Posted under American history & Dolls & European history & Gender & art & book reviews & jobs & local news & unhappy endings & weirdness & women's history
Howdy! Hellsapoppin’ here. While some of you in the East may be shoveling yet more snow today, we in the West have got more than a few stalls to muck out today, and a lot of fences to mend. Here are some items for your delectation and consideration:
- National Politics: What’s up with our Transformational President? Well, not his approval numbers, that’s for sure. Jonathan Last offers an analysis that says it’s the Clinton primary voters who jumped off the bandwagon first, and looks at the recent election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts from that perspective. Michael Lind writes that the Republicans have nothin’–but that won’t stop them from winning because of Dem fecklessness, diffidence, and/or incompetence: “Buyer’s remorse is what the voters should feel when they vote for a party that promises a bold reform agenda and then acts between elections as though it were a lobby for the financial industry. But wait — which party are we talking about here?” Meanwhile–there are open rumblings about the incompetence of the Chicago bubble that appears to have been more effective at getting President Obama elected than they are at governing. (H/t RealClearPolitics.)
- Local Politics: Our new U.S. Senator, Michael “Never Won a Single Vote” Bennet is sinking like a stone against Republican front-runner Jane Norton, and even against Weld County D.A. Ken Buck. (OK, so they’re only Rasmussen and DailyKos polls, but wev–that’s all we’ve got.) Gee–who ever would have predicted that it might be a craptastic idea to crown this guy Senator? Meanwhile, a guy who actually ran a few successful campaigns and won a lot of votes is now in the lead to replace Gov. Bill “The Family Guy” Ritter. Go figure! Historiann might be voting Republican for the first time in her life come November–unless Andrew Romanoff wins the D primary, and even then, I might vote Republican anyway. Why should I reward bad behavior by all of the d00dly d00dz who think they run this state? (Of course, we’ll have to see how Norton and Buck play their hands, too.)
- Literature: Leonard Cassuto considers J.D. Salinger’s Bartleby-like retreat from literary celebrity, and predicts Continue Reading »




I’ve been looking for this for the past decade–a copy of Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s The Leopard’s Spots: A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1902). As many of you probably know, it was the first in Dixon’s “Ku Klux Klan” trilogy, an awesomely racist masterwork that was enormously popular with white Americans. The second novel in the trilogy, The Clansmen (1905) became the basis for D. W. Griffith’s movie, The Birth of a Nation (1915). The Leopard’s Spots is Dixon’s retort, fifty years after the fact, to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), only this time Tom isn’t a slave but rather a poor white Southern man whose family is victimized by black men, and Simon Legree isn’t a wicked Southern overseer, but instead is a white liberal who abets the political ambitions of black men during Reconstruction. (The source for the above information, as well as a detailed plot summary, is available at
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Here’s an example of the delusions of the so-called “left,”
It’s Thanksgiving week, so I thought I would reprise my Thanksgiving foods posts from last year. Just in case you haven’t finalized your menu, here’s a retrospective of Thanksgivings past (and in the far distant past):
All this semester, I’ve been meaning to do some food blogging based on my re-reading of M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf (1942), as a response to our current Great Depression, but frankly, I’ve been a little flummoxed. (How to Cook a Wolf was written as a guide to surviving rationing and fuel shortages in the U.S. during World War II, but I thought it might contain some useful tips for economizing more generally.) I must report reluctantly 
Well, I loved them in spite of the stuttering insanity that gripped the mainstream media. This little reminder is courtesy of