I stand astride America’s Transcontinental Railway, looking east, then west. Initiated by Lincoln, overseen by Johnson, and completed under Grant, the undertaking called for the Union Pacific Railroad to work westward from Omaha and the Central Pacific, eastward from Sacramento. They met, as most schoolchildren learned in my day (do they study this anymore?), at [...]
Category Archives: History
The Market Falls–Then and Now
August 5, 2011 – 4:13 pm
I glance at the headline of an old newspaper that had been used to insulate one of the old log cabins that make up the museum in Frisco, CO. “Bankers Blame Tax Laws for Securities Drop” (The Denver Post…November 7, 1937). The Great Depression had been ongoing for over eight years. Yesterday the Dow fell [...]
Craft vs. Creativity
July 15, 2011 – 12:41 am
“With the coming of the Industrial Revolution, craftsmanship dissolved miserably into creativity.” In his shop beside the flour mill, the cooper spoke flatly and firmly, with no correction possible. It was Colonial Williamsburg, and my daughter Emily and I were breaking our cross-country drive with a hot summer’s day walk into 18th-century Virginia.
Clarence Darrow and Hawaii’s Massie Affair
June 22, 2011 – 10:46 am
A letter I wrote to The New Yorker about Hawaii’s infamous Massie Affair, a sordid episode in American race relations, was printed in the June 27, 2011, issue and is at the bottom of this page. I wrote the letter because: (a) I had recently read three thought-provoking books about racism in America during the [...]
A Captain and the Majors
April 12, 2011 – 5:57 pm
Time and situation award only a few in each generation with an opportunity to take a place in history. How much smaller is the number who are twice-touched by fate. Today’s post is about one such man. It starts with the differences between North and South and ends with the thin line that separates fair [...]
Henry VIII for a Five-Year-Old
April 7, 2011 – 9:54 pm
One of my daughters, a medieval history scholar and expert on European royalty, recently acquired a Henry VIII mug with images of his six wives surrounding him. Appropriately, when the Queens get into hot water (e.g., tea or coffee), their heads disappear. What she hadn’t anticipated was how fascinated her five-year-old daughter would be with [...]
What Would MLK Do?
January 17, 2011 – 11:53 am
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s "I’ve been to the mountaintop" speech, Memphis, April 3, 1968 Just a few days ago, Jeh C. Johnson, general counsel for the Department of Defense, gave a speech at the Pentagon in recognition of Martin Luther King Day. Toward the end of his talk, Johnson mused about what the non-violent [...]
Buffy Sainte-Marie
November 11, 2009 – 11:03 pm
Earlier this year Buffy Sainte-Marie released her 18th album, Running for the Drum. Her first album, It’s My Way, for which she was awarded Billboard‘s Best New Artist in 1964, included Universal Soldier, which has become an anthem for peace. Her song, Until It’s Time for You to Go, was a huge popular success and [...]
The Babson Boulders of Dogtown
April 19, 2009 – 10:13 am
In his 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, German economist and sociologist Max Weber theorized that capitalism’s ascendancy owed much to Protestantism’s emphasis on hard work and worldly success. Whether or not Weber was actually right, the term he coined, “Protestant ethic,” has, to many, become accepted as part of our [...]
Darwin and Lincoln: 200 Years Today (or are they?)
February 11, 2009 – 11:13 am
Born 200 years ago, February 12, 1809: Charles Darwin, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in the bios, and Abraham Lincoln, who changed the way we think about a human’s place in society. – * * * But perhaps these two Great Men were not born on the same day. Darwin’s [...]
