The stories that a nation tells about its history provide a foundation for building community, creating institutions and transmitting values. For a pluralistic democracy such as the United States, the work that historians call "constructing a usable past" is vital to the task of building a future.

Robert McChesney and John Nichols feel that Americans have a patriotic duty to support newsgathering with our tax dollars. They've laid out their case in a new book, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (Nation Books, 2010), and they're barnstorming the country to promote their ideas for government mechanisms to support the fourth estate.

The Supreme Court's declaration last week that corporations are people with an unlimited right to spend money on political campaigns has set off a frenzy of blogospheric speculation about just how far the doctrine of legal personhood will go. In fact, one corporation has even declared its candidacy for Congress. 

How do we know the truth of what is happening in Haiti - especially those of us who are in the global north and west, our perceptions shaped by a tragic history, largely unknown, in which our governments have often been complicit? As the immediate rescue effort becomes a sustained task of recovery how do we know when ideology and naked self-interest warp news accounts and recovery efforts? 

It's census time in the United States. The US Constitution requires a national head-count every 10 years, and the exercise is typically fraught with arcane debates over how people should be allowed to classify themselves, what questions should be asked, and who gets to decide what should be counted. For those of us who study the question of what it means to be American, the census is a historical marker of the judgments made by those with the power to name. This year, for example, we have the option of identifying ourselves as "Negro" when we fill out our forms - an option that the Census Bureau says it is providing because 56,175 people who filled out the 2000 Census so named themselves.