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Presidents' Day
Nov. 6th, 2008 05:41 pmTwo articles that made me go hmmm. The first, I don't totally agree with, but as a history girl it got to me anyway. The second made me tear up.
No, I don't know if Obama will live up to all that people are expecting of him. I rather doubt it. And I have no idea what the two men referred to in the articles would've thought of him. But as a history girl, feeling a connection between the past and the present gives me goosebumps. Makes me wonder which events I have witnessed will reverberate down the generations. Makes me wonder if what happened two days ago will be one of them.
***
Lest we forget:
Alabama troopers attack voting rights marchers at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965.
The Election That LBJ Won
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 4, 2008; Page A17
If the polls are right, if it don’t rain and the creek don’t rise, the winner of the presidential election is sure to be...Lyndon Baines Johnson. When he signed the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson knew he was also signing away the South and, with it, much of the white vote elsewhere as well. “We have lost the South for a generation,” he supposedly said back then. For that generation, time’s up.
( Barack Obama is often called a transformational figure, and this election, it then follows, is a transformational one. I beg to quibble. )
Link to the lj with this article
***
Memorial Day
By MATT MENDELSOHN
Published: November 5, 2008
I used to be a photojournalist. And so Tuesday night, as some 200,000 Chicagoans gathered around a brightly lighted stage under the gaze of the world’s news media, I headed to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, ( expecting to find a crowd and some news. )
No, I don't know if Obama will live up to all that people are expecting of him. I rather doubt it. And I have no idea what the two men referred to in the articles would've thought of him. But as a history girl, feeling a connection between the past and the present gives me goosebumps. Makes me wonder which events I have witnessed will reverberate down the generations. Makes me wonder if what happened two days ago will be one of them.
Lest we forget:
Alabama troopers attack voting rights marchers at Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge in March 1965.
The Election That LBJ Won
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 4, 2008; Page A17
If the polls are right, if it don’t rain and the creek don’t rise, the winner of the presidential election is sure to be...Lyndon Baines Johnson. When he signed the epochal Civil Rights Act of 1964, Johnson knew he was also signing away the South and, with it, much of the white vote elsewhere as well. “We have lost the South for a generation,” he supposedly said back then. For that generation, time’s up.
( Barack Obama is often called a transformational figure, and this election, it then follows, is a transformational one. I beg to quibble. )
Link to the lj with this article
Memorial Day
By MATT MENDELSOHN
Published: November 5, 2008
I used to be a photojournalist. And so Tuesday night, as some 200,000 Chicagoans gathered around a brightly lighted stage under the gaze of the world’s news media, I headed to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, ( expecting to find a crowd and some news. )
