I was thinking back on the wonderful hospitality I enjoyed in Ireland and came upon this bedtime prayer on a card I saved from the Clifden Station House. It might sound corny, but I believe it is completely sincere and it shows what happens when people really like the business […]

I just wanted to take the time to say what fun it is to write this blog. It’s the most fun I’ve ever had with my pants on — although I do occasionally blog naked. So when Google decided to downgrade my blog from a five to a four, I […]

I have a photo on this blog of Omar Bradley and Dwight D. Eisenhower with Ernie Pyle, and if you look closely, you can see the two generals are kind of sheepish. That’s because they’re getting their picture taken with Ernie Pyle. It’s hard to explain what a big deal […]

I mentioned before that the best work I have seen about the destruction of Rome in the time of Nero is Quo Vadis by Heinrich Sienckiwcz. At that time I said you have to read his account of the fire, that there was no way to summarize it; and that […]

I love reading about the ancient world. It shows you that there is nothing new under the sun. In the most ancient literary work that we know of, the Epic of Gilgamesh, this guy says to Gilgamesh, “Don’t go searching for immortality. Take delight in good food and wine and […]

I have written before about the disgust with which Charles Dickens viewed American slavery during his first visit in 1842. He saw, just down the street from the US Capitol, the holding pens for slaves being auctioned. He read the advertisements for runaway slaves marked by the lash and the […]

George F. Kennan, in his short, definitive work American Diplomacy 1900-1950, asks a telling question: Why were the United States, in 1900, with no navy and no army to speak of, secure against all foreign enemies, while in 1950, with the second largest army in the world and the world’s […]

Here is a party game recommended by my uncle Nathaniel Hartshorne, who is also one of my favorite authors. Uncle Nat used to find himself at parties where he didn’t quite know what to do with himself. Maybe he still does, I don’t know. Has that ever happened to you? […]

People always say that history books place too much emphasis on such and such a battle on such and such a date when they ought to be looking at the underlying conditions that lead to war and the impact war has, not just on soldiers, but on ordinary people. I […]

As I mentioned in the opening posting of this blog, once in a while I go to The Bookmill in Montague and purchase a book for ten or twelve dollars, which is about twenty or twenty-four times what I ever pay for a book. Usually these are scholarly tomes which […]