Mother’s Day is here again. The air is filled with purple prose from Hallmark, florists are exhausted from non-stop deliveries, and if you’re planning on eating out, better bring a lawn chair so you can relax during the long wait for a table.
Most people think they have the best mother of all time. (They’re mistaken; my mom was the world’s best.) But this post takes the opposite view. Let me introduce you to the Five Worst Moms in History. Continue reading
“There is not much desire on the part of our authorities to welcome such a large addition to the already overflowing numbers engaged in their peculiar profession.”
– Cincinnati Gazette, 1863
You wouldn’t wanted to have been William Rosecrans in the spring of 1863, because he was having a really tough time at work.
Rosecrans was major general in command of the Army of the Cumberland, and he had two equally pressing problems. First, Abraham Lincoln was riding him hard because he hadn’t been able to drive the Confederate army out of Tennessee. That’s enough to keep a general awake at night. But it was child’s play compared to his other dilemma: how to get rid of all those prostitutes behind his lines? Continue reading
Boy, the groundhog sure got it right. He forecast six more weeks of winter. Given the relentless cold and snow we’ve had since then, six more months of winter is more like it.
In some parts of the country (especially New England and Long Island), all that snow was blown in by a blizzard. With folks still shoveling out of drifts taller than the Budweiser Clydesdales, you may be interested to learn how the word blizzard entered America’s vocabulary.
Blame it on, of all things, a blizzard. But it didn’t start that way. Continue reading
This is a banner day for my family. My Great-Grandfather Elisha Powell was born exactly 150 years ago today, February 15, 1865.
I never met the gentleman; he left this life 22 years before I entered it. He was born, raised, lived and died in and around St. Joseph, Missouri. He was a farmer who did carpentry work on the side (including repairing boxcars for the Union Pacific Railroad).
But it’s what he did in retirement in the early 1930s that has always intrigued me – and which can teach an important lesson to today’s cash-strapped municipal governments. Continue reading
So there they were at 96 Wentworth Street in downtown Charleston, South Carolina last Wednesday morning. A construction crew on the College of Charleston campus, busily preparing the site of a new vegan and vegetarian cafeteria (to each their own, I guess) due to open next year. Then something unexpectedly turned up, and everything stopped.
It seems an unexploded Civil War ordnance shell had been peacefully resting on the grounds of The Sylvia Vlosky Yaschik Jewish Studies Center for a century and half without anybody knowing it was there. Continue reading
“War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.” – Maj. General William T. Sherman
That scowling, growling face is back in the news again, thanks to a highly unlikely source: a simple historical marker.
Many drivers rush by historical plaques without noticing them. Sure, dads would pull over and check them out during family vacations when you were a child, saying “It’s educational,” stranding bored kids in the broiling sun while he read each and every word. Continue reading
“It is horrible. You can stand to see one, two or twenty men die, but to see these poor devils dropping like flies gets on your nerves. We have been averaging about 100 deaths per day, and it’s still going on.” -An army doctor near Boston in September, 1918
The first documented case of Ebola in the United States is being treated in Texas, and that’s bringing intense media attention to the deadly illness. It has killed 3,300 people so far this year in West Africa, with Sierra Leone alone reporting a new infection every twenty minutes.
That, in turn, is triggering new fears of some deadly pandemic marching unrestrained across the globe.
But here’s the thing: it happened once before … and it happened where you live. Continue reading
“Everybody says this here thing we’re involved in ain’t a real war. Congress says it ain’t a war. The President says it ain’t a war. ‘Course the guys over there getting shot at say it’s the best damned imitation they ever saw.” -Will Rogers
America’s men and women in uniform are once again in harm’s way. Last week, the U.S. launched a series of deadly attacks on terrorist targets in Syria. Some in Washington are going out of their way to avoid calling it a war; others are almost enthusiastically using the same word. I’m not getting into that debate. But it does raise an interesting question: at what point does an armed conflict become a war? Continue reading
“If I had my way, no man guilty of golf would be eligible to hold any office of trust or profit in these United States.” -H.L. Mencken
Chances are, someone you know will spend time this Labor Day weekend playing golf. Chances are even better that President Obama will, too.
There’s been much talk in recent weeks about the Chief Executive’s passion for the game. He likes playing golf; he really, really, really likes it. (So too, for that matter, does House Speaker John Boehner, who’s also crazy about the game.) Continue reading
We were all appalled by last week’s gruesome video showing American hostage James Foley’s barbaric murder by terrorist thugs called ISIS. Or ISIL. Or however they’re identifying themselves these days. With their hands drenched in the blood of so many innocent people, what they are screams louder than who they say they are.
Making matters worse, the thugs are still holding other Americans captive. Like it or not, we have a new hostage crisis on our hands. Which is renewing an old debate: how do you handle such a crisis? Do you respond with military force? Refuse to negotiate with hostage takers? Pay ransom and meet demands? Or sit back, do nothing and hope for the best?
Consider, for a moment, how Washington handled a major international hostage crisis way back in 1904. Continue reading