The author of The Gulag Archipelago has died. He spent seven years in the Gulag, for criticizing Stalin in a letter to a friend. There he began to write, and he never stopped. For a long time, practically everything he wrote was illegal; he and his courageous friends had to hide his work and smuggle […]
Archive | History
Adventures in Repetitive. (Saying the Same Thing Twice)
My edition of J.C. Masterman’s book, “The Double-Cross System,” has an introduction, followed by a preface, followed by a forward. The Introduction, written in this century, spends some time discussing a certain series of events that’s slightly related to the book. Then you get to the preface, written in 1973 or something, which discusses the […]
On Dissolving Political Bands
My version of the Declaration, modernized and more readable: — IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776 The unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America When a group of people splits apart from another group to become their own power in the world, they should give their reasons. We think that the following things are […]
Avast, ye scallywag!
I’m reading Under the Black Flag, by David Cordingly. It’s a nonfiction look at pirates in the 17th and 18th centuries. Pirates! I’d guess I’m on page 2 or something, and I’ve already learned the difference between buccaneers, corsairs, and privateers. I bet you don’t know the difference. But I do! Flipping through it a […]
Giddyup
Every once in a while, someone will mention “the teamsters,” and I’ll wonder… How did they come to be called “teamsters”? Tonight, as I read a bit of the early section of U.S. Grant’s memoirs, I get to a point where he says, “… it is not probable that any of the men who reported […]
Goose, Gander, etc.
It’s not a new claim that maybe Shakespeare was someone else, or a collection of other people. How could it be, people wonder, that some under-educated rube from the provinces could write such beautiful, witty, universally acclaimed stuff? Ok. Whatever. Now, out comes a book claiming that Mary Shelley couldn’t have written Frankenstein. She was […]
Did You Know (Civil War Edition)….
That Delaware and New Jersey (and a couple of others) voted NO to the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution? That’s the amendment freeing all slaves. (They later changed their minds, but only after the amendment was already ratified, so it made no difference.) That there were some slaves states (including DE and NJ) in […]
Democracy
I always just assumed that the United States has an electoral college (rather than direct election of a president) because the founders were nervous about direct democracy. That is, they believed in representation of the people, but stopped a little shy of a simple show of hands for anything as important as putting Bush in […]
Hot off the Presses: The South was Wrong!
I’ve always thought that the American South had every legal right to withdraw from the Union. There was nothing in the existing Constitution saying that those states who joined couldn’t leave whenever they wanted. After all, it had only been about three score and twelve years between the ratification of the Constitution and the election […]
Jewish Nazis
Whoa, got your attention, didn’t I? I recently picked up a copy of my cousin’s European History doctoral dissertation. Two Three hundred pages later, I’m almost finished. I don’t recommend it as a nightstand book, but there’s a lot of really interesting stuff in there. Here’s the latest thing. There were several groups of Jews, […]