kerkko.fi

The "culture of resistance" was decisive in the long run. The South proved to be ungovernable for its conquerers. White Southerners refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of their appointed rulers. They refused to concede that blacks could hold elected office in the South or vote in Southern elections. Southerners tenaciously clung to their supposedly "outdated" traditions and way of life.

After twenty years of Reconstruction, the North abandoned the quixotic project and concluded it had been a mistake. Northerners tired of hearing about outrageous corruption, incompetent black legislators, race riots, lynchings, and general chaos. The Republican Party was overthrown in every Southern state and federal troops were withdrawn in 1877.

Moral of the story: The North was unable to establish the legitimacy of its rule in the South. It could only rely upon brute force to exercise its power. The Northern public did not have the appetite to use brute force indefinitely and eventually conceded Southern home rule.

http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2010/06/21/invisible-empire-the-ku-klux-klan-in-america/

The Afghan war has gained a fresh and dubious distinction: it is the longest war in US history, surpassing the conflict in Vietnam. 103 months passed between passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the withdrawal of the last American combat forces from Vietnam. As of today, the Afghan war has lasted 104 months.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/afghan-war-now-longest-war-us-history/story?id=10849303

A fight broke out between hussars and infantrymen of the Austrian army campaigning against the Ottomans in Wallachia in 1788. An officer shouting "Halt! Halt!" was misheard as "Allah! Allah!" causing a mass panic. Two days later, the Ottoman army arrived. They discovered 10,000 dead and wounded soldiers.

http://www.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=26165

Some things about politics never change, but following Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s death in 1945, nearly every major political figure in America embarked on a bizarre, one-of-a-kind trip on a funeral train carrying his body to Hyde Park with Eleanor Roosevelt, Harry Truman, every single Supreme Court justice, and, unbelievably enough, a Soviet spy all on board.

Robert Klara has put together a thrilling piece of history that looks at the intense political and social machinations taking place as the nation mourned its president: Eleanor Roosevelt coped with fresh knowledge of her husband's extramarital affairs, Truman worked on policy for WWII, and a massive security effort struggled to keep the high-profile passengers out of harm’s way.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-03-18/this-weeks-hot-reads-26/

Great powers are complex systems, made up of a very large number of interacting components that are asymmetrically organized. They operate somewhere between order and disorder. Such systems can appear to operate quite stably for some time; they seem to be in equilibrium but are, in fact, constantly adapting. But there comes a moment when complex systems "go critical." A very small trigger can set off a "phase transition" from a benign equilibrium to a crisis.

Historians often misunderstand complexity; they are trained to explain calamity in terms of long-term causes. In reality, most of the "fat-tail" phenomena that historians study are not the climaxes of prolonged and deterministic story lines; instead, they represent perturbations, and sometimes the complete breakdowns, of complex systems. A small input to such a system can produce huge, often unanticipated changes -- what scientists call "the amplifier effect."

When things go wrong in a complex system, the scale of disruption is nearly impossible to anticipate. One day, a seemingly random piece of bad news will make the headlines. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry but the public at large. This shift is crucial: A complex system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability. Empires function in apparent equilibrium for some unknowable period. And then, quite abruptly, they collapse.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-ferguson28-2010feb28,0,7706980.story

It's easy to say the modern teabaggers are assholes. But as it turns out, these latest teabaggers are simply carrying on a longstanding tradition of proud, vaguely patriotic douchebaggery that they learned from the OG's of asshole behavior; the guys who tossed some tea into a harbor a couple hundred years ago. No, we're not saying we wish the British had won the war or that we wish America had never been born. We're just saying that American history glosses over a lot of true dick behavior.

http://www.cracked.com/article_18442_5-reasons-founding-fathers-were-kind-dicks.html

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

One of the program's most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, chief medical examiner of New York City in the 1920s, said it was "our national experiment in extermination." During Prohibition, however, an official sense of higher purpose kept the program in place. As the Chicago Tribune editorialized in 1927: "Normally, no American government would engage in such business. It is only in the curious fanaticism of Prohibition that any means, however barbarous, are considered justified."

http://www.slate.com/id/2245188/pagenum/all/