Over the weekend I watched a 2023 C-SPAN piece on Jimmy Carter’s relationship with the First Baptist Church in Washington D.C. The Carters arrived at First Baptist on the Sunday after his inauguration and immediately applied for membership. The C-SPAN […]
Washington D.C.
The Washington D.C. Archdiocese to Sean Feucht: Please get off our lawn
Here is MAGA worship leader Sean Feucht: Here Ruth Graham at The New York Times “Trump Transition” blog: Sean Feucht, a prominent conservative Christian activist with ties to President-elect Donald J. Trump, announced this week that he would headline a […]
January 6, 2021: The Shakespeare angle
Today at The Washington Post, Meena Venkataramanan has a piece on a letter the January 6th “Stop the Steal” protesters sent to the Folger Shakespeare Library. This is wild. Here is a taste: While insurrectionists were plotting to storm the […]
Ann Sprigg’s boarding house and the end of slavery
Here is historian Bennett Parten at Zocalo Public Square: In the early 1840s, where the steps of the Library of Congress now stand, a group of American abolitionists gathered in a modest boardinghouse to plot the destruction of slavery. The […]
Mark Meadows and his MAGA cronies are buying-up property near the U.S. Capitol
I guess a lot of Trump followers like living in “The Swamp.” Here is Paul Schwartzman at The Washington Post: At first glance, the flurry of real estate sales two blocks east of the U.S. Capitol appeared unremarkable in a […]
When Congress got rid of a George Washington statue…in 1908
Whatever happened to that statue of George Washington in a toga? Here is Ronald Shafer at The Washington Post: Slowly, some of the U.S. Capitol’s many statues and other artworks honoring enslavers have been slated for removal, most recently a bust of Roger […]
The National Prayer Breakfast is next week. “The Family” is not running it.
Some of you may remember Jeffrey Sharlet’s The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Most people learned about “The Family” (or The Fellowship) from the 2019 Netflix series based on the book. I reviewed the Netflix […]
How climate change is threatening the National Museum of American History
Some of the strongest critics of climate change policy are also some of the people most concerned about how our kids learn American history. Here is Chrisopher Flavelle at The New York Times: Nearly two million irreplaceable artifacts that tell […]