Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Saturday, June 03, 2023

The Pilot Makes the Machine?

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 I found this piece on an obscure and unsuccessful (for US)WWII fighter plane to be very interesting.  It seems that while it was a failure ...
Friday, June 02, 2023

Watergare II--Disregard of Law

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 Nearing the end of the Watergate book, which now recounts the briefing of the House Judiciary Committee by the special prosecutor and his s...
Wednesday, May 31, 2023

October Is Coming: the 50th Anniversary

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 The Watergate book I'm reading starts one chapter with the observation: "October 1973 would prove to be perhaps the most historic ...
Monday, May 29, 2023

Watergate

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 In the process of reading Garrett Graff's Watergate.  It's a reminder of how we simplify our history--many reporters involved other...
Tuesday, May 09, 2023

Apollo 11--Apogee of White America?

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 Watched the documentary film Apollo 11 l ast night. Seeing it 54 years after the original offered a certain perspective, not to mention col...
Thursday, May 04, 2023

The Ending of Government Mental Institutions

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 Some discussion on twitter about the ending of government mental institutions, the deinstitutonalization  movement.  Apparently some believ...
Wednesday, May 03, 2023

Will, Ford, and Pardons

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 George Will's newest column is a review of a new biography of Gerald Ford.  I don't know what Will thought of Nixon and Ford in t...
Friday, April 21, 2023

Slavery Everywhere?

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 Americans, some of us, know that slavery was part of our history from 1619 to the Civil War.  We're less knowledgable about the slavery...
Saturday, April 08, 2023

Morrill Land Grant Act and ROTC

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It turns out the Morrill Land Grant Act, enacted in 1862 during the Civil War, included some vague language about military training.  It...
Wednesday, April 05, 2023

Women's Economic Activity

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 Reading "The Wife of Bath".  Stumbled on the first sentence of Chapter 3, where the author Marion Turner claims that "women ...
Tuesday, April 04, 2023

How Did the Academy Become Liberal

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 IIRC in my young the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association were generally quite conservative, perhaps with an excep...
Sunday, April 02, 2023

What Will ChatGpt Do for History?

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 Discussing with my cousin the pros and cons of a decision on what to write caused me to reflect on ChatGpt, and how it might change histori...
Saturday, April 01, 2023

Responsibility for Deficits

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 Kevin Drum had a post the other day showing the percentage of the nation's GDP devoted to the federal government.  It's roughly 2...
Saturday, March 25, 2023

The Port Royal Experiment and Phonics

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 Stumbled across an odd fact today.  I've been reading Roger Lowenstein's "Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Fina...
Friday, March 24, 2023

The Great 20th Century

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 It seems we often look at some statistics the wrong way.  For example, it's common among the optimists among us to brag about the impro...
Monday, March 20, 2023

Iraq in Retrospective

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 This is a comment I posted on Kevin Drum's post l ooking back at Iraq, which you should read: "Wish I was blogging then so I'...
Friday, March 17, 2023

Why Grist Mills?

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  Roots of Progress is an interesting effort I follow.  This  particular post   roused my usual contrarian reaction, but also triggered a qu...
Monday, March 06, 2023

Fading Families

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 Don't remember what I've written here about genealogical research.  My sister did a lot during a year when she was no longer teachi...
Monday, February 27, 2023

Myrh America II

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 Akhil Reed Amar writes in Myth America about the founding fathers.  He emphasizes Washington's importance to the Constitutional Conven...
Sunday, February 26, 2023

Myth America

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 Started reading this collection of essays, subtitled: "Historians Take on the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past"  David Bel...