August 31, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents IV Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:05 AM EST I’m grateful to Alexander Burns for linking to the Los Angeles Times op-ed. But I wonder if the author has it exactly right. I’m not a psychiatrist by the longest of shots, but I suspect the persistence of “tearoom trade,” as the op-ed calls it, has a lot more to do with the erotic potential of the danger involved—the thrill of getting away with something so fraught with potential consequences—than with people who engage in such behavior simply being in denial. Mr. Burns writes, “In 1964, Jenkins was called a security threat by members of the political establishment. Today, similar political actors are condemning Larry Craig as merely ‘disgusting’ (see here and here). I guess this is a kind of progress, but it’s certainly not as much progress as one might have hoped for in 43 years.” Speaking of the security-threat excuse for being homophobic, it is interesting to put it mildly that when Walter Jenkins was hospitalized after the news broke, who should send him flowers but J. Edgar Hoover. In fairness to the writers in the two links, however, what they found disgusting was not Larry Craig or homosexuality per se but his behavior in a public restroom.
August 30, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents III Posted by Alexander Burns at 03:00 PM EST Thanks to John Steele Gordon for bringing up the Walter Jenkins case, in which one of President Johnson’s closest associates was arrested for disorderly conduct in a restroom in October 1964. There’s an interesting Time magazine article from that month, available here, that addresses the incident in some detail. The article is interesting not so much for its analysis of the Jenkins scandal as for its illustration of mainstream concerns about homosexuality in 1964. One of Time’s conclusions is that Jenkins, as a man of indeterminate sexual orientation, may have been a security risk. “Walter Jenkins could at any time have laid his hands on the most closely guarded secrets of the U.S., including the workings of the most advanced nuclear weapons,” the article observes. “The Jenkins case raised new doubts about the effectiveness of U.S. security agencies. Are the FBI and the Secret Service, recently rebuked by the Warren Commission for their sloppy work before the Kennedy assassination, once again guilty of grave inefficiency?” Journalists at Time were not the only observers who raised alarming questions about Jenkins’s trustworthiness. Mr. Gordon is right that Barry Goldwater conducted himself admirably in the aftermath of Jenkins’s arrest and chose not to make it a campaign issue. Goldwater’s running mate, William Miller of New York, was less forbearing. He told a group of Chicago businessmen: “If this type of man [Jenkins] had information vital to our survival, it could be compromised very quickly and very dangerously.” Miller’s line of thinking, which held that non-heterosexuals were more likely to betray the United States or handle its secrets carelessly, was not unusual at the time. But the attempt to make Jenkins’s indiscretion a campaign issue in this way was disgraceful all the same. There’s an editorial in today’s Los Angeles Times that compares Larry Craig’s scandal to Jenkins’s and concludes that men like Senator Craig are stuck in a less tolerant time. There’s been progress in the last several decades, David Ehrenstein writes, and “it’s up to the I’m-not-gay(s) to discover the real freedoms fought for and won by the people they so fiercely claim they’re not.” This is a good point, but one might also contrast Jenkins and Craig and draw some more discouraging conclusions. In 1964, Jenkins was called a security threat by members of the political establishment. Today, similar political actors are condemning Larry Craig as merely “disgusting” (see here and here). I guess this is a kind of progress, but it’s certainly not as much progress as one might have hoped for in 43 years.
August 30, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:45 PM EST One of the biggest scandals involving politics and men’s room indiscretions involved Walter Jenkins, perhaps Lyndon Johnson’s closest aide, who had been with Johnson since 1939. On the night of October 7, 1964, in the midst of the presidential election of that year, Jenkins attended a party at the new Washington headquarters of Newsweek, where he had several martinis, and then visited the men’s room at the nearby YMCA, where he was arrested for having sex with another man by policemen who had the place staked out (using peepholes). See here. Jenkins paid the $50 fine and went back to work at the White House, hoping—like Senator Craig—that the story would not come to light. However, when newspapers began calling about it a week later, he went to see Abe Fortas, Lyndon Johnson’s legal Mr. Fixit (and later Supreme Court appointment) and was nearly incoherent. Fortas put Jenkins in George Washington Hospital and tried mightily to get the story spiked, unsuccessfully. After it hit the front pages, on October 15, Jenkins, married and with six children, resigned immediately. Jenkins and President Johnson had a tremendous stroke of luck when, the very day the story broke, Nikita Khrushchev was ousted in a Kremlin coup d’état and the British government of Sir Alex Douglas Home fell on a no-confidence vote in Parliament. The day after that Mainland China exploded its first atomic bomb, and the Jenkins story was pushed far into the back pages. Although Barry Goldwater was way behind in every public opinion poll, he exhibited a decency not common in Washington when he refused to exploit the story in any way.
August 30, 2007
Larry Craig’s Antecedents Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:50 AM EST Yesterday, Fred Allen posted here an item that had shown up on Andrew Sullivan’s blog. It was a humorous story told by Tallulah Bankhead and repeated on Tuesday in connection with the breaking scandal involving Senator Larry Craig. This wasn’t the only post on Sullivan’s site about the Craig affair. Jamie Kirchick, a guest-blogger who normally writes for The New Republic, posted yesterday about a 1955 incident that provides some useful historical background to the contemporary incident surrounding the Idaho legislator. I think it merits a link. “In the fall of 1955,” Kirchick writes, “12 men were arrested in Boise, Idaho for ‘infamous crimes against nature.’ Over a decade, it had been alleged, some of the city’s most prominent men operated an underworld gay prostitution ring with hundreds of teenage boys. . . . One of the more humane participants in this episode was the chief of the state’s Department of Mental Health, who, rather than advocate that the men face jail time, offered that, ‘One alternative might be to let them form their own society and be left alone.’” As Kirchick notes, the facts of this scandal turned out to be considerably less sensational than first reported, but it created an ugly atmosphere in Idaho all the same. It’s risky to play armchair psychologist for a public figure like Craig, but one imagines that, as a 10-year-old growing up in Washington County, the future senator might have heard something of the blowup in Boise. A lot of people are rushing to judge Craig’s private behavior and to find hypocrisy by comparing it with his public record. Their conclusions are largely reasonable, but I find it’s hard not to pity Craig a little, considering the spectacular intolerance he must have witnessed as a youth. The man didn’t grow up in the twenty-first century, and, to quote Kirchick again, it’s perfectly possible that “1955 has hung over Larry Craig all his life.” There’s also a decent comparison to be made between Craig’s problems and those of a different Western senator, dating to 1954. Lester Hunt, a Democratic senator from Wyoming, had run afoul of Joe McCarthy and the Senate’s Republican majority. He was up for reelection in 1954. Republican Senator Styles Bridges, wanting to grab the seat for the GOP, told Hunt that he should forget about his reelection bid, or else. The “or else” in this case referred to information about Hunt’s son getting busted for soliciting an undercover officer for sex, and the possibility that the incident could be widely publicized in his home state. Hunt acceded to Bridges’s demands and decided to retire. Then he killed himself on Capitol Hill. Larry Craig didn’t plead guilty to solicitation but rather to a much less serious, almost farcically silly charge. This being the case, one might expect that he’d dodge the kind of bullying Lester Hunt experienced half a century ago. But it’s notable that Senators John McCain and Norm Coleman have already called on Craig to resign, when neither made a similar demand upon David Vitter, who admitted to hiring prostitutes in June. There’s a hint of Styles Bridges in this double standard, and things are bound to get uglier.
August 29, 2007
Across Noir America: An Interview with Barry Gifford (Part 2) Posted by Allen Barra at 05:00 PM EST This is the conclusion of the interview that begins here. You’ve worked on two films with David Lynch, Wild At Heart and Lost Highway, which had critics arguing over who was the real auteur of the films. I take it that you didn’t see the collaboration as a problem, that your vision and Lynch’s were pretty much in sync. Actually, Lynch and I have worked together on a few projects, three of which, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway, and Hotel Room, were completed. I have a hard time with the auteur theory. There are very, very few filmmakers who qualify for this distinction. Lynch’s films are certainly identifiable as directed by him, but he still, at least in the past, has collaborated very well with writers, cinematographers, editors, sound technicians, composers, etc. The French went a little bit daffy with this auteur business. Isn’t it enough just to say that certain directors have a recognizable style? Let’s put Orson Welles, Buster Keaton, and a couple of others on that list. Each film fan can decide who is an auteur and who is not. Let’s just say David Lynch is a great filmmaker, and leave it at that. One of the people you dedicate The Cavalry Charges to is Matt Dillon, and one of the most interesting chapters in the book is how you two came to work together on the film Dillon directed, City of Ghosts. You finally got the film made, and Matt fulfilled his desire to shoot almost exclusively in Cambodia. The story has to do with a con artist on the lam in Cambodia, which has some plot similarities with your own novel Port Tropique. Would you summarize your travails in getting the project going? Matt first contacted me way back in the early 1980s about my novel Port Tropique, which he felt would be a great film that he could star in. He was too young at the time, and you are correct, after many years Matt and I finally did get together on a film project that contains echoes of my novel. City of Ghosts began after a trip Matt took to Southeast Asia. He wanted to set a film there that he could direct and act in. I had always loved Joseph Conrad’s novel An Outcast of the Islands and the film of it made by Carol Reed, and I suggested to Matt that that story could be an inspiration for our own. Matt and I wrote a screen story, obtained development money from a couple of French producers, and set about writing the screenplay. We worked on and off for several years, in many locations, until we finished it. At that time Matt was able to raise money for the production and was promised distribution by United Artists/MGM. He set off for Cambodia with a stellar cast that included James Caan, Stellan Skarsgard, Gerard Depardieu, and others, and with great difficulty produced it. To my mind he did a great job; it was certainly an ambitious undertaking seeing as how it was the first feature film shot in Cambodia since 1964. City of Ghosts got great reviews in most of the major newspapers and magazines, much to our delight. Of course, the film didn’t make any money, mostly because UA/MGM decided to sell it as an “art” film rather than an action-adventure film. It was certainly closer to Vera Cruz than to Lost Highway. At present Matt and I are dreaming up another film to collaborate on. You’ll probably see it in about 10 years, if we’re lucky. As a cultural critic, you’re best known for writing about books, film, and music that are—how should I say this?—under the radar. If there were a Barry Gifford Film Fest, and you could show an audience, say, three American films that they probably hadn’t seen, what would they be? And what three American novels would you have your students read in a lit course that generally aren’t taught in American schools? And what three albums would you choose as a deejay that don’t usually get played on radio? American films: Some Came Running, based on James Jones’s novel, Out of the Past, and two by John Huston, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Asphalt Jungle. There are films that are more obscure, but those are four great American movies I can watch over and over. In fact, I have a fifth that I must add, Lonely Are the Brave, starring Kirk Douglas, which most people haven’t seen, made in 1962. Three American novels: Two Serious Ladies, by Jane Bowles, The Optimist’s Daughter, by Eudora Welty, and The Town and the City, by Jack Kerouac. If the latter is not obscure enough for you, let’s throw in Masters of Atlantis, by Charles Portis. I don’t know about three albums, per se, but I would recommend music by the following three Americans: Don Covay, Earl King, and Erma Thomas. There are thousands of albums that deserve to be listened to that don’t get airplay. And I would add, along with Erma, Ann Peebles. Can’t keep it to three. Sorry.
August 29, 2007
Historical Bathroom Humor Posted by Frederick E. Allen at 12:45 PM EST Apropos of the matter of Sen. Larry Craig, there’s a 1985 book of Hollywood interviews, People Will Talk , by John Kobal, that contains this historical anecdote, from the actress and bonne vivante Tallulah Bankhead (thanks to Andrew Sullivan’s blog for digging it up): “There was the time she was in Washington for a Democratic Convention honoring her ‘divine friend, Adlai Stevenson.’ . . . And during a long speech by some senator she had to go to the john, but found when she was settled in for the duration that there was no toilet paper at hand. ‘So I looked down and saw a pair of feet in the next stall. I knocked very politely and said: “Excuse me, dahling, I don’t have any toilet paper. Do you?” And this very proper Yankee voice said: “No, I don’t.” Well, dahling, I had to get back to the podium for Adlai’s speech, so I asked her, very politely you understand, “Excuse me dahling, but do you have any Kleenex?” And this now quite chilly voice said: “No, I don’t.” So I said: “Well then, dahling, do you happen to have two fives for a ten?”’”
August 29, 2007
Across Noir America: An Interview with Barry Gifford (Part 1) Posted by Allen Barra at 11:00 AM EST According to Wikipedia, Barry Gifford—novelist, poet, critic, and screenwriter—is “known for his distinctive mix of American landscapes and film noir and Beat Generation–influenced literary madness.” Madness, perhaps, but with a method. Gifford has mastered numerous literary forms from fiction (including Wild at Heart, made into a feature film by David Lynch, and this year’s Memories from a Sinking Ship) to biography (Jack’s Book, an oral biography of Jack Kerouac), screenwriting (Lynch’s Lost Highway and City of Ghosts, directed by Matt Dillon), sportswriting (A Day At the Races: The Education of a Racetracker), memoir (A Good Man to Know, about growing up the son of a small-time gangster in Chicago), and even publisher (his Black Lizard Press led a mid-1980s revival of American pulp crime classics). He has also established a cult audience as a cultural critic in such books as Out of The Past: Adventures in Film Noir and The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Other Unforgettable Films. His latest book is The Cavalry Charges: Writings on Books, Film and Music, from Thunder’s Mouth Press. The Cavalry Charges muses on such Gifford fetishes as Artie Shaw’s music, the novels of the mysterious B. Traven, and the horror films of Val Lewton. He talked to us from his home in the Bay Area. (His website is www.barrygifford.com.) This interview is appearing in two parts. Your work has been so diverse, from fiction to memoir to film scripts, that it’s sometimes difficult to get a handle on you. The Cavalry Charges seems like a good place for a reader to jump in because it deals with so many subjects dear to your heart—most of them, if you don’t mind my saying so, way out of the vast left field of American culture. For instance, the essay on the mysterious B. Traven, the author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. I love the first sentence; “Does it really matter who B. Traven was?” Was he an influence on your early writing? In your essay “Read ’Em and Weep, My Favorite Novels,” you list some books I expected to see—by Nelson Algren, Raymond Chandler, Jack Kerouac—but at least one selection threw me for a loop—the Chip Hilton novels by Claire Bee. What kind of cultural stew shaped your sensibility as a writer of fiction and film? Who were the writers who shaped your own neon-noir sensibility? My formal education was scattered and brief. My reading from the very beginning was random, and later on I read whatever was recommended to me by people I respected. I still do. B. Traven was certainly an early influence, as were Jack London, Joseph Conrad, and Jack Kerouac. They inspired me in terms of a lifestyle as well as a direction in which to develop a literary style, although I don’t write like any of them. I’ve learned equally from writers as diverse as E. M. Forster, Jean Rhys, and so many others. A recent favorite of mine has been Alvaro Mutis, a neglected author in virtually any language other than his native Spanish. I write in many forms—fiction, poetry, screenplays, plays, essays—because they are all, fortunately, available to me. I began as a songwriter, and sometimes the inspiration to write something continues to express itself as a song. I particularly admire the songwriters Augustine Lara, Doc Pomus, Hoagy Carmichael, and Smokey Robinson. These composers have influenced me as much as any poet or novelist. About Clair Bee and the Chip Hilton novels, when I was very young I identified with Chip Hilton, or rather fantasized about having a life like his, in a small town with a gray-haired mother who was a telephone operator, a job as a soda jerk, and being a star athlete who helped everyone with their problems—a life almost entirely unlike my own at that time. My mother was certainly nothing like Chip Hilton’s mother. It’s disgraceful that the recent reprints of the Chip Hilton novels have been revised by a hand other than Clair Bee’s to include religious, namely Christian, instruction. This is a sacrilege, pun intended. What you call my “neon-noir” sensibility was formed from my life on the street. Writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, and Jim Thompson were not so much influences as good beat reporters. Thompson, however, interested me more than the other so called genre writers because of his peculiar psychological edge. Since you mentioned Thompson, could you straighten me out on something? Your name is associated with the Jim Thompson revival of the 1980s. Before then, he was someone who many talked about but few ever read. What was your connection to Thompson’s work? I first read Jim Thompson’s novels when I was 13 or 14 years old, bought off of a wire paperback rack in a drugstore in Tampa, Florida. They made a big impression on me at the time, and I never forgot them. In 1982 I found many Thompson novels in print in France, and I bought all I could find and read them in French. Then in 1984 I founded Black Lizard Books and wound up publishing 13 Thompson novels in that series. Black Lizard ceased publishing in 1989, at which time the backlist was sold to Vintage books. The line is now called Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. I wrote the introductions to all the Thompson novels. He was virtually out of print in this country when Black Lizard began, and I was happy to have brought him to the attention of the reading public again. Several of the Black Lizard Thompson books were made into feature films.
August 27, 2007
Not Just Peace in Our Time Posted by Alexander Burns at 09:25 PM EST John Steele Gordon’s lead feature today, on the Kellogg-Briand Pact, makes an admirable effort to rescue the treaty’s reputation. It is very easy, in retrospect, to deride the agreement as a preposterously idealistic and doomed experiment. It certainly was one, but it’s a mistake to dismiss the treaty offhand. Even if the Kellogg-Briand Pact was a failure, the fact that it was ever enacted is notable and says a lot about the international atmosphere of the 1920s. Mr. Gordon’s article does a great job of probing some worthwhile questions about the agreement: Why was it enacted in the first place? Did it have any impact? Did its signers really think it would work? Readers should read the full article, but I would summarize its conclusions in the following way: When Japan and Germany manufactured attacks by their rivals to justify war, they did so “admitting the moral and legal force of the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Before the pact, war had been nothing more than a way for sovereign states to carry on politics by other means. After Kellogg-Briand, it was a flat violation of international law, a fact that had consequences at the war crimes tribunals held after World War II in Nuremberg and elsewhere.” This point is worth considering. I think the influence of this treaty in promoting disapproval of offensive war could be overstated. Throughout history, warring parties have attempted to claim moral superiority over their rivals by posing as victims. The U.S. government under James Polk, for example, seized on a bogus reason for war with Mexico in 1846. The firefight that Polk treated as a reason for war may or may not have taken place on American soil, and the Mexican troops who opened fire on U.S. forces might have been perfectly within their rights to do so. Polk’s real concern, of course, was territorial expansion, and this murky incident served his interests well. Countries and individuals with aggressive aims have always found it advantageous to present their actions as defensive. The trend didn’t start with imperial Japan. All the same, I believe Mr. Gordon is right that the Kellogg-Briand pact helped produce a world in which offensive war is even more frowned upon. At the very least, by promoting the fairly new concept of international law the treaty set a precedent for treaties to follow. The notion of an international criminal court, for example, has its roots in the same interwar idealism as the Kellogg-Briand Pact. Incidentally, an interesting side effect to our having attached such stigma to offensive war is that now even wars that are actually fought for defensive reasons are suspected of being offensive wars in disguise. There are plenty of people, in the United States and abroad, who believe that 9/11 may have been an inside job designed to provide the Bush administration with justification for an oil war in Afghanistan. The idea is mad, but at least part of its appeal comes from the fact that, were we ever to have a government misguided enough to launch an elective war in Western Asia, it would surely need to cook up some defensive rationale for that war. Hopefully, we’ll never see such a crazy scheme in practice. Oh, wait . . .
August 26, 2007
Mad Men Posted by Ellen Feldman at 08:45 PM EST Perhaps it is blasphemy to say this, but I was never a fan of The Sopranos. While I found some of the earlier episodes intriguing and fully realized, the progressive exploitation of America’s love affair with the Mafia—all that violence and endless shots of strippers pole dancing in the background—soon put me off. But now that Tony Soprano has either retired or been whacked, depending on your interpretation of the final scene, the race is on to crown a successor. Last Thursday, August 23, The New York Times ran two articles citing Mad Men, an AMC series about Madison Avenue admen, their secretaries, wives, and mistresses, set in 1960. One piece in the Entertainment section reported that HBO had lost its preeminent position among cable channels and added that it, as well as Showtime, had turned down the new hit series, Mad Men. The second, in the Style section, swooned about the period sets, clothing, and artifacts. If character was plot for Henry James, crystal highball glasses and nifty lighters tell the story here. I would be the last to deny the importance of the accurate prop in fiction, whether on the screen or on the page. John O’Hara said reams about a character merely by describing the click of her Delman pumps as she crossed the concourse of Penn Station. But he said even more by letting those accurately accoutered characters talk and act. While I too am in thrall to the ambiance of Mad Men, the real strength of the series lies in the characterizations. The men and women who prowl the agency offices bear a greater resemblance to the characters in nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels than to their two-dimensional predecessors in television sitcoms. I am not an authority on the genre, but it seems to me from the few I have seen that even the best sitcoms relied on disturbingly single-note characters. One was obsessive about cleanliness, another was pathologically insecure; one man constantly denigrated women, one woman was always on the prowl for a man. The laugh track only intensified this harping on one or two qualities. Each week the situation changed and the actors faced a new challenge, but their responses remained the same. There were no surprises, but there was plenty of familiarity and a high comfort level. In Mad Men the characters’ reactions are less predictable. They make be unlikable—many of them are—but they seem to be doing their best to figure out who they are and how to navigate the world in which they find themselves. The series is not flawless. Much of it is broad and over-the-top. I worked in an advertising agency for a single year approximately a decade later, and while there was a great deal of drinking and smoking, bottles did not usually come out of bottom drawers until after five and not everyone in the office breathed smoke like a dragon every time he or she opened his mouth. And while I suspect the sexism of the men in the show is fairly accurate, the lack of ambition in the women was not nearly so universal. As for the sex, as opposed to sexism, affairs, like alcohol, may have been rampant, but few women were as cavalier about them or as determined not to have them turn into marriage as the playgirls in Mad Men seem to be. And no reputable psychiatrist would have called a patient’s spouse to deliver a diagnosis. Nonetheless, the series has a lot more to recommend it than horsehair crinolines, chrome cocktail shakers, and tailfins. The hungry, striving, confused men and women who inhabit this half-century-ago world have more in common with Anthony Trollope’s creations than with their forebears who dominated the small screen for so many years. And oh, yes, the series has one more attraction, not despite, but because of the rampant sexism and anti-Semitism. (Forget about racism. There is not a person of any color but lily white to be seen.) The other night while I was watching the most recent installment, my husband, who is not a particular fan, looked up from his book and observed, “I guess we have made some progress after all.”
August 26, 2007
The True Story Behind September Dawn Posted by Alexander Burns at 12:15 AM EST A controversial new movie opened this week. September Dawn is a retelling of the story of the Mountain Meadows Massacre, the 1857 incident in which Mormon settlers killed over a hundred Americans bound for California. I had been planning to see the film, as the episode it recounts is a pretty fascinating and disturbing tale of the nineteenth-century American West. Then word came out in the New York Times that it’s an overwrought melodrama built around a weak, contrived love story. I imagine that judgment might be a little harsh, but suffice it to say I’m not tripping over myself to reach a theater near me. In assessing September Dawn, The New York Times mostly focuses on the cinematic and narrative qualities of the film, rather than closely examining the accuracy of its historical information. This might seem like a dodge, but after reading Roger Ebert’s review of the same movie, the Times’s restraint looks admirable. Ebert’s review is a mishmash of political statements, speculations about the filmmakers’ motives, and incoherent meditations on the nature of religious strife. After declaring that the movie must either be an allegory about 9/11 or a hit job on the Mormon presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Ebert comes uncomfortably close to saying that it is socially irresponsible to depict the Mountain Meadows Massacre. “There isn’t anything to be gained in telling the story in this way,” Ebert writes. “It generates bad feelings on all sides, and, at a time when Mormons are at pains to explain they are Christians, underlines the way that these Mormons consider all Christians to be ‘gentiles.’” The problem with what Ebert writes is that, regardless of the very real challenges contemporary Mormons might face, the Mountain Meadows Massacre actually was an appalling product of paranoia and militant religious separatism. Finding a place for Mormons in the expanding United States was no insignificant challenge for the young republic, and the Mountain Meadows Massacre was profoundly disruptive to that process. I don’t know whether September Dawn tells this story in an acceptable or unacceptable way. But even the nicest Hollywood gloss couldn’t take the ugliness out of this episode, the known details of which have actually gotten worse as time has gone by. This is all a longwinded way of saying that, while critics are bound to consider this film in the context of present-day politics and may, like Ebert, shy away from the most unpleasant facts of the events of September 11, 1857, viewers might want to give those facts another look. Fortunately, one can do so without leaving this website. I recommend the articles here, here, here, and here—at least for starters.
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