soviet Marxism's Obituary?

Robert Service looks at how Gorbachev’s revolution has left an open agenda for Soviet historians. (History Today)

“Soviet Marxism’s death has officially been certified after recent world-shaking events. Mikhail Gorbachev avoided Marxist-Leninist doctrines in his draft party programme in July. Those who plotted the abortive coup against him in August sought to reverse the trend. As the price for Gorbachev’s return to office, Boris Yeltsin secured his consent to the dissolution of the Communist Party and the disintegration of the USSR as a unitary state.

Pictures of Lenin were removed from the Congress of People’s Deputies in September. Nothing more graphically illustrates the end of a state ideology…

Debates on Marxism are encased in the discussions about Lenin. Polemical thrust is followed by counter-thrust, and the interlinked themes of Lenin, the Soviet past and Marxist ideology have an urgency of interest for the general public which is scarcely conceivable in the West.”

Scots' Referendum Raises a Slew of Legal Issues

With their promise to hold a referendum on independence, Scotland’s politicians have already sparked a lively debate with their English neighbors. Now the issue is prompting questions among their continental ones, too.

During a visit to Brussels this week, Scotland’s deputy first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, argued that Scottish independence, if approved in a referendum expected in 2014, could usher her country smoothly into the European Union as a separate member

Sakhalin: the Japanese Under Soviet Rule

Mariya Sevela gathers oral recollections from the people of Karafuto, a Japanese colony on the island of Sakhalin from 1905 until the arrival of the Soviet army forty years later. (History Today)

Religion and the Communist Party, Render unto Caesar

Although people join the party more for career reasons these days than for ideological ones, it still officially forbids religious belief among its members. In practice, this has for some years been a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. But signs are now growing that the party is about to become tougher on believers within its ranks.

And behind it might be Mr Chang’s notion of Christianity as a Trojan horse.

Historiography: Stalin's Russia

Christopher Read explores the historiography of Russia under Joseph Stalin.

“The atmosphere of emotional involvement and embattled commitment sometimes engendered can lead to lively polemic but does not always produce the best grounded historical analysis.”