Some months ago a dear granddaughter sent me two articles written by authors with liberal/progressive viewpoints. My granddaughter herself has a generally liberal outlook on social issues, and I am certain that she considers me to be a well meaning but somewhat misguided conservative. One of these writers was Margaret Hagerman, a sociology professor […]
In 1948 I was attending the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. When school was not in session I lived with my parents at Carolina Beach. In the summer of 1948 Dad, Mom and I got into the family car and headed west towards Arkansas to visit with my brother Branch and family. Our […]
(This post is essentially an extract from a much longer post that I published more than a year ago. I believe it is important that we think about these things. Where did we come from? Where are we going?) In the third decade of the Twentieth Century, a few years following the cataclysmic event known […]
As a young boy I started playing the game of baseball at a very early age. I loved playing the game, and I learned to swing a bat with considerable efficiency. My fielding skills left much to be desired. All through my pre-teen and teen years I played the game frequently. Usually it was the […]
My grandson Scott recently gave me a book by Sean Carroll entitled The Big Picture. Dr. Sean Carroll is a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and he is a highly respected scientist and writer in his field. This book devotes much of its content to a description of quantum field theory, the […]
Eighty years ago, on September 1, 1939, World War II began with the German attack on Poland. I told the story of World Wars I & II in my post titled “War and Madness.” Now, on the 80th anniversary of that event, I am publishing more details on World War II’s beginning. After World War […]
Today is my 90th birthday. I’m a bit surprised to still be walking and talking. No one else in my immediate family lived so long. I was born during the first year of Herbert Hoover’s term as President and less than two months before the stock market crash that began the great depression. Of course, […]
Adolph Hitler and his followers espoused the theory of a master race. The Nazi Party proclaimed that persons of supposed Nordic or Aryan descent appear most frequently among Germans and other northern European peoples and are superior to persons of other races. Slavs, Gypsies, and Jews were specifically defined as being inferior, and their presence […]
Make America great again!, the Trumpers cry. Some of their opponents say that America was never great. What is the truth? America has never been perfect, but it has been great. I am not so foolish as to bathe all past times in a nostalgic mist that obscures all flaws. We are a nation composed […]
In the years leading up to World War I, French military thinkers had wavered back and forth over the best strategy and tactics to employ in the forthcoming struggle with Germany. Most of them were not pushing for conflct, but there was a general feeling that war was inevitable. In 1870-71 France had lost a […]
Jordans-Journey 