HNN: Jim Loewen's History Blog

For this week, I looked at entries from Jim Loewen's Blog on the History News Network. He is a historian and a sociologist, who appears to write mostly about race and the US.

The first article I looked at from the blog was "The Other Civil War": Howard Zinn, Abraham Lincoln, Lerone Bennett, Stephen Spielberg, and Me. The posting was about Loewen's experience writing a preface for Howard Zinn's The Other Civil War. Loewen ended up giving a lot of praise and criticism for Zinn's work, and ultimately, the publisher altered his harsh language and the spirit of parts of his preface. The posting is about his frustration with the publisher and the parts he disagreed with Zinn. Loewen wraps it up with a plug for Spielberg's Lincoln.

Morons in Africa was the next post that I read. This post is mostly arguing against Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, which essentially attempts to use IQ test scores as scientific racism.

Then I read Registering to Vote, Then and Now. In this post, Loewen talks about voting issues and breakdowns across racial lines today, an anecdote of a voting registration event in 1965 in Mississippi as well as voting during Reconstruction.

After that, I looked at We Have Had a Gay President, Just Not Nixon. In this posting, Loewen argues against a recent thesis that Nixon was gay. He claims that it is baseless, and uses evidence to show that President Buchanan was beyond a reasonable doubt a homosexual and that if Nixon was, there would be evidence to support it. He notes the importance of Buchanan's homosexuality in understanding who he was as a person as well as the roles that lesbians and gays have played in history.

Finally, I read Victimized by Folklore, which is basically a history of racism in Martinsville, Indiana, a sundown town. Residents of the town began to claim that they were 'victimized by folklore' and weren't actually racist or have a special history of racism. Loewen disagrees with this assertion and further points out that the definition of folklore isn't 'untrue'.

I enjoyed reading Jim Loewen's Blog, and I think anyone who is interested in race in the US, the Civil War and other musings should check it out.