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{ Category Archives } History

Three Perfect Days

Wow, three absolutely gorgeous days in a row here in Virginia. 68 – 86 degrees, low humidity, light breezes, cloudless skies, and all on a long weekend! Even better, we spent them with La Belle Compagnie friends, recruits, and members at our Summer Gathering and then visiting the Sackler Gallery of Art to see the […]

Full House

I love having our home filled with happy friendly people. We had another fabulous La Belle Compagnie meeting/workshop/gathering at our place and continued making progress on preparations for the spring reenactor show season. We’ll be going to Military Through the Ages (March 17-18, Jamestown, VA), and to Marching Through Time again (April 14-15, Marietta Manor […]

Quick review: “Lies my Teacher Told Me”

So I just finished “Lies my Teacher Told Me” by James W. Loewen and recommend this book to everyone educated in the United States and to everyone interested in American history. Mr. Loewen sometimes beats a point to death, but in general it is excellent, exhaustively researched and packed with citations and bibliographic details. The […]

Sometimes Music and Poetry and a Few Photos are Worth Millions of Words

This just about sums up my feelings about the U.S. administration so eloquently and succinctly that it deserves spreading around. Sorry if the language is not suitable for certain environment… it is a flash slideshow with music, runs a few minutes. Worth every precious moment it takes to watch. FilmStripInternational Thanks Kate!

Politics and Foreign Policy

I continue to enjoy reading Richard N. Goodwin’s excellent book “Remembering America: A Voice From the Sixties” and had a sudden inspiration while reading about how America backed and stumbled into the Vietnam war. Conventional wisdom is that America became involved in Vietnam as a result of the continuation of a foreign policy practiced steadily […]

Prague, a way too short trip to a most beautiful and vibrant city…

Monday evening we got back from a fabulous, if far too short, trip to Prague in the Czech Republic. Erci’s Aunt was there on business and invited her husband and us to come along for some tourism. I fell in love with a city. Last Wednesday evening we jumped on a plane at Dulles. At […]

Saddam Hussein captured

The capture of Saddam Hussein is a victory for the Iraqi people and a victory for American Corporate Adventurism, but it is not a victory for the American people. Mr. Bush will try to pretend that it is a victory in the alleged “War on Terrorism” and that American’s will be safer somehow, but that […]

Politics: A People’s History of the United States

According to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States the following quote can be attributed to Gustavus Myers’ History of the Great American Fortunes: The whole institution of Law saw nothing out of the way in these conditions, and very significantly so, because, to repeat over and over again, Law did not represent […]

October 4th

Personal: Today is my mother’s birthday, and I was able to call her but unable to talk a lot because I have a very sore throat. I am extraordinarily fortunate to have a mother with whom I am very close. She is someone I can talk to, someone I love, someone I respect enormously. She […]