Posts Tagged ‘american history’

Dreams do come true, and sometimes wilder than anyone could have imagined them, but sometimes they have to lay dormant—or get left behind, or rot, or even be given to someone else—for a long time before they can.

Read More

Tweet In the winter of 1910, Dallas was suffering a crime wave of purse snatchings and assaults. The police didn’t know how to stop it, and people were hungry for blame. One night amid this crisis, a 68-year-old servant named Allen Brooks was discovered in a barn outside of town in the company of 3-year-old Ethel Huvens. The […]

Read More

There is no route to the present except through the past. Indiana's recent history is, in a word, sordid. Its past record of "religious freedom" movements should burn in memory.

Read More

Tweet Here’s a delightful anecdote: A Civil War soldier had his leg amputated, and while he recovered in the hospital, he carved this pin for his sweetheart out of his own leg bone. Who’s this lucky gal Lizzie, you ask? Well, we will never know, because he died of infection before he could tell the […]

Read More

The new World Trade Center's symbolic height is wrongheaded, jingoistic, and ultimately embarrassing.

Read More

Near the northwest corner of Madison Square Park, in an concrete traffic triangle bordered by Broadway, Fifth Avenue, and 25th Street, a squat obelisk is encircled by an iron fence. You'll never believe what lies inside.

Read More

We don't need minstrel shows or vaudeville now. We have YouTube. Are Sweet Brown and Antoine Dodson the newest version of the old minstrel show?

Read More

"Since Walt wanted the Matterhorn Bobsleds to open in just over a year later, along with a Submarine Voyage, a larger Autopia, and a Monorail, he asked if it could be built faster. He asked me to design a bobsled and two track layouts. He asked Arrow Development, Walt’s favorite outside manufacturer, to find a way. Arrow said bent up pipe would be the quickest way, thus it turned out to be the world’s first steel pipe coaster. See, Walt

Read More

Tweet Today was the only time I have ever had to cross a protest line to see a musical. As I approached the Lyceum Theatre on 45th Street for today’s matinée of The Scottsboro Boys, I could see the shapes of banners, and I could hear a chant emerge from the noise around Times Square: […]

Read More