February 18, 2011
Forced at gunpoint this weekend to clean out a lot of old paper files in anticipation of some home improvements, I ran across some articles and obituaries I had saved following the death, a little more than five and a half years ago, of the late, great Ann Richards, former governor of Texas.
Read on.
1 comment:
Many people too often tend to idealize their OWN past, and are often indirectly encouraged by their family elders to do this. It is not hard to see how most of these people can even MORE easily idealize a historical past... ESPECIALLY when there are politicos who can crassly manipulate that sentiment to seemingly support their present-day agenda.
One easy-to-read book that I found a VERY effective antidote to this Pollyana-ish view of US history is Otto Bettmann's "The Good Old Days--They Were Terrible!", where he contrasts a lot of our poignant US myths about the bygone days with the often severe realities, in a brief but effective manner, nicely supplemented with newspaper drawings/photos from the period.
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