Abraham Lincoln liked to attend the theater with his secretary, John Hay, and saw several plays in which John Wilkes Booth acted. (I learned this from Lincoln at Gettysburg by Gary Wills.) He especially liked Shakespeare and admired the Shakespearean actor James Hackett. Lincon and Hay disagreed about the way […]

In 1848, ten years before the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, the people of Illinois voted to amend the state constitution to exclude free blacks all right of entry into the state. The amendment was carried by a margin of 70 percent, 90 percent in some communities. As Gary Ellis points out […]

I also write a blog for the ParkSleepFly.com website. Here’s an entry I found kind of moving, in a funny way: “Old Paper That Made My Dad Cry” We’ve come a long way from the old snapshots from a Brownie camera pasted into albums with little black corner stickers. Now […]

“It’s good to be king,” sings Tom Petty, but this is not always true. Consider the case of King Magnus II and VII. His grandfather, Hakon V of Norway, and his uncle, King Birger of Sweden, both died in 1319, making him king of both countries. Doubly good, huh? Actually, […]

“Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This statement is true on its face. Honest Abe would never lie. But the founding fathers actually meant to say […]

I think the mark of a true scholar is the ability to change one’s opinions. True scholars, I believe, are perfectly comfortable acknowledging mistakes or admitting they don’t know something. Smaller minds make snap judgments and stick to them no matter what. I admire the great child psychologist Robert Coles, […]

I just read yet another really interesting article in Old News, which my mom (who made me bookish) gets for me every year. It’s a great publication with articles about history in the form of news stories. The article is by Paul Chrastina. Alfred Lothar Wegener was a researcher in […]

One of the remarkable things about Walking to Canterbury by Jerry Ellis is that while he meets people very briefly, he really captures their character. I guess it’s like that stranger on the train that you’ll never see again, to whom you tell things you’ve never told anyone before in […]

In one of the entries on Dwight D. Eisenhower, I mentioned the day Ike and General George Patton went to Ohdruf, the first concentration camp liberated by the allies. Then last week I read an article in the Greenfield Recorder about Sergeant David Cohen of Longmeadow, who served in Patton’s […]

I was at the doctor’s office today to get ultrasound treatments for DeQuervain’s Syndrome in my wrists (they really work!) and while I was waiting I perused some of the magazines in the waiting room. I read the large-print edition of Reader’s Digest (November 2007) and there was an article […]