Writing History

Students can get help with their homework at the Brea Civic Center through the Homework Club and Tutoring for Teens programs. Homework Club participants, students in the first through fifth grades, get help with homework and access to the center's computers for school assignments. Once they finish their schoolwork, they can take part in games and activities.

"It's like writing history with lightning," President Woodrow Wilson said about Hollywood's first epic movie, "The Birth of a Nation." Griffith's film decreed that movie makers would forever seek to roil the emotions, to write with lightning. Wilson wasn't the only politician to note cinema's new and mighty influence.

When she first perused the script for "Boxing Helena," actress Kim Basinger testified Monday, she felt it was the strangest piece she had ever read. After all, she told a Los Angeles Superior Court jury, it was a story about a woman with no arms and no legs, a character who basically was "just a head." "When I read the piece," Basinger said, "I just felt I had to meet the mind behind this idea."

Tina Allen, whose monumental sculptures of prominent African Americans through history -- including abolitionist Sojourner Truth and author Alex Haley -- fill public spaces across the United States, has died. She was 58. Allen died Tuesday at Northridge Hospital Medical Center of complications from a heart attack, her former husband, Roger Allen, said. She had been a resident of North Hills. Her first major commission, in 1986, set the course for her future. She made a 9-foot bronze sculpture of labor leader A. Philip Randolph, who helped organize a union for sleeping car porters in the 1920s, for a train station in Boston.

Watergate A Novel Thomas Mallon Pantheon: 448 pp., $27.95 A few months ago I attended a book launch party for Adam Hochschild's World War I history, "To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918," where he offered a concise dissection of the difference between writing novels and writing history. To write history, he said, the story needs only to be true. To write a novel, the story must be plausible - an often much more difficult thing to accomplish.

Guidelines on how to divide the day's classroom instruction have been adopted by the Fullerton School District board. Teachers in the district will be encouraged to follow the guidelines, which outline the amount of time that should be spent on subjects including reading, writing and math. For example, kindergartners are expected to receive 350 minutes of reading and writing lessons and 250 minutes of math lessons each week. The minutes vary for older students.

Howard Zinn died last week. Since 1980, his controversial "A People's History of the United States" has sold more than 2 million copies, and it has given Zinn -- a professor, social activist, shipyard worker and World War II bombardier -- his own shot at being more than a footnote in the march of time. Marjorie Miller Marjorie Miller interviewed his colleagues to start history's assessment. Sean Wilentz Princeton University, "The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008" What he did was take all of the guys in white hats and put them in black hats, and vice versa.

America is safer, but if Al Qaeda attacks around Nov. 2 we may have to postpone the election (especially if President Bush trails in the polls). All the intelligence on Iraq was wrong, but the war was right. Sen. John Kerry doesn't have the combat experience to be commander in chief, but Bush's National Guard records were inadvertently destroyed. Millionaires Kerry and John Edwards cannot speak for the common man, but millionaires Bush and Dick Cheney can. We have given Iraq freedom from oppression, but not from getting its people killed by the dozen.

Re "Obama to Bush's rescue," July 1 Jonah Goldberg writes of President Bush's policies, "Whatever the merits of those policies, it's unlikely that historians will see them as a radical, right-wing break from the Clinton years. " If he's writing that history, highly unlikely. Goldberg also says he was in the Oval Office with the president during a meeting with a small group of journalists. Doing what? Washing the president's feet? David Hocker South Pasadena -- I greatly enjoy watching Goldberg squirm as he struggles to put a positive face on the unmitigated disaster that is the Bush administration.

A memorial service for longtime Artesia resident and historian Albert O. Little will be held today at 1 p.m. at the Artesia Community Center, 18750 Clarkdale Ave. Little, who was known to many residents as "Mr. Artesia," died Tuesday at Pioneer Hospital. He was 87. The center was renamed the Albert O. Little Community Center on Aug. 10. Today's ceremony had been originally planned to be a rededication ceremony, City Manager Eugene Romig said.