Toggle Menu

Rap Sheet

Links on R&P from around the web

Dispatches from the Democratic National Convention

posted on September 5, 2012

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kelly Candaele contributes interviews from the Democratic National Convention. He talks with Sean Wilentz, professor of American history at Princeton University and a Democratic Party supporter. who tackles a range of subjects, from Ayn Rand and Ronald Reagan to the Civil War and Howard Zinn. “To the extent that historians who came of age during the 1960s and ‘70s—and I’m one of them—saw social movements as the engine of political change, I think we have learned to think much more subtly about how politics operates across the board,” Wilentz says. “Some historians think that there is the noble left and then there is everything else. And that’s just not the way American politics works—or how American history works.” Candaele then interviews John Lewis, who also came of age in the 1960s as a Civil Rights leader and is now a congressional representative from Georgia. He too reflects on history in light of this year’s DNC. Noting the influence Martin Luther King and Gandhi had on his life, Lewis says, “[M]y faith told me that there is a better way, and a more humane way … I believe in something called the spirit of history. You have to be in tune with the spirit and let it use you and let it guide you.”   

Read at Los Angeles Review of Books