“It’s just a phase”
“It’s just a phase.” That was what my German-born Jewish great grandmother Henrietta Giballe Previn is said to have remarked on the rise of Adolph Hitler to power in the…
Read MoreRighting a Wrong in Harpers Ferry
In recent long-delayed acknowledgement of our own dark past, many Confederate monuments have been taken down throughout the South and in border states. Though there are some resisters (“fine people…
Read MoreHappy 100th Birthday, President Carter!
Peanut farmer James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, Jr., our 39th commander in chief often mocked as president but revered as ex-president, entered hospice in February 2023 and I began writing this…
Read More“Ain’t No Back to a Merry Go-Round”
“Ain’t No Back to a Merry-Go-Round,” from a poem by Langston Hughes, is a new documentary that tells the all-but-forgotten story of the fight 65 years ago to desegregate Glen…
Read MoreThe shrinking local news landscape… and much more!
For many of my former Washington Post colleagues and, apparently, for many DC-area readers, the reductions in local coverage and locally-based correspondents have been more than disheartening. The newspaper we…
Read MoreThe GOP convention convulses…in 1976!
It was not yet morning in America. Nor was it mourning in America. That had already happened, in 1963 (JFK), and in 1968 (MLK, RFK). Four years after Richard Nixon…
Read MoreEyewitness to History: 1964 Civil Rights Act signed 60 years ago today. I was there.
It was a time of relative comity, when Senate Republicans joined with the Democratic majority to overcome a filibuster and pass the most significant civil rights legislation in a century. …
Read MoreJuneteenth: A Time to Read and Reflect
Juneteenth – June 19th — became a federal holiday in 2021. It marks the date in 1865 when the enslaved people in Texas were officially informed of their freedom 2…
Read MoreD-Day+80. Lest we forget.
For the 80th anniversary of D-Day, I am reposting what I wrote five years ago on the 75th, which itself reprised my coverage of the 50th anniversary for The Washington…
Read MoreWhat about Columbia?
It’s been a rough spring on the Morningside Heights campus, where I spent four years nearly a lifetime ago. Sixty years ago I was fortunate and grateful to graduate from…
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