With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.: Still unpublished ... years and years of personal diaries

... To a nation, he was a compass point. Adore him or disagree with him, he spoke with a historian's worldview. The architects of the war in Iraq, he told C-SPAN in an interview that will be aired on Saturday, "do not know enough history, and they duplicated the stupidity of the Vietnam War."

At lunch, he said he was planning to write the second volume of his autobiography. Yesterday, a spokesman for the publisher of the first part, Houghton Mifflin, said that as far as she knew a manuscript does not exist. The working title for Volume 2 was "Unfinished Business."

Maybe he did write one too many opinion pieces and appear on one too many interview shows. But, according to his son Robert, who lives in Alexandria, there are more works of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that might be of interest to historians and history: years and years of personal diaries.
Read entire article at WaPo