When you studied slavery and the slave trade in school, how many rebellions were you taught? On Thursday of this week, I was helping out in middle school social studies, and I learned something that just wasn’t mentioned when I was in school. In 1839, there was a successful rebellion aboard the slave ship Amistad.
March 22nd is the anniversary of an event that helped shaped the United States but has largely been forgotten. On March 22, 1622 Native Americans of the tribes of the Powhatan Confederacy attacked settlements of the Virginia Colony. This was actually the second of three Powhatan Wars, and was triggered by colonists taking more land from the Confederacy,
Since Sunday is the first day of Spring, I’m republishing my poem My Rite of Spring, from my book Some Poems About Life, available through this website and Amazon.com. My Rite of Spring I consider myself a peaceable soul.I value all manner of livable things.Insects and mice, spiders and voles.Just about anything Mom Nature brings. But I do
For those of you celebrating Women’s History Month, the website Book Riot has published “15 Books About Lesser-Known Women Who Made History” by Senjuti Patra. These non-fiction selections cover a broad range of time, from ancient Egypt to the modern era. Some of the titles that jumped out at me — The Woman Who Would
Considering your own marriage or relationship, how much influence does your spouse/significant other have over your professional life? With that in mind, have you ever wondered how much impact a wife has had on a famous historic figure? Occasionally, such an example comes to light. It’s been established that Woodrow Wilson’s second wife Edith played
History has recorded many daring escapes of slaves from the pre-Civil War South. But none was more daring than that of Ellen Craft and her husband William. Born in 1826 in Clinton, Georgia, Ellen’s father was actually her first enslaver, Col. James Smith. Ellen was so light-skinned she was frequently mistaken for one of his
The closest we’ve ever come to a real tooth fairy is probably Erin Dunn, a psychiatric epidemiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dunn calls herself “the science tooth fairy” to encourage kids to donate their baby teeth for science. She gives the teeth to Felicitas Bidlack, a specialist in tooth development at the Forsyth Institute, an oral
Have you ever heard someone who has had a near-death experience say “My whole life flashed before my eyes?” That person may have been right. In 2016, researchers were giving an 87-year-old Canadian man who had epilepsy an electroencephalogram (EEG) — a test that detects abnormalities in the brain’s electrical activity — to study his seizures.
This is one of my favorite short stories. It was originally published at BewilderingStories.com in Issue 612, and was an Editors’ Choice in the 2015 First Quarterly Review. It’s also included in my book Stories Short and Strange, available on this website and Amazon.com in both paperback and Kindle versions (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=%22stories+short+and+strange%22&i=stripbooks&crid=3NM0S4R47KU87&sprefix=stories+short+and+strange+%2Cstripbooks%2C145&ref=nb_sb_noss). By the way, one of these segments actually