Example #547,282 why a modern liberal arts BA has all the inherent honor and usefulness of a fake phone number scrawled on a cocktail napkin: Michael Todd Landis writing on George Mason University’s History News Network proscribing language we are allowed to use when talking about the Civil War.

Landis, Assistant Professor of History at Tarleton State University, doesn’t really have much to say, and certainly nothing new. Mostly, his brief post reads like the work of an average faculty lounge lizard making sure his left-wing credentials are in order for the new school year.

Although the term “anchor baby” has been around for only a couple of decades, the concept is several centuries old, believes Chauncey DeVega. In a Friday article, DeVega contended that the earliest American anchor babies were born to colonists, and that the modern term “cannot possibly be separated from the nightmare of white supremacy, of a democracy where human rights and citizenship were based on a person’s melanin count and parentage.”

DeVega further argued that a much broader racial agenda is at work: “Movement conservatives’ eager deployment of the ‘anchor baby’ meme — and their solution of revoking birthright citizenship through a rewrite of the Constitution– is in keeping with the Republican Party’s assault on the won-in-blood freedom of black and brown Americans. The ‘anchor baby’ talking point is yet more proof that the GOP is a radical and destructive political force, one that actively embraces white supremacy.”

Arthur Chu, best known as one of the all-time biggest money-winners on Jeopardy!, is also a writer who frequently contributes to Salon. In a Thursday article, Chu saluted departing Daily Show host Jon Stewart for, among other things, keeping him sane during his college days. Unfortunately, recalled Chu, back then America as a whole had lost its mind.

Meanwhile, in the August issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott gave props to Stewart for “all that he’s been through on our behalf, subjecting himself to a radiation bombardment of mostly right-wing idiocy."

Nearly 27 years before Donald Trump actually announced he was running for President, then-NBC News correspondent Chris Wallace pressed a younger, thinner Trump about his political ambitions during an interview at the 1988 Republican National Convention. Not surprisingly, Trump at that time said if he did run for President, “I’d have a very good chance....When I do something, I like to win.”

Boldly combining the investigative techniques of David McCullough and Maury Povich, New York magazine’s  Chait has done a little historical paternity testing and determined that Andrew Jackson “is, clearly, the father of the modern Republican Party.”

Chait argued that Jackson’s status as “the progenitor of the Democratic Party” is based on “a myth.” On the other hand, Jackson “believed the Constitution prevented the government from taking an active role in managing economic affairs” and “was instinctively aggressive, poorly educated, anti-intellectual, and suspicious of bureaucrats,” all of which correspond to right-wing GOP behaviors and attitudes of today.