Today is Leap Day. We add this extra day in February if the year is evenly divisible by four. That’s once every four years. Right?
Wrong.
Category: History
The “Turtle”
Hidden behind a fishing boat, a strange craft is silently lowered into the water. The inventor, David Bushnell, has named it “Turtle” because of its shape…and because it is a submarine. It carries a single bomb and its mission is sabotage.
A thin young man named Ezra Lee hands Bushnell a final letter for his girlfriend, climbs into the Turtle, and seals the hatch. Continue reading “The “Turtle””
Ellis Island Vignette
So here’s how the story goes, as told to me by my Uncle Max (long-deceased).
Somewhere in the late 1890s (I could be off by ten years), a man by the name of Tudrus Zlutchin (another branch of the family claims that the surname was Dudek) landed at Ellis Island from Russia with his wife and three (maybe two, maybe four) children. He came from a shtetl just outside of Nizhni Novgorod (now Russia’s third-largest city). Continue reading “Ellis Island Vignette”
After Fidel
Administration after administration has perceived Cuba as an irritant inside our hemispheric shell and coated it with layer after layer of economic and political nacre, which unlike 
mother-of-pearl, has not created value. In fact, U.S. policy has rendered Cuba nearly irrelevant.
Fidel, of course, has been the focus of our sedimentary relationship, one that has hardened into clay, unmoving through ten U.S. presidencies. But with the announcement that Castro is stepping down after nearly 50 years, turning stewardship over to his brother Raul, the U.S. has an opportunity. Will the next president step out of the clay and back into the mud where things are sticky, sloppy, murky, but once again movable? Continue reading “After Fidel”
Liberator of Bulgaria
What actually happens is not always in the history books.
I grew up in California in the 50’s, graduating from high school in 1961, only 16 years after World War II ended. So how was it possible that in all my classes there was not one mention of the internment of Americans of Japanese descent?
Some of these forgotten or overlooked episodes eventually do get remembered. Some never do because of politics, prejudice, embarrassment, and in the case of Bulgarian independence, lack of interest. Americans, provincials we are in the main, simply do not care much about Bulgaria…or even know where it is (see above, Bulgaria in green).
The recent declaration of independence by Kosovo got me thinking about the Balkans and how the roads of conquest and domination have passed through southeastern Europe for centuries. Continue reading “Liberator of Bulgaria”
Little Big Horn
At Little Big Horn National Monument, a low, iron railing surrounds the modest, marble slabs that mark where each white man fell. The fenced rectangle is smaller than my back yard. Custer’s Last Stand…an immense celebration of an ignominious outrage. 
The day is overcast, cold, and wet. Forty-eight degrees feels colder in this Great Plains wind. A National Parks ranger gives a spirited description of tactics and weaponry. He almost prances as he gestures across the swales of brown grass, sweeping his hands from side to side to indicate how the advancing Sioux were able to slip from dip to dip without being seen.
Unlike the other National Parks I’ve visited, this is thoughts and visions, not sights. There is little to see here. Other than the white-on-black face of G. A. Custer’s marker, there is a uniformity in every direction except to the south, where several miles distant, the Montana Interstate reveals just the tops of big rig boxes floating east and west above the long, low hills. This is a small park: a couple of buildings and an attached military cemetery unrelated to The Battle. There is undoubtedly an algorithm that determines who can be interred under the martial exhalations that blow across these hills, but my gravestone investigations reveal no pattern. There are soldiers and wives from many wars.
Indoors, an emphysemic historian with liquid sibilants lectures a seated assemblage on the nature of The Battle. Through his words, all but a few whose patience and vocabulary are limited by childhood see the outcome’s inevitability. He is generous to Custer’s memory with his invocation of Murphy’s Law as a causal force. But the main wall is Custerolatry: movie posters and books, some of them published when 7th Cavalry widows were still in black, that praise the bravery instead of the folly.
It is always thus. Soldiers die. And we overlook the errors of judgment (and sometimes demonize those who point them out) so that we can say that our men and women did not die in vain. But sadly, soldiers often march obediently and with great, blind loyalty into the valley of death, led by fools or villains. It is a patriot’s job to expose such folly or villainy.
It may take years, but attitudes can change. A metallic memorial, its letters acetylene-raised, handmade welts, sits prominently, if informally, in the museum building, remembering the Indians who died, anonymous because their bodies were not left for the sun, the dogs, the vultures, and the hagiographers. And note the focus of the only paragraph on the National Park Service’s Little Big Horn Battlefield home page:
This area memorializes one of the last armed efforts of the Northern Plains Indians to preserve their way of life. Here in 1876, 263 soldiers and attached personnel of the U.S. Army, including Lt. Col. George A. Custer, met death at the hands of several thousand Lakota and Cheyenne warriors.
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