March Against Fear

James Meredith generally doesn't get much attention beyond being the first black man admitted to the University of Mississippi in October, 1962. This didn't come without a lot of grandstanding on Governor Barnett's part, denying him admission a month earlier. But, the state was forced to drop its objections, and Meredith was begrudgingly accepted into the university. As you can see, Ole Miss still hasn't exercised its demons.

A young Meredith had much to fear, but he seemed little afraid, having previously defied state laws by registering to vote. In June 6, he organized a March Against Fear in rural Mississippi, encouraging blacks to register to vote. Meredith was met with a shotgun blast just South of Hernando, Mississippi, and the march temporarily came to an end. With reports of the shooting quickly circulating in the press, members of CORE and SNCC mobilized persons and resumed the march.

Stokley Charmichael, who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, wasn't afraid of confrontation, and issued a bold new call for "Black Power" which had a jarring impact on the American public. Not surprisingly, this led to more violent and ugly confrontations along the route, while also giving the Civil Rights movement a new voice in Charmichael.

Aram Goudsouzian tells the story from its point of origin, to the fatal shooting in Memphis that left Martin Luther King, Jr. dead, and beyond, in his well-received new book, Down to the Crossroads. He had the opportunity to interview James Meredith and many others, piecing together what is essentially a first-person narrative of events, which remains vivid in many persons' minds.

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Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...

The People Debate the Constitution

As Pauline Maier describes in Ratification , there was no easy road in getting the Constitution ratified. After 10 years of living together as a loosely knit confederation, a few forward thinking men decided that the Articles of Confederation no longer worked and it was time to forge a Constitution. Washington would not go until he could be assured something would come of the convention and that there would be an august body of gentlemen to carry the changes through. But, ultimately Maier describes it was the people who would determine the fate of the new Constitution. This is a reading group for Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution 1787-1788 . The book has been well received by fellow historians like Jack Rakove , among others. Maier has drawn from a wealth of research piecing together a story that tells the arduous battle in getting the Constitution ratified. A battle no less significant than that Americans fought for independence.

Dispatches from Vilnius

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