Your Favorite Blockhead!

One of American’s most preeminent Revolutionary historians, Dr. Gordon S. Wood, insists that historical explanation is “only possible because we today have different perspectives from those of the historical participants we are writing about. Most new historical investigations begin with an attempt to understand the historical circumstances that lie behind a present-day problem or situation. It is not surprising that our best recent work on the origins and nature of slavery coincided with the civil rights movement of the 1960s…This is as it should be: the problems and issues of the present should be the stimulus for our forays into the past.” [1] Appropriately, Pulitzer Prize winning Diane McWhorter gives us this definition of segregation, especially in the context of Jim Crow thinking: “a civilization more peculiar than slavery, from which it had mutated”. The early sixties were dominated by Kennedy, Khrushchev, and, of course, Dr. King – and that again was revealed during the s...