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Uphill all the Way.
“‘The whole era,’ concluded Bourne in disgust, ‘has been spiritually wasted.’” Let’s hope, down the road a-ways from 2012, the last few years won’t feel the same. Anyway, that line’s from the first...
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Fact-checking Lincoln.
“It’s not a question of being wrong, it’s just inadequate,’ Foner said…In fact, he says if the 13th Amendment had not passed in January 1865, Lincoln had pledged to call Congress into special session...
View ArticleDarkness Over Oahu.
“For the first time, I felt that numb terror that all of London has known for months. It is the terror of not being able to do anything but fall on your stomach and hope the bomb won’t land on you....
View ArticleOh Maggie, what did we do?
“Well I hope I don’t die too soon, I pray the lord my soul to save. Because there’s one thing I know, I’d like to live long enough to savor. That’s when they finally put you in the ground, Ill stand on...
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Don’t Sleep on Second Sleep.
“In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch of Virginia Tech published a seminal paper, drawn from 16 years of research, revealing a wealth of historical evidence that humans used to sleep in two distinct...
View ArticleAlabama Casts Its 24 Votes…
Personal plug: If your interest was piqued by what I wrote about the 1924 Democratic Convention here, I was interviewed last week by Backstory on the MSG disaster for their episode on gridlock. (The...
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Ruins of Babel. | Pompeii of the North.
“The mysterious structure is cone shaped, made of ‘unhewn basalt cobbles and boulders,’ and weighs an estimated 60,000 tons, the researchers said. That makes it heavier than most modern-day warships.”...
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You May Say They Were Dreamers…
“Like many of his peers, Havens was a songwriter…But Havens also knew a great contemporary song when he heard it, and made his name covering and rearranging songs by Bob Dylan and the Beatles. ‘Music...
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The Last Full Measure.
“The American republic was, in 1863, a dangerously isolated democratic flower in a garden full of aristocratic weeds, and if the Civil War succeeded in sundering the United States into two separate...
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Online All the Way.
Hello all. So after a month or so of significant work — hence, the relative quiet around these parts of late — I have followed up on my earlier promise/threat and transformed all 1200+ pages of my...
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Scholar, Journalist, Cop, Hoopster.
“‘I would say that my ideal of writing history is to give the reader vicarious experience,’ Professor Morgan told The William and Mary Quarterly. ‘You’re born in one particular century at a particular...
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The Wheel of Pain…for Dogs.
“The Turnspit Dog, 1500-1900 – A dog specifically bred to run on a small wheel in order to turn meat so it would cook evenly. This took both courage, to stand near the fire, and loyalty, to not to eat...
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They All Float Down There.
“Even the people who are supposed to like clowns — children — supposedly don’t. In 2008, a widely reported University of Sheffield, England, survey of 250 children between the ages of four and 16 found...
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Tales of Wonder.
By way of io9, an impressive collection of vintage sci-fi pulp art. (You can still make your own here.) Note the editor above — Hugo Gernsback, sci-fi pioneer and the Man in the Mask. (He also appears...
View ArticleVirtual All the Way.
Hello all: Back on the mainland as of 48 hours ago. In case the Election of 1924 talk of a few months past whetted your appetite for more radio ramblings about the dissertation, I discussed Uphill All...
View ArticleThe Dream Persists.
“We have also come to his hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is not time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is...
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Chasing Darkness.
“How dark it would have been—imagine leaning out your door and, on the darkest nights, not being able to see more than a few feet in any direction. Historian Peter Baldwin describes as ‘downright...
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All We Have is Now.
“Humans are good at a lot of things, but putting time in perspective is not one of them…If the Earth formed at midnight and the present moment is the next midnight, 24 hours later, modern humans have...
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The Guerrilla.
“I knew he was proud of his reputation as the ‘Red Napoleon,’ and I presumed he would welcome an opportunity to indulge my curiosity about his triumphs…But he answered most of my questions briefly,...
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The Song of Solomon.
“12 Years a Slave is an easy landmark. It’s a rare sugarless movie about racial inequality…[A]t several points an audience is free to remember that most movies about the Civil War and slavery have been...
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