Whereas the Congress of the United States, by virtue of the constitutional authority vested in them, have declared by their act bearing date this day that “by the act of the Republic of Mexico a state of war exists between that Government and the United States:”

Now, therefore, I, James K. Polk, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim the same to all whom it may concern; and I do specially enjoin on all persons holding offices, civil or military, under the authority of the United States that they be vigilant and zealous in discharging the duties respectively incident thereto; and I do, moreover, exhort all the good people of the United States, as they love their country, as they feel the wrongs which have forced on them the last resort of injured nations, and as they consult the best means, under the blessing of Divine Providence, of abridging its calamities, that they exert themselves in preserving order, in promoting concord, in maintaining the authority and the efficacy of the laws, and in supporting and invigorating all the measures which may be adopted by the constituted authorities for obtaining a speedy, a just, and an honorable peace.

In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed to these presents.

Done at the city of Washington, the 13th day of May, A. D. 1846, and of the Independence of the United States the seventieth.

JAMES K. POLK.

(Source: The American Presidency Project: James K. Polk: “Proclamation 47 – Announcement That a State of War Exists With the Republic of Mexico,” May 13, 1846. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=67909.

#SSCHAT on TWITTER

A “Classic,” as Mark Twain memorably defined it, is “a book which people praise but don’t read.”

Twain’s definition came to mind when I recently came across a “Recommended Reading List for College Bound Students” posted by the National Endowment for the Humanities on its Edsitement website.

The list includes many worthy titles from the fields of government, mythology, philosophy and religion, along with fiction, poetry and drama.

The fiction list ranges (alphabetically) from the late Chinua Achebe down to Eudora Welty. And yes, Mr. Clemens –Mark Twain—is on it.

The complete list is filled with noteworthy names, titles and significant documents that should be familiar to any well-read, educated person –particularly those who want to audition for Jeopardy. They all belong in the so-called “Canon” or “Great Books.” And I am sure that Edsitement doesn’t mean to suggest that this is ALL you need to read.

But…. It is also a list that could have been published when I graduated from high school in 1972 –the modern Dark Ages. While most of the fiction titles still deserve to be there, the most recent novel on the list is One Hundred Years of Solitude, published in 1967.

Similarly, in the nonfiction area the most recent titles include Profiles in Courage and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. And in the Mythology category, I will respectfully call Edith Hamilton’s Mythology “dated.”

So, teachers of Social Studies and English, here is the question:  What are the “new classics?”

What books written during the past 50 years do you assign or recommend for Social Studies? Or English classes?  What books written since 2000 do you include on your personal “Recommended Reading List for College Bound Students?”

In the fiction category, there is a dearth of black, Native American, Latino, and overseas voices.  To begin with, I might suggest Alice Walker (The Color Purple), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine, Beet Queen).

When it comes to nonfiction, the possibilities are endless. How about more recent titles on race, class, the digital world and the contemporary American experience? How about Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed? Fast Food Nation? Is Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father as significant a book today as John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage was in the 1960s?

I could go on. But I am more interested in what you are doing in class. Let the #sschat conversation begin.

The famed headline from the Presidential election of 1948 when Truman came from behind to grab victory (Photo courtesy of Library of Congress-American Memory)

I graded him an “A” in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents. But America was not always so generous towards Harry S. Truman,  America’s 33rd President, born on May 8, 1884 in Lamar, Missouri.

Truman inherited the Oval Office on April 12, 1945 after First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt told him that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was dead.  The following day, a shaken Truman said to reporters:

Boys, if you ever pray, pray for me now. I don’t know whether you fellows had a load of hay fall on you, but when they told me yesterday what had happened, I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me.

The only president with combat experience in World War I, Truman was a relatively obscure Senator from Missouri who had been picked to fill out Roosevelt’s ticket for the unprecedented and successful fourth run at the presidency in 1944. As FDR’s fourth term opened, the war in Europe was nearing its conclusion but the brutal and deadly fighting in the Pacific continued –with a potential invasion of Japan on the horizon.

With the overwhelming task of replacing the dominant political figure of the 20th century, Truman was immediately faced with a daunting choice: whether or not to use the atomic bomb– a weapon Truman did not know existed until he became president. The fateful decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains his most controversial action.

In FDR’s unfinished term and his own term, that followed a come-from-behind victory in 1948, Truman would make other controversial and unpopular decisions about war and peace that were all part of his “The Buck Stops Here”* legacy:

•desegregating the armed forces

•recognizing Israel’s statehood

•”containing” Communism as the Cold War heated up

•entering the war in Korea

•firing the popular General Douglas MacArthur

•setting in motion the “Marshall Plan” to rebuild war-torn Europe

When he left office in 1953, his popularity was in shreds. But Truman’s common sense, honesty, and decisiveness have left “Give “em Hell” Harry with a much better historical legacy.  Truman died on December 26, 1972. (His New York Times obituary.)

Read more about Truman in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents.

*”The Buck Stops Here” was the famed saying on a plaque that Truman kept on his Oval Office desk.

THIS IS a solemn but a glorious hour. I only wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to
witness this day. General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered
to the United Nations. The flags of freedom fly over all Europe.

For this victory, we join in offering our thanks to the Providence which has guided and sustained
us through the dark days of adversity.

Our rejoicing is sobered and subdued by a supreme consciousness of the terrible price we have
paid to rid the world of Hitler and his evil band. Let us not forget, my fellow Americans, the
sorrow and the heartache which today abide in the homes of so many of our
neighbors-neighbors whose most priceless possession has been rendered as a sacrifice to
redeem our liberty.

(Source: Harry S. Truman Library and Museum

Read more about Truman and World War II in Don’t Know Much About History and Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents.

18th President of the U.S.
Ulysses S. Grant
(Photo Courtesy of Library of Congress)

President Ulysses S. Grant: First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1869)

This requires security of person, property, and free religious and political opinion in every part of our common country, without regard to local prejudice. All laws to secure these ends will receive my best efforts for their enforcement.

(Source: Miller Center-University of Virginia)

Ulysses S. Grant was born on April 27, 1822 in Point Pleasant, Ohio. His remains, and those of his wife Julia, lie in the General Grant National Memorial in New York.

Theodore Roosevelt with Reporters at Sagamore Hill
Photo Courtesy of Library of Congress

Theodore Roosevelt: “The Man With the Muck-Rake” Speech (April 14, 1906)

In Pilgrim’s Progress the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil.

(Source: Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project/National Endowment for the Humanities)

Freedom  of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.

(Source: Yale Law School-The Avalon Project)

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, Gentlemen of the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.

Woodrow Wilson, Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany (April 2, 1917)

Robert Frost (Courtesy American Memory Collection (Library of Congress)

In honor of his birthday on March 26, 1874,  a video tribute to Robert Frost.

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world

Robert Frost’s epitaph

One of my favorite places in Vermont is the Frost gravesite in the cemetery of the First Church in Old Bennington -just down the street from the Bennington Monument. This video was recorded there.

Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost’s poetry. Known as a poet of New England, Frost (1874-1963) spent much of his life working and wandering the woods and farmland of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. As a young man, he dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, then drifted from job to job: teacher, newspaper editor, cobbler. His poetry career took off during a three-year trip to England with his wife Elinor where Ezra Pound aided the young poet. Frost’s language is plain and straightforward, his lines inspired by the laconic speech of his Yankee neighbors.

But while poems like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are accessible enough to make Frost a grammar-school favorite, his poetry is contemplative and sometimes dark—concerned with themes like growing old and facing death. One brilliant example is this poem about a young boy sawing wood,  Out, out– 

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

The first poet invited to speak at a Presidential inaugural, Frost told the new President:

Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age. Don’t be afraid of power.

A brief biography of Robert Frost can be found at Poets.org, where there are more samples of his poetry. It includes an account of Frost and JFK.

Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963. He had written his own epitaph, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.

Here is the NYTimes obituary published after his death.

This material is adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature written in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/53

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

 

(Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum)

Born on October 14, 1890 in Denison, Texas, Dwight D. Eisenhower died on March 28, 1969.  Read more about Eisenhower’s life and presidency in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents.

Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents
(September 18, 2012-Hyperion Books)