Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “History Lessons”
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…
It’s been one week and a handful of hours since Obama became our 44th President. Seven short days and climate change, torture, ethics, and a …
It was lovely to hear Elizabeth Alexander read her poem, “Praise Song for the Day”, written for the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration. But somehow it fell flat for me; maybe it was because of where it came during the Inauguration Program…
It has been an extraordinary few days. November 4, 2008, just after 11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, barely the dinner hour for those of us who live in the Pacific Northwest, Barack Obama was declared the 44th President of the United States. The day after, Wednesday, November 5th, was like a…
Coretta Scott King’s funeral today. Six hours. Orations, presidents, standing ovations for truth tellers. Every now and then, the waters of justice and earnestness break through. We are talking about a woman
