Several strands of the history happening in this moment are rolling around in my head. Rather than try and pull together one coherent essay today, I’ll simply capture those strands and encourage you to go to the primary sources. Perhaps later MTC posts will return to these themes.

As you read these pieces, keep this quote from historian Emory Thomas in mind.

“History, defined as ‘facts about the past’ does not change all that much. But we change; the present changes. And so those questions we ask those ‘facts about the past’ change considerably, as does the emphasis we give to some of those facts as opposed to other facts.”

Emory M. Thomas, “The Confederate Nation 1861-1865” (2011 edition)

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God did a good thing when he made your dad

The eulogies for former president Jimmy Carter at the state funeral on Thursday, January 9th held at the Washington National Cathedral were rich, filled with love, and spoken from the heart. They also helped to correct and update the history around the former president.

Heather Cox Richardson captured many of the best remembrances in her Letters from an American newsletter. As she noted, by virtue of living to be 100 Carter survived many of his contemporaries. But his former vice president, Walter Mondale, as well as the man he defeated for the presidency, Gerald Ford, both left behind eulogies which were read by their sons.

“Mondale recalled Carter’s ‘extraordinary years of principled and decent leadership, [and] his courageous commitment to civil rights and human rights.’ He recalled that toward the end of their time in the White House, in the years immediately after the tumultuous years of President Richard Nixon, with his covert bombing of Cambodia and cover-up of the Watergate break-in, the two men were summing up their administration. The sentence they came up with was: ‘We told the truth, we obeyed the law, and we kept the peace.'”

Ford’s son Steve fulfilled his father’s promise to deliver a eulogy. “Ford . . . noted that the former president ‘pursued brotherhood across boundaries of nationhood, across boundaries of tradition, across boundaries of caste. In America’s urban neighborhoods and in rural villages around the world, he reminded us that Christ had been a carpenter.’”

Steve Ford added his own remembrance when he spoke directly to the Carter children and said, “God did a good thing when he made your dad.”

Perhaps the most moving eulogy came from Carter’s grandson Jason, chair of the Carter Center’s board of trustees and a former Georgia state senator, who emphasized President Carter’s “integrity: his grandfather’s political convictions reflected his private beliefs.”

“’As governor of Georgia half a century ago, he preached an end to racial discrimination and an end to mass incarceration. As president in the 1970s…he protected more land than any other president in history…. He was a climate warrior who pushed for a world where we conserved energy, limited emissions, and traded our reliance on fossil fuels for expanded renewable sources. By the way, he cut the deficit, wanted to decriminalize marijuana, deregulated so many industries that he gave us cheap flights and…craft beer. Basically, all of those years ago, he was the first millennial. And he could make great playlists.’

Jason Carter called his grandfather’s life a “love story, about love for his fellow humans and about living out the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself.”

Carter noted that ‘this disease [Guinea worm] is not eliminated with medicine. It’s eliminated…by neighbors talking to neighbors about how to collect water in the poorest and most marginalized villages in the world. And those neighbors truly were my grandfather’s partners for the past forty years [and have] demonstrated their own power to change their world.’ When Jimmy Carter ‘saw a tiny 600-person village that everybody else thinks of as poor, he recognized it. That’s where he was from. That’s who he was.’ He saw it as ‘a place to find partnership and power and a place to carry out that commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. Essentially, he eradicated a disease with love and respect. He waged peace with love and respect. He led this nation with love and respect.’”

Love and respect.

President Joe Biden focused on what he called Carter’s “enduring attribute: character, character, character.” 

“‘At our best,’ Biden said, ‘we share the better parts of ourselves: joy, solidarity, love, commitment. Not for reward, but in reverence for the incredible gift of life we’ve all been granted. To make every minute of our time here on Earth count.’

‘That’s the definition of a good life,’ Biden said. It was the life Jimmy Carter lived for 100 years: a “good life of purpose and meaning, of character driven by destiny and filled with the power of faith, hope, and love.”

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The history you didn’t get in school

Bunk is a shared home for the web’s most interesting thinking about American history. By highlighting some of the many points of connection between overlapping stories and interpretations, the editors seek to create a fuller and more honest portrayal of our shared past and “reveal the extent to which every representation is part of a longer conversation.”

On January 9th, the editors published their compilation of the Best Online History Writing of 2024. The entire list of 40 essays is fascinating, but I want to highlight two that caught my eye on first review.

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Innocent mayhem that hints at a darker side of things

This year is the 50th anniversary of Richard Scarry’s 1974 Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, which strikes Chris Ware, writing in the Yale Review with a piece included in Bunk’s Top 40 list in the “Culture” section, as “a commemoration worthy of ballyhoo.”

The entire story is worth your time, as you’ll find insights and plenty of cultural history.

“The Busytown books were enormous successes in America. But Scarry wrote and drew them in Switzerland, where he decided to move in 1967 after a three-week ski vacation with his son,” writes Ware. “What seems to have been an impulsive decision starts to makes sense if you’ve spent a few days immersed in Scarry’s work writing an essay for The Yale Review: a decidedly un-American tone runs through much of it.” Ware continues. “By ‘un-American’ I don’t mean anti-American. Instead, I mean there’s a top-down, citizen-as-responsible-contributor, sense-of-oneself-as-part-of-something-bigger that feels, well, civilized.”

“In Busytown there’s just enough innocent mayhem and tripping and falling to hint at a darker side of things, like failing 1970s marriages and the things on television news that adults were always yelling about.”

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History lessons from a horror writer

Horror writer Grady Hendrix, writes The Unspoken Issue Haunting the Whole Election a week before the November election for Slate in a piece chosen by the Bunk editors for the top 40 list in the “Memory” section. Hendrix believes the horror genre has political lessons for us.

“Next week, we face an election in which one campaign declares ‘Let’s turn the page!,’ while the other looks at the country, pronounces it a hellscape, and promises to ‘Make America Great Again!’ In their own ways, both candidates want to bury the past and offer a vision of a brighter future. But if we Make America Great Again, we will create a literal underground of trans people, immigrants, and pregnant women who will have to break the law to survive. If we ‘turn the page,’ there will still be millions of people trapped beneath it who feel that Trump gave them a voice. And those people aren’t going anywhere, even if they lose their political power. We can call Trump the Big Orange Cheeto or the Fascist in Chief, but like it or not, there are millions of Americans who believe in what he has to offer and connect with him in a profound way. Maybe they’re all stupid? Maybe every single one of them is an idiot, and those of us who read (and write for) Slate are smarter and better educated and superior in every way. Maybe all the deaths, the isolation of lockdown, all this struggle to change the country, maybe it’ll all just disappear into the past and never be heard from again. Maybe.

But I’m a horror writer. And the one thing horror has taught me is that you can wish it away, you can lock the doors and draw the curtains, you can even burn it alive—but the past always comes back. Just when you’ve finally relaxed, just when you’ve nailed the last board over the final window and locked dead bolts on all the doors, it’ll come crawling out of its grave and smash through the walls or break through the floor. The past always, always, always returns, looking for its pound of flesh. And horror has one other lesson to teach us: We won’t see how it manifests until it’s far too late.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Photo of historical photographs by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash