As some of you know, more and more of my commentary now appears on Facebook rather than on this blog. If you’re not averse to joining Facebook, you can catch it there; I encourage you to do so, as the conversations can be quite lively and good, involving lots of different folks. I’m maxed out on friends, but you can follow me. But since a lot of readers don’t want to join Facebook, I’m going to try to make it a regular feature—monthly or semi-monthly—to catch you up to speed on what I’ve been saying there. I’m going to collect various Facebook posts and post them here as a kind of regular journal or diary. Some will be out of date […]

Sanford Ungar, an author and former president of Goucher College (might he also be the historian whose articles on the FBI or the CIA I read for my dissertation many moons ago?), has an oped in the Washington Post, criticizing the recent efforts to remove Wilson’s name from Princeton, take Jackson off the $20 bill, and so on. There isn’t anything new in the piece (Wilson was complicated, Jackson did some good things, etc.) But this last paragraph caught my eye: What is at stake, in the end, is an understanding of our own history. We certainly must confront the reality that many of our greatest public figures did not always live up to American ideals. But wiping out the names, Soviet-style, […]