When did mankind first have a sense of history and start recording it? Does history exist if no one has the wits about them to remember and document it? It's the classic tree falling in the woods dilemma. I will not be answering any of these questions here, at least not entirely. I'm just writing what's on my mind today.

The internet told me the ( Read more... )

Not too long ago I was having a conversation in a bar, something I like to do, about the greatest generation compared to the generations that followed. We came to the conclusion that baby boomers are the worst of all generations and may be blamed by future generations as the perpetrators in the demise of the American empire ... maybe even human ( Read more... )

I have been a geography buff my entire life, a collector and reader of maps, a student of cartography. My sons have the gene, there are Rand McNally road atlas' and large hard cover World Atlas' in our second bathroom. That's our reading. So it should be no surprise our favorite classic board game is Risk, the geography and war game.

I played day ( Read more... )

This isn't only part 5, the final of a long winded blog series, it's the longest blog post I've ever written.

Roger and Mary Williams arrived in Boston in 1631 where an established community of more than a thousand lived under Puritan rule.

The governor of the Boston settlement was John Winthrop who had arrived the previous year with 700 pilgrims ( Read more... )

As early as the 1540’s English Puritans gained prominence in the church and Parliament seeking further reform. Their movement was a dissenting and driving force throughout the reformation, especially during the reign of Elizabeth when Marian exiles returning to England sought more draconian change. Anti-Catholic sentiment was extremely high after ( Read more... )

Martin Luther wasn’t the only theologian distracting the Italian mob with dangerous ideas of free thinking and reform. Huldreich Zwingli followed Luther’s denunciation of indulgences in Zurich. He broke the tradition of fasting during lent by sharing sausage with other men as he found no reference to fasting in the bible. The Affair of the Sausages ( Read more... )

Execution in the name of God is heinous enough but there's an aspect of the burnings that makes it more disturbing, at least for me. These men are not simple blasphemers; they’re devout Christians, scholars, theologians, and noblemen challenging the clergy. They were often the wisest men in the community, intellectuals. God was not denied. I might ( Read more... )

 
Roman conquest brought Christianity to England in the 2nd century, it didn't stick. In 597 A.D. Pope Gregory 1 sent Augustine to Kent with the task of converting the savage Brits to Catholicism. This Gregorian Mission lead to the establishment of The Church of Canterbury. Life in England would never be the same. For the next 938 years religion ( Read more... )

After returning home from the theater I was all up into the period so I started watching Ken Burns' nine part documentary on 'The Civil War'. I've seen it three times since it came out 22 years ago. Burns pioneered techniques in documentary filmaking with this work. The art of using zoomed video images of still prints and panning them to make a old ( Read more... )

Today I saw the new Spielberg film Lincoln. I've eagerly awaited it's arrival since I heard Daniel Day Lewis was portraying our 16th President. It did not matter what the actual content of the film was. The simple fact Lewis was tackling a character familiar to all was reason enough for me to see the film. Daniel Day Lewis is a phenomenal talent.

I ( Read more... )