Hanukkah, the “Festival of Lights”, has its origin in a Jewish rebellion against the Greeks, centuries before the Roman conquest.
Mattathias in the temple
Monthly Archives: December 2018
Icons of Aviation History: Bleriot XI
In 1909, Frenchman Louis Blériot, in his homemade single-wing design, proved the long-range capabilities of the airplane.
Bleriot XI
The Toledo War
Anyone who follows college football knows about the intense rivalry between Michigan and Ohio. But few realize that this enmity dates all the way back to the 19th century, when a dispute over the city of Toledo almost led to an armed conflict.
The map that started it all
Louisville’s Bloody Monday
One of the deadliest political riots in American history happened on an Election Day in Louisville KY.
Quinn Row
A Shameless Plug
All of my diaries here are draft chapters for a number of book series that I am working on for Red and Black Publishers. Several of these series are now available, both in paperback and as Kindle eBooks, at Amazon, and as ebooks at the Apple iBooks store. The newest are:
The Civil War Tourist: Visiting Civil War Battlefields and Historical Sites
(Amazon Kindle and Print)
The Civil War could truly be thought of as the single defining event in American history. The War’s social and political effects are still with us today. But sadly, our Civil War history is slowly disappearing. Suburban sprawl has destroyed many historic sites, and many significant battlefields are now lost under a layer of shopping malls and residential neighborhoods. On the surface, this book is a history travelogue. It includes famous battlefields such as Gettysburg and Antietam that are run by the National Park Service, and smaller unknown or forgotten places such as Westport and Olustee that are preserved as state or county historical parks, or which are not preserved at all but have miraculously managed to survive for a century and a half. But this is also a journey into America, into the history and culture which, for better or worse, have made us what we are today as a nation. The ghosts of the Civil War have never left us. Illustrated.
Hidden History 