Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “History Lessons”
In the summer of 2022, I started to read Heather Clark’s acclaimed new biography, Red Comet: The Short and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Seven pages into the first chapter entitled “The Beekeeper’s Daughter,” we learn that not only is there a multi-generational history of mental illness in Plath’s family but, unknown to her, her paternal grandmother, Ernestine, was committed to the Salem asylum by her husband, Theodore, in October 1916…
The maple leaves were already falling in our backyard habitat when I decided it was time to read another big biography. This one is W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race 1868—1919 by David Levering Lewis. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1994. And actually this volume is only Part 1 of this bio; Part 2 (another chubby tome) also won the Pulitzer Prize…
Last week was a leisurely, slow-travel road trip with a friend to the southeastern hills of Eastern Washington and Spokane then a loop back to PDX via Moses Lake and Yakima. We took in many truly awesome sights, scenes, vistas
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In 2019, the Beautiful Cadaver Project of Pittsburgh, Pennsyylvania put together an outstanding collection, The Dreamers Anthology: Writing Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jt. and Anne Frank; two of my poems, “Politics and the American Language” and “Still Birmingham” were published in it…
On this eighteenth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina destroying the singular city of New Orleans, I thought I would re-post something I wrote back in 2005 during the week that the hurricane was battering New Orleans and other Mississippi and Louisiana communities in that region…
I am cranking my way through this outstanding biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, winner of the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Biography/Autobiography by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. I have long been fascinated by Oppenheimer perhaps since I saw the footage in which he ominously…
I first stumbled on this small portrait of George Floyd in September 2020, after the upheavals of the Portland pandemic summer/protest summer. It sat by its lonesome on a curb in the Woodlawn neighborhood here in Northeast Portland, making a quiet statement (I thought) every time I walked past…
The corner of Pennsylvania I hail from is no stranger to natural and man-made disasters. Its primary industry, anthracite coal mining, is one of the most dangerous on earth. Men descend, work the slope, the drift, the face …
It’s been little over a month since Haiti was rocked by an earthquake of epic proportions. I have long been interested in Haiti—its people, its history, its art, its surviving against the odds…
These days, when civility in public discourse has plummeted to yet another low when accusations fly like poisoned arrows from one ideological camp to the next, facts are taken out of context and twisted, and half-truths and blatant lies treated as equivalencies on nightly newscasts, I’ve turned back to Jenny Holzer’s…
