On the morning of September 1, 1675, the residents of Hadley, a town of some fifty families, were gathered in their newly built meetinghouse. They had settled the town in 1659, having left Connecticut because of a dispute about the ritual of baptism. At first their pastor, the Rev. John […]
John Bell Hood is one of several Confederate generals who have major US Army bases named after them. While I don’t think, in general, that we should name army bases after enemy generals, in this case it might be apt because John Bell Hood, almost singlehandedly, lost the Civil War. […]
I’ve written several entries about The Armada by Garrett Mattingly because it is a prodigious work of scholarship, and, unlike so very very many prodigious works of scholarship, this is a ripping good read. Not surprisingly it won the Pulitzer Prize and it was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. You get […]
I’ve just reread The Armada by Garrett Mattingly, and would like to say again that this is one of those books that makes you reassess everything you thought you knew, in this case about European history. I used to think that the Thirty Years War in Germany was between Protestants […]
I just braved the perils of the Hutchinson Parkway and the Brueckner Expressway to visit my daughter Sarah and her husband Ian in New York. Of course the main attraction was my one-year-old granddaughter Esben, but I also wanted to deliver Leela the Lilac bush to Sarah’s terrace garden, and […]
Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, published in 1899, is one of the most widely read, frequently taught, and earnestly discussed books in the history of American literature. But in the 1950s, it was out of print, as were all of Chopin’s books. Only one of her stories, Desiree’s Baby, was […]
Many people aspire to be great writers, or just writers, period, but have trouble getting started. While nearly all successful writers say the way to be a writer is to write and leave it at that, many believe there is some secret to it – like getting up at 6 […]
Today brought the sad news of the passing of my Aunt Valerie Thomas Hartshorne, the last of my parrents’ generation to depart this earth. I find it difficult indeed to describe what she meant to me, to her family, and to her myriad friends. To me she exemplified love and […]
Jonathan Edwards was a famous 18th century preacher, probably best known for his sermon ‘Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God’. But he was also a famous naturalist, who discovered how spiders fly by sending out a length of filament into the wind and then, at the last minute, […]
“It was a New Jersey farmer, as Thomas Jefferson pointed out, who invented the modern wagon wheel, of which he had found an exact description in Homer. [Not Homer Simpson. The blind Greek guy.] This was the wheel with a circumference made from a single piece of wood. “American farmers, […]