Tag Archives: history

For awhile, my favorite radio show was This American Life. And one of my favorite voices on the show was Sarah Vowell. Her nasal, girlish tone belied a sophisticated intelligence and wicked sense of humor.I recently read “The wordy shipmates” by Sarah Vowell. It’s basically her idiosyncratic take on the Puritans who colonized Massachusetts at Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. While they were escaping England because of religious persecution, the...

My daughter gave me Emma Southon’s book “A fatal thing happened on the way to the forum” for Christmas. Apart from my longtime interest in history, there was a particular reason for this choice. Rebecca took five years of Latin in middle school and high school. She got a 5 on the Latin AP exam, which entitled her to college credit, although I’m not sure whether Colorado State awarded that credit on her transcript. Along the way, she learned 33 words...

Just finished “Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the making of a postwar stalemate” by Mary Sarotte. The book was recommended to me by Bruce Cochrane. It is an excellent insight into current events in Ukraine today.The title comes from the assurance given by then-Secretary of State James Baker to Mikhail Gorbachev that German reunification would mean “not one inch eastward” in NATO expansion. This phrase has inspired much finger-pointing by Russia...

Just finished “Africa, A Biography of a Continent”” by John Reader. I don’t recall how this book came into my possession. It may have been on my mom’s bookshelf when we stopped by after they moved to take whatever we wanted. Whatever its provenance, I had only read a little African history: “King Leopold’s Ghost” and a book on the Boer War are the only ones I can recall. I also read Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” which is a thinly veiled account of...

It is unusual for Prof. Heather Cox Richarson to have posted last night. The good Prof. of History typically rests on the weekend. Further down this post, you can read her latest. Just a bit more of my comments, some news, and then Prof. Heather. It appears the wheels of a global political and historical change are turning in a direction which “may” impact us for years to come. Global leader, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has managed to...

The Biden administration is relying on the promise of harsh economic penalties to avert a Russian invasion of Ukraine. That’s just one of the instances where it’s wielding those tools. When were modern economic sanctions invented? In the aftermath of World War I, is one answer. Yesterday Adam Tooze reviewed a new history of this tool, The Economic Weapon, by Nicholas Mulder. Fighting was ruinous. But here was a multinational instrument, still painful to wield, but better than most of the...

Continuing from last week, a few more favorites of the past 12 months (none of which were written all that recently). And a reminder that you can sign up to get posts by email. Gods of the Upper Air, by Charles King, alongside Euphoria, by Lily King (and Gillian Tett’s Anthrovision for good measure) Euphoria was my recommendation for best book in 2015. “Pioneering anthropologists in the field, making it up as they go along: The novel,” was my description. It was a thinly-veiled...

I subscribe to various sites from which I extract data. Each morning, this is my read while drinking my coffee – black. A brief Introduction as taken from Professor Richardson’s site: This is a chronicle of today’s political landscape, but because you can’t get a grip on today’s politics without an outline of America’s Constitution, and laws, and the economy, and social customs, this newsletter explores what it means, and what it has meant, to be...

A bit of Tom Sullivan @ Hullabaloo this day. Democrat Moe Davis lost the race last fall for the congressional seat in NC-11 to Republican Madison Cawthorn. The seat was left open when Rep. Mark Meadows vacated it to fumble around for the Trump White House. Moe Davis tweeted this morning in response to a local letter to the editor denying the assault on the Capitol even happened. And the Letter: “Denialism is alive and well “Tom...

No doubt, they saw these decisions as moments of greatness. Or, at least hoped that history would see it that way. One, an egotistical ass who used his intellect as a cudgel with which to intimidate, to bully others. The other, simply a small minded man selected for that very smallness of mind. The one, recently departed Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The other, now Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. Had Justice Scalia been even half...