It seems like a good time for long articles to read while at home. One article I highly recommend is Mike Shropshire’s article in the October 1987 D Magazine titled “The Silent Spring of Walker Railey” regarding the attack on Peggy Railey, wife of high-profile Methodist minister Walker Railey. I lived in Dallas at the […]
Tag: U.S. History
Last week, TCM aired the 1963 TV documentary Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment directed by Robert Drew. From the linked DrewAssociates link: When Governor George Wallace literally stands in the schoolhouse door to block the admittance of two African-American students to the all-white University of Alabama in June 1963, President Kennedy is forced to decide […]
Found at Air Mail, an excerpt/adaptation from The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin, by Douglas Smith, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux today. An engrossing read (no pun intended). The stories began to appear in the Soviet press in the autumn of 1921, each one more […]
God Struck Me Dead: Voices of Ex-Slaves Edited by Clifton H. Johnson, with a new introduction by Albert J. Rabateau The William Bradford Collection from The Pilgrim Press, 1993 (2nd edition) Paperback, 204 pages The reissue of a rare volume of ex-slave narratives is as timely now as it was when it first appeared in […]
The documentary film Rosenwald tells the inspiring story of Julius Rosenwald, an immigrant’s son who became CEO of Sears, Roebuck & Company and used his wealth to support equal rights for African Americans during the Jim Crow era. His support of education, the arts, and housing for middle-class African Americans left a legacy that influenced […]
In 1864 during the American Civil War, Union General William T. Sherman began his famous march to the sea. With an army of 60,000 men he swept into the South, destroying Atlanta, Georgia, Columbia, South Carolina, and dozens of smaller towns. His troops plundered homes, destroyed livestock, burned buildings, and left a path of destruction […]
A grab bag of articles I’ve recently enjoyed: “The Puzzles of Thermopylae” by Chris Carey The story is well known and easily told. But the battle throws up a number of lasting puzzles. We have no contemporary account. Our earliest source, Herodotus, began his research perhaps 30 years or more after the event. He had […]
My oldest expressed interest in seeing The Cold Blue tonight instead of waiting for it on HBO, and who was I to say no? So we’re excited about going tonight for the movie and the extra “making of” short. Plus I’m happy to see the score is provided by Richard Thompson. A good article on […]
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou Alfred A. Knopf, 2018 Hardcover, 352 pagesBad Blood, the true story of the rise and collapse of a medical device start-up in Silicon Valley that blew through $900 million dollars on a product that never worked, was on many “Best Of” book […]
Last week I decided to take the long way back to Atlanta for my plane ride home. It turned out to be a meditative trip. Driving across the Florida panhandle, from the Alabama border to Tallahassee, allowed me to see some of the devastation from Hurricane Michael, which had hit the area a few weeks […]