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1 week ago | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant
In February, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower invited Chief Justice Earl Warren to a “stag dinner” at the White House. It was two months after the Supreme Court heard arguments for a second time on the case of Brown v. Board of Education, and it would be three months before the court would issue its historic ruling striking down racial segregation in schools.
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2 weeks ago | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant
In 2022, the British tabloid Daily Star dramatized the perishability of Prime Minister Liz Truss’s leadership by streaming video of a head of iceberg lettuce to see if it would survive longer than the government. The produce, decorated in the style of Mr. Potato Head and dubbed Lizzy, outlasted the 45-day premiership of Truss. It wasn’t the first time that Britons had chosen such a food analogy for political leadership.
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1 month ago | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant
Editor’s note: In a recent Now It’s Historypost on high-speed rail, I explored the view that Democrats should become the party of “Abundance,” which is the title of a recent book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
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1 month ago | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant
A “spirit of revolutionary change” was reshaping the world economy, Pope Leo XIII wrote in 1891.
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1 month ago | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant |Noel Rubinton
As a young commuter, John McPhee would stop by an orange juice stand at New York’s Penn Station. “From late autumn and on through winter and spring,” he wrote, “I noticed a gradual deepening of the color of the expressed juice. December was pale cadmium, April marigold, and June a Persian orange.” That set him to wondering about the different varieties of the fruit. “I didn't linger over the question.
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2 months ago | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant
The saying, “Children should be seen and not heard” traces back to a book of sermons compiled by John Mirk in the late 1380s. Mirk was a priest in Shropshire, in western England. His book, titled “Festial,” was so popular it was hand copied more than 40 times and, after Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, printed in more than 20 editions. “In the original form it was specifically young women who were expected to keep quiet,” according to the Phrase Finder.
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2 months ago | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant
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2 months ago | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant
On October 15, 1929, economist Irving Fisher spoke to a regular meeting of the Purchasing Agents Association at 2 Park Avenue in Manhattan about gyrations in the stock market. The Dow had climbed by more than 600 percent over the preceding eight years and some forecasters were warning of a coming crash. Traders were getting “yippy, a little bit afraid,” the phrase President Donald Trump used last week to describe anxiety over his tariffs.
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Oct 24, 2024 | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant
Hillary Clinton got nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump in 2016. Why didn’t she become President of the United States? Four years later, Trump’s backers tried to alter the vote counting process in several states when they sought to invalidate Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. And in 2024, if the election is as close as the polls say it is, the popular vote winner may not be elected President. When we think of democracy, we assume that whoever gets the most votes will win an election.
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Sep 29, 2024 | 
nowitshistory.com | Richard Galant
A fresh breeze was blowing in American politics as 1961 began. A relic of that time sits on my desk: a bronze medal showing John F. Kennedy’s profile on the front and the presidential seal on the back. The medal, 2 ¾ inches in diameter, says “Inaugurated January 20, 1961.”Kennedy was “the youngest person ever elected to the presidency, ready to succeed Dwight D.