June 29, 2007
Looking for good sources on Japanese internment?
Editor & Publisher highlights the web version of a special series on Japanese internment during World War II, put together by the Statesman-Journal in Salem, Oregon. The series is featured in “Pauline’s Picks,” a feature by Pauline Millard showing off the best use of the web by old-line print publications.
The Statesman-Journal’s web piece is “Beyond Barbed Wire,” featuring timelines, maps of the Tule Lake internment facility (closest to Oregon), stories about Japanese Americans in Oregon, especially in Salem, photos, video interviews, and a significant collection of original documents perfectly suited for document-based studies.
Texas kids test particularly badly in this part of U.S. history. Several districts ask U.S. history teachers and other social studies groups to shore up student knowledge in the area to overcome gaps pointed out in testing in the past three years, on the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS). In teacher training, I’ve noted a lot of Texas social studies teachers are a bit shaky on the history.
The Korematsu decision was drummed into my conscious working on civil rights issues at the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee, and complemented by Constitutional Law (thank you, Mary Cheh) and other courses I was taking at the same time at George Washington University. It helped that Utah has a significant Japanese population and had “hosted” one of the internment camps; one of my tasks was to be sure committee Chairman Orrin Hatch was up on issues and concerns when he met with Japanese descendants in his constituencies in Utah. Hatch was a cosponsor of the bills to study the internment, and then to apologize to Japanese Americans affected, and pay reparations.
The internment was also a sore spot with my father, G. Paul Darrell, who witnessed the rounding up of American citizens in California. Many of those arrested were his friends, business associates and acquaintances. Those events formed a standard against which he measured almost all other claims of civil rights violations.
Because children were imprisoned with their parents, because a lot of teenagers were imprisoned, this chunk of American history strikes particular sympathetic chords with students of any conscience. Dorothea Lange’s having photographed some of the events and places, as well as Ansel Adams and others, also leaves a rich pictorial history.
(I found this thanks to the RSS feed of headlines from Editor & Publisher at the Scholars & Rogues site.)
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
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Bill of Rights, Citizenship, Civil Rights, DBQ sources, Education, Freedom - Political, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, Historic documents, History video sources, Japanese American internment, Justice, Newspapers, Supreme Court cases, TAKS, Teaching, Technology in the classroom, TEKS, U.S. Constitution, U.S. Supreme Court, World War II | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
June 23, 2007
The Fifth Amendment is an old friend and a good friend. It is one of the great landmarks in man’s struggle to be free of tyranny, to be decent and civilized. It is our way of escape from the use of torture.
William O. Douglas, “An Almanac of Liberty,” 1954.
Douglas served longer on the Supreme Court than any other justice, from 1939 to 1975.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
1 Comment | Fifth Amendment, Freedom - Economic, Freedom - Political, Justice, Law | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 22, 2007
Today is the 137th anniversary of the creation of the U.S. Department of Justice, June 22nd, 1870.
Among other interesting points:
Image of Lady Justice against a sunset; FBI photo; hope remains, since no body has been found. Photo is not from a current investigation. Image at top: Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in front of The Spirit of Justice, sculpted by Paul Jennewein in 1933; photo in the lobby of the Department of Justice. Source not listed — probably a news photo.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Utah Policy Daily
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Leave a Comment » | 1789, America's founding, Famous quotes, Government, History, Justice, Law | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
June 15, 2007
1968 propelled history in dramatic fashion, much of it tragic. History teachers might await the 40th anniversary stories of 1968’s events, knowing that the newspapers and television specials will provide much richer material than any textbook could hope for.
Was 1967 less momentous? Perhaps. But an anniversary this week only serves to highlight how the entire decade was a series of turning points for the United States. This week marks the 40th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s issuing the decision in Loving v. Virginia. The Lovings had been arrested, convicted and exiled from the state of Virginia for the crime of — brace yourself — getting married.
Photo of Richard and Mildred Loving from Bettman-Corbis Archive.
You see, Virginia in those days prohibited marriage between a black person and a white person. So did 15 other states. In language that is quaint and archaic to all but Biblical literalist creationists, the trial judge said:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”
The Lovings appealed their conviction. They appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. And on June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down laws that prohibit a person of one “race” from marrying a person of another. (I put “race” in quotes because, as we have since learned from DNA studies, there is just one race among us, the human race. Science verifies that the Supreme Court got it right, as did the Americans before them who wrote the laws upon which the Supreme Court’s decision was based.)
From 1958 to 1967 — nine years the case wended through the courts. Oral argument was had on April 10 — the decision coming down in just two months seems dramatically quick by today’s standards. This was one of the cases that angered so many Americans against the Court presided over by Chief Justice Earl Warren.
Ed Brayton at Dispatches from Culture Wars points to a statement from Mildred Loving on this anniversary. The statement is below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
8 Comments | 1968, Citizenship, Civil Rights, Fourteenth Amendment, Freedom - Political, Heroes, History, Human Rights, Jurisprudence, Justice, U.S. Constitution | Tagged: 1967, Civil Rights, Constitution, Loving v Virginia, marriage, Miscegination, Supreme Court | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
May 19, 2007
City elections in Aurora, Texas, may need to be re-run after spectacular failures of two of three Diebold voting machines, and a fire that damaged the impounded units after 38 votes were completely erased and Diebold technicians were unable to hack results out of their own machines. Do you even need to be told the fire’s cause is undetermined?
Is your local government considering voting machines with no paper back up?
The voting machines don’t work even when there isn’t a great partisan prize at stake; the first explanation from the Justice Department for mess-ups in personnel there is that dismissed people were not aggressively enough pursuing a campaign against minority voting; a federal conviction of a campaign worker in Wisconsin turns out to have been a bogus case created by a U.S. attorney appointed to bring exactly such bogus cases . . .
How great must the assault on the Constitution and rights of Americans be, before there is a general clamor for justice, and change?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Leave a Comment » | Civil Rights, Current History, Elections, Ethics, Justice, Law, Politics | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
April 26, 2007
In the middle of the Ray Donovan mess* I was dispatched one afternoon to the Labor Department to see Donovan’s press conference on some complaint the Senate Labor Committee had misrepresented the misrepresentations about testimony offered to the committee. Donovan was mad, but I didn’t realize just how mad until I was stopped at the door — my I.D. was flagged as persona non grata, apparently. Either that or they thought Sen. Orrin Hatch would try to sneak a subpoena in with his press guy.
A friendly reporter standing behind me in line added me to his crew, and I got the handouts.
That was retail, face-to-face scandal. Nothing like this:
Anything like “OllieNorthinthebasement.net?”
* It’s amazing how little of this history is available on line.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
1 Comment | Current History, History, Journalism, Justice, Law, Presidents, Santayana's ghost, Scandals, Technology, U.S. Senate, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
April 17, 2007
Columbia University unveiled the Pulitzer Prize winners yesterday.
In U.S. history, the prize went to The Race Beat:The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff (Alfred A. Knopf). 
Other finalists for U.S. History were: Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 by James T. Campbell (The Penguin Press), and Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War by Nathaniel Philbrick (Viking).
Roberts and Klibanoff share $10,000.
In Biography, the $10,000 first prize was awarded to The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, by Debby Applegate (Doubleday).
Finalists for the biography prize included two other great books: John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty by Arthur H. Cash (Yale University Press), and Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw (The Penguin Press).
In the category of general non-fiction, where evolution has triumphed over anti-science bigotry in recent years, history is rampant in 2007, also. The prize for general non-fiction was snagged by The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11″ by Lawrence Wright (Alfred A. Knopf). Other finalists for the general non-fiction prize were Crazy: A Father’s Search Through America’s Mental Health Madness by Pete Earley (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), and Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas E. Ricks (The Penguin Press). 
High school history and other social studies teachers would do well to read each of these winners and the finalists. They will be significant additions to any serious history curriculum, or government, and perhaps economics.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
2 Comments | Bill of Rights, Books, Civil Rights, Heroes, History, Iraq, Journalism, Justice, Leadership, School desegregation, War | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
April 14, 2007
April 16 marks the 60th anniversary of the Texas City Disaster. A large cargo ship being loaded with tons of ammonium nitrate caught fire and exploded, setting fire to other nearby ships, one of which exploded, and devastating much of the town. In all, 576 people died in Texas City on April 16 and 17, 1947.
View of Texas City from Galveston, across the bay, after the explosion of the French ship SS Grandcamp, April 16, 1947. Photo from International Association of Fire Fighters Local 1259
The incident also produced one of the most famous tort cases in U.S. history, Dalehite vs. United States, 346 U.S. 15 (1953). (Here is the Findlaw version, subscription required.)
The entire Texas City fire department was wiped out, 28 firefighters in all. The International Association of Fire Fighters, Local 1259 has a website dedicated to the history of the disaster, with a collection of some powerful photographs.
More below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
17 Comments | Disasters, History, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Texas, Texas history | Tagged: Disasters, History, Jurisprudence, Justice, Law, Local 1259 International Association of Fire Fighters, Texas, Texas City Disaster, Texas history | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
April 4, 2007
Drug couriers, it appears, like to put off suspicion of their vehicles by putting a Bible on the dashboard as they travel. So, in a countermeasure, cops target cars with Bibles on the dash to be pulled over as suspected for couriering drugs.
Isn’t that a violation of someone’s First Amendment rights? Not according to the federal courts in Nebraska, no. The case is Frazier v. Lutter, a March 27 decision, which Prof. Friedman details slightly more.
Say what? Suddenly you have more sympathy for imams kicked off of airplanes?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
Leave a Comment » | Justice, Law, Religious Freedom, Travel, U.S. Constitution | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
March 13, 2007
Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (FREE) is a great idea. Federal agencies are loaded with information useful to teachers and students, formerly available in print if one could find the appropriate phone number or get lucky with a mail sweepstakes. Now a lot of the information is compiled specifically for education, and the U.S. Department of Education has compiled a user-congenial site to help educators find the stuff.
Under “U.S. History and Topics” you may find a good deal of support for most social studies disciplines. The Women’s History Month focus highlights two topics from the Library of Congress and two from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Read the rest of this entry »
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
1 Comment | Classroom technology, Curricula, Economics, Education, Freedom of Information, Geography - Physical, Government, History, History video sources, Justice, Law, Lesson plans, Presidents, Public education, Teaching, Technology in the classroom | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
March 5, 2007
Really.
I can’t gloss this at all, and so far it checks out as presented. Political Teen Tidbits is a blog run by a bright young Texan with a conscience. She’s trying to draw attention to the bizarre cases that keep coming out of Texas’ immigration detention practices.
Political Teen Tidbits thinks we should let the 9-year-old Canadian kid out of jail. Go read the details — what do you think?
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
1 Comment | Dissent, Ethics, Human Rights, Immigration, Jurisprudence, Justice, U.S. Constitution, Weblogs | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
February 22, 2007
Educators get a few seconds to make a decision, usually with other kids yelling and a fight breaking out across the hallway. Lawyers and judges have more time.
But even with the advantage of cool reflection, the levels of irony in this case are too thick to cut through.
Can a kid dress as Jesus about to be crucified, for Halloween? Is the costume religious? If so, is the school’s allowing it to be worn an impermissible endorsement of religion? Is the costume blasphemous? If so, would the school be sued if they didn’t ban it? Is the costume in good taste, compared to the kid dressed as a chainsaw serial-killer, or one of the phantasms from Nightmare on Elm Street?
How do 10-year-old kids always come up with these questions?
With the disclosure that what I have comes from a press release from the Alliance Defense Fund, which has its biases, I post the details of the case as we have them so far, below the fold. Read the rest of this entry »
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5 Comments | Education, First Amendment, Jurisprudence, Justice, Religious Freedom, Teaching | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
February 4, 2007
Charles Stimson resigned Friday. Stimson is the attorney who was deputy secretary of defense for detainee affairs. You may recall he was the person who suggested in a radio interview that business clients of lawyers who provide legal counsel to detainees should pressure the attorneys not to represent the detainees, a suggestion that is contrary to the ethical canons of attorneys.
According to the New York Times:
Stimson drew outrage from the legal community — and a disavowal from the Defense Department — for his Jan. 11 comments, in which he also suggested some attorneys were being untruthful about doing the work free of charge and instead were ”receiving moneys from who knows where.”
He also said companies might want to consider taking their legal business to other firms that do not represent suspected terrorists.
The Defense Department disavowed the suggestion. Attorney General Albert Gonzalez also disavowed Stimson’s remarks. But Stimson said that the controversy hampered his effectiveness on the job. The NY Times said:
Stimson publicly apologized several days after the radio interview, saying his comments did not reflect his values and that he firmly believes in the principles of the U.S. legal system.
But it didn’t completely quiet critics.
The Bar Association of San Francisco last week asked the California State Bar to investigate whether Stimson violated legal ethics by suggesting a boycott of law firms that represent Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Earlier posts:
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
2 Comments | 6th Amendment, Democracy, Dissent, Ethics, Iraq, Jurisprudence, Justice, War | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
February 3, 2007
Chuck Colson claims to have found God, while in prison, and changed his ways. He’s got a newspaper column and radio feature called “Breakpoint” which generally covers issues at least tangentially related to ministry and church work.
But he’s either fallen victim to a great hoax, or he’s in on it and spread it.
Ed Brayton at Dispatches from the Culture Wars alerted us to Colson’s “Breakpoint” commentary dated February 2, in which Colson repeats the disproven claims that Judge John E. Jones of the Middle District of Pennsylvania “plagiarized” significant portions of his decision. The charges are completely out of line, and have not held up under scrutiny. The claims were invented by people at the Discovery Institute who have no knowledge of how federal civil trials work, who misinterpreted trial procedures, and who made an invalid count of the words in the decision (failing to account for most of the 129 pages of the work for reasons that have never been explained).
If this catches you unaware of the issue, you can catch up with several posts. Attorney and Panda’s Thumb contributor Tim Sandefur explains how the charges are false here. Sandefur’s earlier explanation of the statistical errors behind the false claims is here (also at Panda’s Thumb).
You should act. If your local newspaper carries Colson’s column, notify them of the hoax. Give them the links above, and urge them to contact the press people at the National Center for Science Education for comment. Tell them they can quote Panda’s thumb, and that they can contact Sandefur, Brayton, or me, for comment.
Similarly, if your local radio station carries Colson’s commentaries, notify the station. Stations need to check to be sure they are not broadcasting hoaxes for license renewal reasons (though the FCC polices this issue rarely, and not often well).
Were Colson a practicing attorney, of course, he’d probably remember how federal trial procedures work, and not make such errors.
You can help him recall.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
22 Comments | Accuracy, Creationism, Evolution, Hoaxes, Intelligent Design, Journalism, Justice, Plagiarism | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
January 15, 2007
Franklin is reputed to have said that truth wins in a fair fight. In the few days since Charles Stimson suggested the nation’s top lawfirms should not be representing clients being held in detention at Guantanamo Bay, condemnation has been swift, deep and broad. Even Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said lawyers should represent all accused. Perhaps the fight will be fair.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Brian Maka, said Stimson was not speaking for the Bush administration.
Stimson’s comments “do not represent the views of the Department of Defense or the thinking of its leadership,” Maka told The Associated Press on Saturday.
Ethics courses, now required at all U.S. law schools, generally spend a great deal of time on the issue of the duty of attorneys to provide representation to all criminal defendants, even and especially those who are unpopular or held in disrepute. Such representation is queried on the ethics exams that all lawyers must take to be licensed.
History offers many examples of lawyers and the difficulties they face in providing such representation: John Adams representing the British soldiers accused of murder in the Boston Massacre (Adams largely won; eight were tried, six were acquitted, two convicted and branded on their thumbs as punishment); John Quincy Adams representing the men being carried for slave trading aboard the errant Amistad ; Clarence Darrow’s representation of the accused murderers Leopold and Loeb, and other cases. In literature, we get the fictional lawyer Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, and the defense team in Inherit the Wind.
Perhaps we should be encouraged at the response to Mr. Stimson’s remarks. A lover of justice might be happier were these defenses of the legal system and the representation of all accused to be more apparently on display from government officials prior to and without such gaffes.
Also see:
Disclosure: A member of my immediate family is employed by Fulbright and Jaworski, one of the firms Mr. Stimson questioned — not in a legal capacity, not in representation of any of the Guantanamo Bay detainees. I was unaware of the firm’s being named by Mr. Stimson at the time of my first post. The views here, of course, should not in any way be construed as representative of any firm named, they are my own views.
Spread the word; friends don't allow friends to repeat history.
2 Comments | 6th Amendment, Democracy, Iraq, Jurisprudence, Justice, War | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 