I spent a bit of time this morning following up on the story of escaped slave Henry Box Brown.  We read Ellen Levine's Henry's Freedom Box ast night with the kids, which strongly emphasizes the two parts of the story that children can probably best relate to: the separation of the family and the feeling of being inside the box for a long time ( Read more... )

When reading about Hitler's daily life, one cannot but wonder how he ever got anything conquered at all. The idea that a modern CEO would sleep in till around 11am because they had not gone to bed until 2am is so surreal it requires re-reading.

In the age of the 100 hour work week, one might be tempted to say, "No wonder you lost the war." to the ( Read more... )

We just returned from the King Tutankhamun exhibit at the Dallas Museum of Art.

More later.

In the movie The Ark, someone asks about the name of a German composer, and his colleague replies, "Aren't all composers German?"

I sort of shared that sentiment, until I recently purchased a CD with 20 famous Soprano Arias for the children, and lo and behold, it's dominated by Giacomo Puccini (8 out of 20), followed by Giuseppe Verdi (2), and ( Read more... )

One of the actually vacationy things that I did on my vacation in Austria was to explore a section of the Austrian Limes with my long-suffering parents. The two key places we visited in situ were Zeiselmauer (Cannabiaca in Latin) and Traismauer.

"Mauer" is the German word for wall (from the Indo-European moiros, Latin murus, so the name of the ( Read more... )

... when I search for "maternal mortality rate medieval" I primarily get web pages that use "Medieval" in the pejorative sense of the word.

Hello, I am a historian!?!?! Can we get over the Enlightenment put-down of the Middle Ages, please?

In the last post about Picture Interpretation, we talked about the fact that the background story that the iconography alludes to is a significant part in making the picture understandable, bringing into relief features that may be opaque (or even irrelevant otherwise).

At the same time, the background story can change over time, too. Motifs and ( Read more... )

I have been following academy ward winning documentary film maker Errol Morris' three-part blog journey (Part 1, Addendum, Part 2, Part 3) on the epistomological aspects of picture interpretations (here, Roger Fenton's Valley of Death from the Crimean War) for the last weekends in the New York Times sub-region of the blog-sphere.

Among the many ( Read more... )

The only privately held copy of the magna carta is going on sale.

I had ranted some time back about the misleadingly Romantic image of Native Indian culture that the new Smithsonian was projecting. Now the new National Geographic article on the Rise and Fall of the Mayan culture spells the internal conflicts, the over-exploitation of the environment and the Euroasian style of dealing with ones' opponents out in ( Read more... )