I remember when I was a student teacher and I asked a class to tell me what they knew about the Persians. My cooperating teacher quickly informed me they had never studied that civilization. I thought of this as I reviewed an email from the National Geographic Society listing some long-forgotten civilizations. There have been
The issue of Confederate monuments was such a hot topic in the recent past that an article in the December 2018 Smithsonian magazine couldn’t help but get my attention. Entitled “The Costs of the Confederacy” by Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Wessler, it claims that taxpayers have spent at least $40 million on Confederate monuments
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