The Big Monochrome Picture
The principal character in Joyce Maynard’s 1992 novel “To Die For” said that if you look too closely at a black and white photograph, all you see are a series of black dots on a… »
The Tarnished Tarheel
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1851 phantasmagorical image of slave life in the South has long been regarded as one of the sparks that ignited the War Between the States. However, a now almost forgotten anti-slavery polemic… »
The War in the Pacific
The dramatic events leading up to the secession of the Southern States, the tragedy of the War Between the States and the ensuing final act of the South’s Reconstruction period were, for the most part,… »
Slavery and Emancipation 101
The roots of the myth that slavery was primarily a white Southern institution were planted three decades prior to the War Between the States by the abolitionists in New York and New England. This myth… »
1619 Plus 2020 Equals 1984
In George Orwell’s novel “1984,” the central governmental agency in his fictitious country of Oceania is the antonymic Ministry of Truth, a body charged with the duty of erasing actual history and then rewriting it… »
As Luck Would Have It
The tiny hamlet of Lake Hill in New York State’s Catskill Mountains was my mother’s hometown, and her ancestors there, the Howlands, could trace their family history to its roots in Fifteenth Century England and… »
Knead to Know
Today we are besieged with raucous cries on both America’s streets and its social media platforms, as well as by all too many in the halls of government, to bring to an end what is… »
1619 Lies Matter
The dogs of racial war were released this May in Minneapolis by the senseless death of George Floyd, a black man, under the knee of Derek Chauvin, a white police officer. Even though Chauvin had… »
A Voice of Reason
Today, as it was a hundred and sixty years ago, America stands on the edge of an ever-widening chasm of cultural, ideological, political, racial and sectional divisions. In 1860, there was at least one prominent… »
Emancipate This!
A Japanese neighbor of ours in Tokyo, a former university professor, has written a number of books on American and Western humor, with some of his material covering the witticisms of Abraham Lincoln. One such… »
