Bernard Bailyn is at the top in my Pantheon of US historians...but

...but I struggle a bit with his advice:

"Without presenting the past in the correct context of its own time, and somehow disengaging it from one’s present—without grasping the past as the present it once was—one can never understand what really happened or how that distant past changed into a later present and, eventually, into the present that we are ourselves are experiencing."
-Bernard Bailyn

It’s hard to ignore the present in working to interpret the past . . .

Juneteenth 2020

One hundred fifty-five years ago, Gen. Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and issued General Order No. 3, proclaiming the freedom of the slaves. Today I had the honor of participating in a panel webinar presented by the Dallas Bar Ass'n in commemoration of this anniversary, featuring Professor Daina Berry (the incoming Chair of the History Department of UT Austin) and Dallas lawyer Paul Stafford, under the title "Juneteenth to June 2020: History's Relevance to Today's Reality."







Re the American civil disturbances following the killing in Minneapolis of George Floyd, May-June 2020

"What did you expect? I don't know why we're so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for three hundred years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off."

-President Lyndon B. Johnson re the toll of deaths, injuries, and arrests in Baltimore immediately after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, quoted in Nick Kotz, *Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Laws That Changed America* at 418 (2015).