When suicidal hijackers crashed airliners into targets in New York City and Washington 10 years ago, killing almost 3,000 people, U.S. Senator Charles Hagel of Nebraska was in Florida with President George W. Bush. “This is the second Pearl Harbor,” Senator Hagel exclaimed when he heard the news. It’s an analogy that has been repeated […]
Remembering the Twin Towers
Posted September 2nd, 2011 at 4:02 pm (UTC-4)
Like many Americans, I’ll never forget, not just the horror of watching hijacked airplanes fly straight into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York on the crystal-clear morning of September 11th, 2001, but also the immediate, defiant determination of the people of New York to rebuild the towers as quickly as humanly possible […]
Weedpatch Dust Bowl Memories
Posted August 24th, 2011 at 7:39 pm (UTC-4)
Reading about the incessant wave of 100° (F; 38° C) temperatures and terrible drought conditions that thousands of Americans living in Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas have endured this summer, I got to thinking about the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl conditions that ruined the land in those very places in the 1930s and early […]
Whole Lotta Shaking, Baking — and Snaking
Posted June 9th, 2011 at 1:30 pm (UTC-4)
Last posting, I presented a reasonably close inspection of the somewhat aloof, but by no means separatist, Amish people and their culture. I pointed out that although the sect clings to 19th-century ways, it is growing and thriving. As I noted, however, the long-term success of other onetime “people apart” in the mainstream American culture […]
Civil War Photo Bonus
Posted May 26th, 2011 at 3:39 pm (UTC-4)
In preparing the previous four stories about U.S. Civil War sites and their histories, I gathered and posted a number of related photographs. And I was left with dozens more to choose from. If you’re one who believes the old adage that “a picture is worth a thousand words” and that photographs as well as […]
Gettysburg to Surrender
Posted May 24th, 2011 at 7:21 pm (UTC-4)
Like a pesky fly that neither swatter nor sledgehammer can seem to catch and crush — or a hero who lived to fight another day in cliffhanger movie serials a couple of generations ago — undermanned but determined Confederate forces kept eluding certain destruction in the first two years of the American Civil War. […]
Second Bull Run Through Chancellorsville
Posted May 23rd, 2011 at 1:47 pm (UTC-4)
In our short course on the U.S. Civil War, we — or rather Union forces —made it as far as the outskirts of Richmond, Virginia, in 1862. There the grinding war, barely a year old, might have been brought to a triumphant close had cocky, but overcautious, Union general-in-chief George McClellan pressed his advantage in […]
Fort Sumter Through the Peninsula Campaign
Posted May 20th, 2011 at 9:51 am (UTC-4)
As I told you when I first started this written adventure, I’d be asking you to put up with occasional sorties into American history as a backdrop to what our nation has become today. So pack your imaginary bags! I promised last time that I’d take you on a two- or three-part written and visual […]
A Poor Man’s Fight
Posted May 18th, 2011 at 12:19 pm (UTC-4)
The transcendent U.S. Civil War historian Shelby Foote came across a slogan used by southern opponents of secession and war — of which there weren’t many in a region that romanticized the rectitude of the cause. Poking the mighty northern bear, they warned, would lead to “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.” […]
Bin Laden Makes the Lightning Round
Posted May 3rd, 2011 at 8:54 am (UTC-4)
Fans of the TV game show “Password” know that a “lightning round” is a blitz of questions and attempted answers within a short amount of time, usually with a loud countdown clock intensifying the pressure. I decided to whip through, without the obnoxious clock, some items that got me thinking. **** The Forget Factor In […]
