I’ve always been amazed about how much history never makes it into the schoolbooks. We all know how Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860 triggered Southern states leaving the Union, and the Civil War. But go back four years to the election of 1856. The winner was James Buchanan, who had been born in Pennsylvania but
Some historians rate Woodrow Wilson as a near-great president, which always made me curious because he is most remembered for his idealistic League of Nations proposal, which his own country shunned. So my curiosity led me to Wilson, a highly rated biography by A. Scott Berg. The truth is Woodrow Wilson lived a life of
As a history nerd, I know there are lots of strange stories during wartime. This is right up there with them. On a hill near the village of Itter in Austria sits a small castle that during World War II was seized by the Waffen SS and converted into a prison camp for high-profile prisoners
I can rarely resist a book, especially a book about history. Recently I found an interesting little volume — The Civil War: Voices of Hope, Sacrifice, and Courage, edited by Gordon Leidner. It lists over 220 quotes from soldiers and civilians on both sides, as well as texts and excerpts from some of the war’s
I think every schoolchild learns about Anne Frank — the little Jewish girl who died in the Holocaust, then became famous when her writing, The Diary of a Young Girl, was first published in 1947. But why her? Of all the millions of Holocaust victims, how did she become so famous? Other victims wrote, notably
I wrote about this topic on June 6, 2017, after I’d traveled to Boston and learned the meaning of NINA — “No Irish Need Apply”. That referred the immigration caravan of the 1840s — the inflow of Irish to escape the Potato Famine. (By the way, the Irish picked Boston because that was the closest
Today Nazism is poison. But one of history’s little secrets is Adolf Hitler and his political movement had a significant following in this country. The truth is in the days before Pearl Harbor, the country was deeply divided, torn by the trauma of the Great Depression and the beginning of another major war in Europe.
I was teaching yesterday, helping another teacher in a high school English class discussing mythological literature. Then one of the girls asked a question that made me curious — who was Nike? The brand name we all know as the shoe and apparel company really did exist, at least in mythology. Nike was the Greek
There are many unusual stories about World War II; I’ve just stumbled across another one. In April 1940, Denmark fell under Nazi domination. It was a time a great frustration for the Danish people, and their options were limited since they were Germany’s neighbor. But while the adults did nothing but curse, there was one
There have been many heroes in the civil rights movement. Recently, I’ve learned of another. Percy Dale (P.D.) East was a white native of Mississippi who developed a refined sense of racial justice while being raised in sawmill camps in the southern part of the state by a blacksmith father and a mother who ran