Awaz Apni

I mistakenly omitted mentioning in the previous post that I think Woodrow Wilson is overrated, but I'm glad, because while I was figuring out whether to do a whole item or just update the previous post, I saw what Matt Yglesias argued on the subject: I think the other president primed for a historiographical re-evaluation is the little remembered Warren Harding. Arthur Schlesinger and the project of post-WWII Cold War liberalism casts a long shadow over popular understanding of a lot of American history, and that project almost requires an underrating of Harding and an overrating of his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. But the Harding administration is an example of the historically rare phenomenon of the civil liberties ratchet shifting in the direction of more freedom. Harding also began the process of raising the status of African-Americans from the low point we reached under Wilson—promoting, for example, an anti-lynching bill that passed the House of Representatives only...

I mistakenly omitted mentioning in the previous post that I think Woodrow Wilson is overrated, but I'm glad, because while I was figuring out whether to do a whole item or just update the previous post, I saw what Matt Yglesias argued on the subject: I think the other president primed for a historiographical re-evaluation is the little remembered Warren Harding. Arthur Schlesinger and the project of post-WWII Cold War liberalism casts a long shadow over popular understanding of a lot of American history, and that project almost requires an underrating of Harding and an overrating of his predecessor Woodrow Wilson. But the Harding administration is an example of the historically rare phenomenon of the civil liberties ratchet shifting in the direction of more freedom. Harding also began the process of raising the status of African-Americans from the low point we reached under Wilson—promoting, for example, an anti-lynching bill that passed the House of Representatives only...