Roundtable

The Rest Is History

The moon, historically relevant pig fat, and the racist bone.

By Jaime Fuller

Friday, July 19, 2019

Buzz Aldrin on the Moon with the American Flag, by Neil Armstrong, 1969. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mary and Dan Solomon, 2016.

• “In the first half of the twentieth century, some women (even natural-born citizens) who married foreigners were stripped of their citizenship, as were Asian persons whose race was considered ‘un-American.’ In 1956, the U.S. Attorney General Herbert Brownell proposed a plan to punish communists by stripping them of their citizenship. In reaction to Brownell’s proposal, political theorist Hannah Arendt characterized denaturalization in a letter to Robert Maynard Hutchins as a ‘crime against humanity.’ ” (Boston Review)

• It’s the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing on Saturday, meaning the internet is flooded with stories about how people reacted in 1969, the astronauts’ heart rates, Poppy Northcuttmoon germs, the man who was supposed to be the first black astronaut, conspiracy theories, moon landing children’s books, Neil Armstrong as artist, and the time when the moon stopped a baseball game.

• On a battle to force officials in Texas to remember history. (Texas Observer)

• Nathan Bedford Forrest Day was observed in Tennessee last Saturday. (Tennessean)

• The memories of Soviet children who made it through World War II. (Paris Review Daily)

• An excavation of a Battle of Waterloo site turned up sawn-off limbs. (The Guardian)

• “Americans as early as the founding generation believed whiteness was a prerequisite for the exercise of republican virtue. Before the Civil War, there was a decades-long movement to send free and freed blacks back to Africa based on the theory that black people were unfit for and incompatible with democratic life. America’s most restrictive immigration laws were rooted in the idea this was, as the popular nineteenth-century phrase had it, a ‘white man’s country,’ inherently threatened by the presence of nonwhites and non-Anglo-Saxons, not to mention women.” (New York Times)

• “Ancient people may have used pig fat to build Stonehenge.” (Science)

• Talking about reparations in the town where Mitch McConnell’s ancestors enslaved people. (Courier-Journal)

• A history of the racist bone. (Washington Post)

• This week in obituaries: a former Supreme Court justice, an Italian novelist, a historian of modern China, a former editor of the Buenos Aires Herald, a South African musician, the first black player on the Red Sox, a fixer of smashed guitars, and a bird-watcher.