As the imminent Fourth of July holiday ushers in the annual paeans to American independence and editorials about the importance of remembering its history, several momentous chapters in our national story—including the temporary misplacement of America, the unfreezing of the Earth, and the invention of the prairie dog—are once again missing from the familiar Independence Day narrative.

So it's a good thing that, just in time to correct these grievous oversights, we rediscovered in the vault Walter Blair's Tall Tale America, a classic of American humor that features as its chief historical figures not presidents, military leaders, and tycoons but folk heroes and popular characters such as Davy Crockett (and his pipe-smoking pet bear Death Hug), Old Stormalong, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan, and John Henry.

More traditional characters do make brief appearances: Blair briefly tells the story, for example, of when Thomas Jefferson "put on one of his oldest suits of clothes, just to show he was one of the folks.… walked from his boarding house through the mud up the hill to the brand new Senate chamber, and started to run the country." But the tall tales of "Daniel Boone's Discovery of Kentucky and His Other Puzzling Habits" and "Seaman Tom Smith's Theory about Dry Oceans"—not to mention their accompanying illustrations by John Sandford—are, if we may say so, much more interesting.

After being arrested in October of 2006 for the murder of acclaimed Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya, three men—two Chechen brothers and a former police investigator—were found not guilty by a jury on charges that they provided logistical support for her killing. But today's New York Times reports that Russia's Supreme Court has now overturned their acquittals, as well as the acquittal of "a fourth defendant, a former colonel in the F.S.B., the successor to the K.G.B., who faced lesser charges," on the grounds that "there had been procedural violations by the judges and the defense during the first trial." According to the NYT:

Ms. Politkovskaya's colleagues said they were not surprised by the court's decision but said they feared that the new trial would be a distraction from their central concern: finding the gunman and the mastermind in the crime.… Investigators say they believe that Rustam Makhmudov, a brother of the two Chechen defendants, carried out the murder, shooting Ms. Politkovskaya, 48, with a Makarov 9-millimeter pistol on Oct. 7, 2006, in the hallway of her apartment building as she returned home.

He is thought to be in hiding abroad. The person or people who ordered the killing have not been found.

But, the article quotes Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of the Novya Gazeta where Ms. Politkovskaya worked, saying that whoever ordered the killing, "it is obvious that the one who ordered it is a very prominent person." It has been widely speculated that the motive for Politkovskaya's murder was her outspoken criticism of the Russia's handling of its bloody conflict with Chechnya that began with the movement for Chechen independence in 1991 and continues to the present day. Her second book on the subject, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya was published by the press in 2003. In the book Politkovskaya recounts the horrors of living in the midst of the war, examines how the war has affected Russian society, and takes a hard look at how people on both sides are profiting from it. A powerful account of what is acknowledged as one of the most dangerous and least understood conflicts on the planet, Politkovskaya's book offers one of the world's only window's into this region and its troubles.

For more on the Politkovskaya's book read this excerpt. Also see our past posts on Politkovskaya's murder and the ensuing trial, or follow the NYT's coverage here.

At the press conference he held yesterday to explain his now-infamous weekend jaunt to Argentina, South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford seemed to be trying to say "that he screwed up, in the biggest possible way, because he lost his bearings. He lost his self-control. He was indulgent. He forgot that there were other humans in the world." That, at least, is how Slate's John Dickerson tried to explain what others described as Sanford's "rambling" and "strange" apology for the trip and the extramarital affair that prompted it.

Though the governor's behavior may indeed be unorthodox, the scandal itself is, of course, not. A quick survey of news from Italy to Japan to the UK reconfirms that he shares indulgent behavior and loss of self-control with politicians the world over.

While these kinds of antics are mostly painful and costly, the silver lining to their global reach is that they can offer a singularly revealing means of comparing cultures. Mark D. West uses just such a method in Secrets, Sex, and Spectacle, in which he organizes the seemingly random worlds of Japanese and American scandal to explore well-ingrained similarities and contrasts in law and society.

His study of scandals ranging from corporate fraud and baseball cheaters to political corruption and celebrity sexcapades approaches this inherently fascinating phenomenon from an entirely fresh angle. And it will be, if history is any guide, perennially timely.

Our new series, American Beginnings will publish original books, written by scholars but accessible to students and a general readership, that address critical issues in American history from the initial period of European contact through the beginning of the twentieth century. The series will focus particularly on questions of power, in all its manifold forms, in the centuries when America evolved from a loose collection of disparate colonies to a full-fledged nation-state. While it will include books on the kinds of institutions typically associated with power— government, legal systems, and voluntary organizations, to name a few—the series also seeks studies that explore expressions of power in more intimate contexts, such as the family and the household.

By affording a broad chronological frame, American Beginnings encourages work that moves beyond conventional periodization and in turn brings new insight to the formative influences on the early American past.

The series will include works by senior and junior scholars from a broad array of subfields, including political history, labor history, African American history, gender history, and financial history. In doing so, it hopes to facilitate novel interdisciplinary discussions about the practices of power in the American past.

For more information, you may contact Edward Gray (egray@fsu.edu), Stephen Mihm (mihm@uga.edu), or Mark Peterson (mark-peterson@berkeley.edu). You may also contact Robert Devens, the Press's editor for American history (rdevens@press.uchicago.edu).

Link to the announcement or download in PDF format.

Just a quick post to point you towards Slate magazines' weekly poem, which is currently featuring Peg Boyers, author of Hard Bread and more recently Honey with Tobacco, reading her poem "The Fate of Pleasure."

Each week Slate's poetry editor Robert Pinsky chooses a poem to be featured on their site and added to the audio archive at Slate's Poetry Podcast. So in the spirit of full disclosure it should also be mentioned that Pinsky has recently released a new book with the Press as well: Thousands of Broadways: Dreams and Nightmares of the American Small Town. Though not a poetry book Thousands of Broadways does offer up some of the fascinating literary insights of its author as he examines the history and character of America's small towns, including reflections on his own time growing up in one.

Find out more about Pinsky's new book and Boyer's poetry on the press's website.

Don Rose, a former spokesman for the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, condemned the reunion at a City Hall press conference held by Chicago Copwatch, a community group that is organizing a march to the Fraternal Order of Police hall—where the event is being held—on the night of the reunion.

Rose took issue with the "provocative language" used by reunion organizers. . .

"They seem to be seeking to rewrite history," Rose said. "These were unprovoked assaults by the police."

A counterprotest is planned.

John Schultz, a former professor and chair of the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College, was in the middle of the action on those tumultuous August days. While other writers contemplated the events of the 1968 Chicago riots from the safety of their hotel rooms, Schultz was in the city streets, being threatened by police, choking on tear gas, and listening to all the rage, fear, and confusion around him. We recently reissued the book that resulted from his experience of the protests, No One Was Killed: The Democratic National Convention, August 1968. The book is Schultz's account of the contradictions and chaos of convention week, the adrenalin, the sense of drama and history, and how the mainstream press was getting it all wrong. Read an excerpt.

Also relevant to any discussion of the role of the police in the 1968 DNC protests is Frank Kusch's book Battleground Chicago: The Police and the 1968 Democratic National Convention the only book on Chicago '68 that gives voice to the officers on the street. You can also read an excerpt from that one.

From nameless Gitmo detainees to warrantless wiretaps, the abuse of executive power by successive presidents continues to make headlines. Even NPR's This American Life entered the fray with a piece that aired last weekend about the 1953 U.S. Supreme Court case that created a "state secret privilege" permitting the executive branch to derail normal judicial procedures for cases it claimed would disclose national security secrets. The TAL story reveals that the original 1953 case, in fact, contained no state secrets at all—calling into question not only the government's motives for moving to dismiss that trial, but undermining the legal basis for the string of cases shut down since—up through the Bush administrations and, unfortunately, the current administration as well.

If this were not enough to concern the ordinary citizen, Peter M. Shane, professor of law at Ohio State University and author of the new book, Madison's Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy argues in a recent article for George Mason University's History News Network that the most systematic White House power grab has garnered much less publicity.

Over the past thirty years, Shane argues, the White House has taken increasing control over "domestic rulemaking activity by administrative agencies"—agencies responsible for regulating everything from the air we breathe to discrimination in schools and entitlements to health care— by subjecting them to intensive scrutiny by the president's Office of Management and Budget. Along with torture, domestic surveillance, and executive secrecy—which Shane also discusses in his book—he sees rulemaking by the executive branch as a significant threat. Shane writes:

The move towards centralization of policy control in OMB should worry Americans for three reasons. First, a tightly controlled bureaucracy is actually less responsive to public sentiment than a bureaucracy in which administrators enjoy some room for independent judgment. This seems counterintuitive because we elect presidents, but not bureaucrats. The problem, however, is that the President is unlikely to reflect the views of the median voter on each and every issue of significant public concern. Because the President chooses agency heads, they will all share his general policy outlook, but each agency head is somewhat more inclined than the President to respect the median voter's view on the particular issues that his or her specific agency addresses.

Second, the system is potentially less accountable to the public. The more decision making is concentrated in the White House, the easier it becomes to use executive privilege as a shield against disclosure of the decision making process. To be fair, recent Presidents have taken some significant steps to make White House regulatory review more open and transparent than it was in the 1980s, but the potential for changing course towards more secrecy is always present.

Third, the system adds months of delay to the process of issuing new regulations. As I detail in Madison's Nightmare, it has never been demonstrated that the reduction in regulatory costs produced by White House review has adequately compensated for the value of benefits foregone by delaying new health, safety and environmental regulations for periods often lasting six months or longer.

Shane concludes:

I wrote Madison's Nightmare partly in the hope of explaining persuasively … how aggressive presidentialism undermines good governance. Much of the book deals with the dramatic questions of torture, domestic surveillance, and executive secrecy that are so often in the news. I hope that the book also brings at least some greater attention to the centralization of presidential policy making control, which deserves far more public attention and debate than it has seen since its inception.

Read the complete article on the History News Network and read an excerpt from the book.

Fifteen years ago this month, police in California charged O. J. Simpson with murdering his former wife and her friend, then chased him for about 50 miles before he surrendered, starting a process that would lead to one of the most famous trials in recent memory.

As Robert Ferguson reminds us in The Trial in American Life, an estimated 150 million Americans, the largest TV audience ever, watched the verdict, which arrived "only after thirteen months of media frenzy." These excesses were, well, particularly excessive—but they are not unique. In his fascinating investigation of prominent trials in American history, Ferguson points out that "media frenzies during noteworthy trials have become such a staple of our times that dozens of instances will come to mind."

But despite its cultural prominence, the trial is, in reality, almost extinct. In 2002, less than 2 percent of federal civil cases culminated in a trial, down from 12 percent forty years earlier. And the number of criminal trials also dropped dramatically, from 9 percent of cases in 1976 to only 3 percent in 2002. In his new The Death of the American Trial, Robert Burns warns that this decline could lead not only to the loss of a vaunted institution, but also to the dangerous erosion of American democracy.

Discussing his book in a recent post, the Virginia Quarterly Review blog noted that

high-profile lawsuits with a controversial verdict—the OJ Simpson trial, for example—may have affected social perceptions about the value of decisions delivered by jury, but as Burns demonstrates in his book, the trial is actually a fundamental component of American democracy.… The 20th century has left us with a legacy of famous trials and Supreme Court verdicts that have shaped our history as a country. As we move into the 21st century with even greater challenges ahead, let us hope that this part of our legal system does not come to exist only in television reruns.