I don’t have anything to say about the Newtown shootings or the fiscal cliff.  I’ve written posts on those topics before on the mass shooting which occurred a mile from where I live in 2009 and on the debt ceiling talks which are now being made and rerun from July 2011.  In my last post […]

Now that the election is over it’s time to focus on politics.  Much has been made of Nate Silver’s having been shown to be right about the results while the pundits, especially at Fox News, were not.  Many still do not understand what he was forecasting.  They assume that because his model gave Obama a […]

As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney prepare for Wednesday’s debate I give you audio clips from the 1912 election.  Below are the actual voices of Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and William Howard Taft in campaign recordings from that year (presented in the order that they finished).  Phonograph records were the Facebook/YouTube of it’s day.  Radio […]

Just as MTV has little to do with music anymore, The History Channel has long ago gotten away from it’s Civil War/WWII roots with non history shows like Ax Men, Ice Road Truckers, and Pawn Stars (all seemingly targeted at men).  There are a few exceptions to this rule but this one new series did […]

Last May 3 I published a post called The Civil War in a Larger International Historical Context which discussed how in the 150th anniversary of the Civil War there were similar conflicts in Germany, Italy, and Japan which would have many repercussions for the US and the world to this day.  It has become one […]

Some tragedies grip our imaginations more than others and the Titanic is one of them.  We (myself included) are consumed with all of the details of the disaster.  The History Channel has come out with this graphic showing the scale of it in numbers and other fascinating things on their website (but only one special […]

The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Nassir Ghaemi http://www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive Last month Stephen Colbert had Dr. Nasir Ghaemi on his show who wrote a book titled A First Rate Madness leaders saying that America’s more successful Presidents such as Lincoln or Franklin […]

Enacted in the wake of the Civil War to correct the prior injustices which occurred, three constitutional amendments were ratified: the 13th in 1865 which banned slavery, the 14th in 1868 which I shall discuss later, and the 15th in 1865 which guaranteed the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition […]

This year much has been made of the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the US Civil War.  Between the years 1861 and 1865 the United States of America changed, at the expense of over 600,000 lives or 2% of the population, from a loosely confederated grouping of agricultural states (eleven of which were agrarian […]

Since the football season ended NBC has had more prime time space to fill so on Friday nights (the graveyard shift of primetime) aired the series Who Do You Think You Are? at 8PM.  In it stars like Gweneth Paltrow, Steve Buscemi (he pronounces his name Busemi but the proper way in Italy is Bushemi), […]