A weekly thread about the past
Welcome back to the History Thread! My head is still in Civil War land, as I’m rereading Bruce Catton’s Army of the Potomac Trilogy alongside Leon Litwack’s brilliant Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery. Additionally, my … Continue reading The History Thread Soldiers On
Thanks to Dave and Colm for filling in while I was preparing for/on vacation. I will share some pics in the comments below, but I wanted to draw your attention first to this most awesome of battle flags. In keeping … Continue reading The History Thread Sticks it to the Secesh
In 1880, the wider world came to the Kerry market town of Listowel with the arrival of the Limerick & Kerry Railway. Immediately thereafter, with the promise of easier access to education, a boost to tourism and a market for … Continue reading The History Thread Rides a Genuine, Bonafide, Steam-Powered Irish Monorail
“If you had a time machine would you kill Baby Hitler?” At some point in their lives just about everybody gets confronted by this bizarre variation of the Trolley Problem. Those who pose this scenario want to suggest a moral … Continue reading History Thread: Dave rants about the Great Man Theory.
On November 23, 1861 New Orleans hosted a military review like no other. A force of nearly 800 officers and men, most of them people of color, paraded through the Crescent City to the cheers of assembled citizens. One journalist … Continue reading History Thread: Black Confederates, or a Study in “Alternate Facts”
Last week, Nathan Bedford Forrest’s bust was finally removed from the Tennessee state capitol. The predictable neo-Confederate voices, including the state’s Lieutenant Governor, are shrieking about “woke culture” ruining Tennessee heritage by no longer honoring the man responsible for the Ft. … Continue reading History Thread: That Devil Forrest
Another week without a proper header! I’m researching a couple of potential subjects for future threads, but they’ll take more research than a week or so of cramming so I’d rather hold off for now. I’m also starting to plan … Continue reading The History Thread Looks Ahead
Well, the History Thread is taking the week off from substantive writing. I’m mulling over a few topics for future threads but they’ll probably take a deeper research dive than usual to write about. (See: Reconstruction, voter suppression during.) And, … Continue reading A Low-Fi History Thread
In her own mind, Mary Steichen Calderone was hardly radical. She was a practicing Quaker and a well-regarded doctor; a mother of three, she expressed pride in her role as “a mother and a grandmother and a “great-grandmother.” Even at … Continue reading History Thread: Fighting “Raw Sex” in the Classroom
By the mid-1960s, many expected the next Civil Rights battleground to be in education. Martin Luther King lamented that “the history books, which had almost completely ignored the contribution of the Negro in American history, only served to intensify the … Continue reading History Thread: Propaganda and Poppycock in “The Land of the Free”
Mesopotamia, the region roughly occupying modern Iraq, is one of the oldest inhabited areas of the Earth. It’s been settled, conquered and fought over for millennia, being the seat of many empires and the graveyard of others. But until relatively … Continue reading The History Thread Cooks the Mesopotamian Way
In 1914, white supremacy was as dominant in America as ever. Ben Tillman, the one-eyed Senator from South Carolina who in his youth led the Paramilitary Redshirts in taking over his state, proclaimed that “this is a white man’s country … Continue reading History Thread: William Monroe Trotter vs. D.W. Griffith
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa race riot (or Tulsa race massacre), which resulted in the destruction of “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the deaths of anywhere from 39 to 300 Black Tulsans at the hands … Continue reading The History Thread Remembers Tulsa
In 1974, America was coming apart at the seams. Disillusioned by Watergate, infuriated by foreign oil embargoes and spikes in meat prices, frightened by terrorism, cults and kidnapped heiresses, depressed by an economic downturn, there seemed little respite from misery. … Continue reading History Thread: The Year of Pitching Dangerously
24 December 1978, Chicago: 24-year old radio DJ Steve Dahl was fired from radio station WDAI as part of the station’s switch from AOR to disco. At his new workplace – rival AOR station WLUP – Dahl indulged in both … Continue reading The History Thread Tries to Demolish Disco
In 1534, French explorer Jacques Cartier and his crew were stricken with the disease near modern-day Montreal. The symptoms were gruesome: Cartier’s men “had all their skins spotted with spots of blood of a purple colour: then did it ascend … Continue reading History Thread: The Triumph of Scurvy
During a recent visit to Fort Ligonier, I was impressed anew with their remarkably thorough, well-curated exhibit on the Seven Years War. This visit, I found myself particularly struck by a mural-sized reproduction of the famous painting, The Execution of … Continue reading History Thread: To Kill an Admiral
For all the recent outpouring of World War I books, it’s doubtful whether most add anything significant to existing scholarship. Some, like Max Hasting’s Catastrophe 1914, are well-written but don’t deviate from the classic Barbara Tuchman narrative. The converse are books … Continue reading History Thread: Alexander Watson’s Ring of Steel (2014)
Note: I haven’t done a Things That Are Not article in awhile, and wanted a break from the heavier military-political focus of recent threads. Prepare to be spooked! Sailors and ocean travelers have always entertained and scared each other with … Continue reading History Thread: The Curse of the Ivan Vassili
In October 1962, when the Cuban Missile Crisis poised the world on the cusp of nuclear oblivion, President John F. Kennedy encouraged his staff and military leaders to read The Guns of August, Barbara W. Tuchman’s chronicle of the outbreak of … Continue reading History Thread: Barbara W. Tuchman’s The Guns of August (1962)
Header image from National Lampoon (October 1973), art by Dick Ayers. All other illustrations are from New York Magazine’s The Illustrated Secret History of Watergate, online here. Last Tuesday, Nixon henchman and Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy died at age … Continue reading History Thread: Gordon Liddy’s Greatest Hits
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