JFK myths, debunked

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By Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Former TIME staffer Mark Updegrove has written a new biography of President John F. Kennedy called Improbable Grace: JFK in the Presidency. For TIME.com this week, he highlights three of the most common myths and misconceptions about JFK—from his role in the Cuban Missile Crisis to his approach to the Vietnam War and civil rights issues. In doing so, Updegrove explains why one of the youngest Presidents has also become one of the most mythologized—and what our collective fantasies of him reveal about America. Click here to read the full story. Here’s more history to know:

HISTORY ON TIME.COM How Trevor Reed, the American Just Released From Russian Custody, Fits Into the History of Prisoner Swaps By Olivia B. Waxman "The State Department has a lot more of these negotiations than most people could ever possibly realize" Read More » Climate Change Became Politicized in the 1990s. It Didn’t Have To Be That Way. By Eugene Linden To understand why the world didn't act faster on climate change, we have to understand what changed in the 1990s Read More » Deported From France as Convicts, These Women Helped Build New Orleans Women helped weave the diverse experiences from the four corners of France into the urban fabric of the new city of Louisiana. Read More » The True Story Behind The Northman By Shannon Carlin A historical consultant who worked on 'The Northman' describes recreating the Viking Age, including wardrobe and weapons Read More » The True Story Behind A Very British Scandal By Eloise Barry The show—which airs on Amazon Prime April 20—is a tale of sexual desire and aristocratic excess in 1960s Britain. Read More »

FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1968: John Updike “Updike in Couples is really only reworking the territory that he has claimed for his own since he made his first appearance as a New Yorker short-story writer 15 years ago. In his own words, he is ‘kind of elegiacally concerned with the Protestant middle class.’ Among modern American writers, only John Cheever shares Updike's sense of accumulated loss, his feeling that the national past contained a wholeness and an essential goodness that have now evaporated.” (April 26, 1968) Read More » This week in 1974: Patty Hearst “Only three months ago, Patty Hearst was a quiet, comely heiress to a famed publishing fortune who spent much of her time preparing for her intended marriage to Steven Andrew Weed, 26, a graduate philosophy student. Kidnaped on Feb. 4 by the obscure revolutionary band that grandiosely calls itself an army but is more of a ragtag platoon, she seemed close to release two weeks ago, after her family started a free-food program for the Bay Area's needy…Then she stunned her family and friends by announcing that she had renounced them, joined her abductors, and adopted the name Tania, after the German-Argentine mistress of Latin American Revolutionary Che Guevara. Whether through conversion or coercion, she materialized last week in the role of a foul-mouthed bank robber.” (April 29, 1974) Read More » This week in 1987: U2 “U2's sixth and best album, The Joshua Tree, in stores for little more than a month, hit No. 1 on Billboard's chart this week. The album's first single, With or Without You , has made the band's heaviest mark on Top 40 radio and is already in the Top Ten…’We don't think we're that good, really,’ says Bono, 26, who writes the lyrics and fronts the band both as lead singer and resident shaman. ‘We think we are overrated, and though we're concerned about living up to people's expectations, it scares us even to live up to our own expectations.’” (April 27, 1987) Read More »

HIGHLIGHTS FROM AROUND THE WEB World: For the Washington Post, as Russia’s war on Ukraine continues, journalist Gordon F. Sander interviews historians about the Soviet-era parallels to Russian President Putin’s crackdown on dissent. Business: NPR’s Alana Wise reports on a conflict between the foundation that runs the home of former U.S. President James Madison and the committee representing descendents of the enslaved people who toiled on his land. Television: For Slate, writer Alicia Haddick explains what to know about Japan’s colonial past to provide context for the Apple TV+ series Pachinko. Fairgrounds: Historian Grant Wong talks to fellow experts about the importance of world’s fairs in the early 20th century and how the concept fell out of fashion, for Smithsonian. Leisure: For JSTOR Daily, Betsy Golden Kellem sashays into the history of dance marathons, which took off as a cheap entertainment option during the Great Depression.

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