Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it
Stuckley Tillinghast was known to be a jovial good-natured man. He managed to provide decently for his family by selling his apples across Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts. Honour, his wife, kept a busy well-ordered household, watching over the couples … Continue reading The Vampires of Rhode Island: Half An Orchard Died. Sarah Tillinghast, 19, Exeter. 1799
It is a harrowing disease, one of the deadliest across history, it’s victims are left in a pallid state , their eyes blood red; wracked by extreme fever and night sweats, their weight plummets as they simply waste away. If … Continue reading The Vampires of Rhode Island: Voted That This Council Be Dissolved. Abigail Staples, 23, Cumberland. 1796
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Days of Rage protest in Chicago. While other antiwar organizers prepared for the National Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, a radical splinter of the Students … Continue reading The History Thread is All the Rage
Welcome to the History Thread! I didn’t have time to prepare a header today, but that doesn’t mean we can’t discuss history in the thread below. Continue reading The Weekly History Thread
This week’s History Thread falls on two seminal days in American history: the signing of the Constitution in 1787, and the Battle of Antietam seventy-five years later. The former created the document which remains, with a number of amendments, the … Continue reading A History Thread, if You Can Keep It
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! My apologies for missing last week, I have no good excuse other than being otherwise occupied. This week’s picture: on September 10, 1897 a miner’s strike at Lattimer, PA turned violent. After the usual … Continue reading The Striking Weekly History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today is the 136th anniversary of the eruption of Krakatoa, one of the largest and most destructive volcanic events in modern history. After several months of gas emissions and preliminary explosions, the volcano (located … Continue reading The Loud Weekly History Thread
Sixth in a series of articles on McCarthyism and the Red Scare; see Parts One, Two, Three, Four and Five. By any standards, Ruth A. M. Schmidt was a remarkable woman. Born in Brooklyn in April 1916, Schmidt became interested … Continue reading How We Got Here: Ruth Schmidt Browses the Washington Bookshop
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! It’s the 51st anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which crushed the Prague Spring and its reformist government under Alexander Dubcek. Continue reading The Weekly History Thread With a Human Face
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today is the anniversary of Cortes’s conquest of Tenochtitlan and the fall of the Aztec Empire. Discuss what you will, it is an open thread today. Continue reading The Weekly History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread. Today is the 400th anniversary celebration of the opening of the Virginia General Assembly, the first European-led legislative body in the New World. Naturally, it has sparked controversy, from discussions about the acknowledgment of … Continue reading The 400th Anniversary History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! This week’s discussion question is judging the past through modern eyes. It’s hard not to look at past events without using our own lens of judgment. How much are you willing to forgive, or … Continue reading The Judgmental History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today’s the anniversary of the exploding of the first atomic bomb at White Sands, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico (July 16, 1945). Continue reading The Explosive Weekly History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today we can discuss historical distortions; events or people who are commonly misrepresented. We’ve talked a lot about things like the American Founding Fathers and the Lost Cause in this thread before, feel free … Continue reading The Defeated History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! It’s the anniversary of one of the most decisive battles of the Brazilian Independence War, the fall of Salvador after a 16 month siege, and I wish I knew more about the subject so … Continue reading The Shortest Weekly History Thread Yet
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today is the anniversary of (among other things) George Custer’s defeat by the Sioux and Cheyenne at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, a classic case of tactical ineptitude that became celebrated, for many … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread’s Last Stand
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today’s picture: June 18, 1940 saw two of the most famous speeches of the Second World War. With France virtually overrun by Nazi Germany and the British military in humiliating retreat, Winston Churchill gave … Continue reading The Appealing Weekly History Thread
Welcome to this week’s History Thread! Today’s picture: On June 11, 1963, Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức immolated himself in Saigon. Quang Duc was a legendary figure in Vietnamese Buddhism, having spent decades building the Mahayana faith across Indochina and constructing dozens of temples. Living under Ngo Dien Diem’s repressive South Vietnamese government, he (like most Buddhists) chafed at the preferential treatment granted by Diem to the minority Catholic population, which included forced conversion of Buddhists to Catholicism and the murder of protesters and political dissidents. Duc sat down at a crowded intersection and allowed other monks to douse him … Continue reading The Weekly History Thread Protests
Note: I toyed with the idea of making this a “How We Got Here” post, but there was too much impressionistic and personal material to really separate from the strictly historical paragraphs on the Highland Clearances. Nevertheless, tagging it as … Continue reading Caledonian Flaneurade: Scotland Report, 2019
A couple of years ago, my dad finally pulled the trigger on a lifelong wish to take the family—he, his fifth wife, his four sons (two of us from his first wife and another two from his third), and my … Continue reading The Smoke: London Report, 2019
Of all of Richard Nixon’s men, Tom Charles Huston remains the most elusive. The lanky, bespectacled ideologue from Logansport, Indiana entered politics at an early age. At age 24, he chaired America’s largest conservative organization; at age 28, he became … Continue reading How We Got Here: The Education of Tom Charles Huston
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