The First Thanksgiving.

A hilarious reenactment of the first Thanksgiving that includes references to small-pox-covered blankets, the Pequot War, and King Philip's War:

TV and space

both make me unreasonably happy.

Thus today was a good one for fucking around on the internet, because I got to dissect the brand-new Emmy nominations (BSG was once again criminally overlooked, although I'm really happy about the recognition Breaking Bad is getting) and check out lots of Apollo 11-related NYTimes content (today being the 40th anniversary of the launch): reader's photos and memories of what they were doing at the time, a cool page of NYTimes' original coverage, and, best of all, really amazing photos taken by the astronauts, many of which I'd never seen before.

Hitler in color

Pretty amazing color images of Hitler from LIFE magazine - the craziest thing, to me, is how unreal it seems: I've seen the "Indiana Jones" movies so many times that it's tough to really comprehend that Hitler's uniform isn't a costume, the parades aren't staged, etc.

"The Course of Human Events."

In 1972 the National Endowment for the Humanities founded the Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities lecture series, which the NEH describes as "the highest honor the federal government confers for distinguished intellectual achievement in the humanities." David McCullough won the honor of being the 2003 Jefferson lecturer and gave a great speech on the arc of history, the text of which can be found here.

McCullough's general point:
"The truth of history is the objective always. But the truth isn't just the facts. You can have all the facts imaginable and miss the truth, just as you can have facts missing or some wrong, and reach the larger truth."

Random note about McCullough: He still uses a 1940s typewriter and writes only in a small shed/studio behind his house on Martha's Vineyard (seen in the above picture).

"Going Dutch"

This article by Russell Shorto (author of The Island at the Center of the World and Descartes' Bones) is a relaxed examination of the similarities and differences between the American and the Dutch social welfare systems. This is not a number-filled article, but rather a straightforward discussion of some of the pros and cons of both the Dutch and American systems. Shorto also discusses the cultural roots of the two systems and the historical forces that shaped the trends of each system.

One of the interesting points raised in the article:

This points up something that seems to be overlooked when Americans dismiss European-style social-welfare systems: they are not necessarily state-run or state-financed. Rather, these societies have chosen to combine the various entities that play a role in social well-being — individuals, corporations, government, nongovernmental entities like unions and churches — in different ways, in an effort to balance individual freedom and overall social security.

And, a hilarious summary of the Dutch personality:

'If you tell a Dutch person you’re going to raise his taxes by 500 euros and that it will go to help the poor, he’ll say O.K.,' [an American expatriate] said. 'But if you say he’s going to get a 500-euro tax cut, with the idea that he will give it to the poor, he won’t do it. The Dutch don’t do such things on their own. They believe they should be handled by the system. To an American, that’s a lack of individual initiative.'

Prescience bites us in the ass yet again.

"There is nothing I dread so much as a division of the Republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader and converting measures in opposition to each other."
-John Adams (1790)

In other news, I highly recommend the book John Adams by David McCullough.