Saturday, June 15, 2024

This Season’s Reading Challenge

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On Bluesky, where I have been spending much of my online time, I recently began taking part in a collective social-media activity: posting t...
Monday, February 19, 2024

Was Lincoln a Douche?

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On Presidents’ Day it is customary to laud Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of These United States, as the greatest of all American lead...
Wednesday, January 31, 2024

Social Welfare as Common Sense

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My cherie and I spent part of a recent drive in Florida reading and discussing Thomas Paine’s 1797 pamphlet “Agrarian Justice,” a document b...
Friday, December 22, 2023

The Court Fees Weren't Exactly Light

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  Advice to sojourners in the early-modern era who are trying to avoid execution for witchcraft: be sure you are born male and have a high s...
Monday, November 20, 2023

Some Underground Movements Begin at Versailles

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  An improving climate did not bring lasting relief from famine to eighteenth-century Europeans. France, the most populous kingdom on the c...
Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Fritz Jennings, Poet Laureate of Ethnohistory

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  I had the privilege of meeting Francis Jennings - "Fritz" to his friends - at a party hosted by two of my doctoral advisors in 1...
Friday, September 29, 2023

Those Weird and Luminous Lights in the Sky Don't Necessarily Mean Bad News

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  In March 1716 Edmond Halley became one of thousands of northern Europeans to witness a powerful display of the Northern Lights. The aurora...
Sunday, August 13, 2023

The World Is a Garden and We Are All Flowers

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“I for one do not lament the passing of social organizations that used the many as a manured soil in which to grow a few graceful flowers of...