Eyewitness His-Story: New Madrid 1812 WAS a very strange year. The thought first occurred to me while listening to the 1812 Overture the other day. The part where they blow the lid off a dozen or two trash cans just makes you want to salute something—anything...
Missing Books: A Probable Introduction "History repeats itself; that's one of the things that's wrong with history." — Clarence Darrow AND THEN one day it finally occurred to me. The Vatican has never been raided. In the sort of imaginary world where nobody...
MISSING BOOKS have long bothered me. Name a person. Name practically anybody worth mentioning and there's likely a lost work attributed to them. Homer. Shakespeare. Aristotle. Pythagoras. Plato. Julius Caesar. Caesar Augustus. Euclid. Pliny the Elder. Tertullian....
AFTER FIVE consecutive decades of turning out Hollywood movies, I'm somewhat surprised that Steven Spielberg never got around to making an American western. Oh, haven't you heard? Every meaningful Spielberg movie is based upon a lie. That's my working theory, anyway....
"But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase to more ungodliness. And their word will eat as does a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of...
THE YEAR was 1849. That's when it happened, in 1849. 1849 is all you really need to know. 1849. 1849. If you happened to miss that, 1849. San Francisco did not exist before 1849, give or take a year, and something about gold. Oh, haven't you heard? Everybody flocked...
ORPHAN PROTAGONISTS have long bothered me, particularly in nineteenth-century literature. There is such an abundance of them. Dorothy Gale was an orphan and she went over the rainbow. Anne was an orphan and she managed Green Gables. Then again, Heidi was an orphan in...