Category Archives: about history

An historian is always hopeful when stumbling across an appeal to history in the popular press. But more often than not, an historian is disappointed.

Take, for example, one particularly baleful reaction to the Balcombe fracking protests in the UK this August of 2013.  That the protesters were a superstitious lot, lacking any sense of history, is an argument employed by Daily & Sunday Express columnist, Niel Hamilton.

Although it must be read in its native ‘red-top’ context to be fully enjoyed, here are a few of Hamilton’s ‘lessons’ of history:

The doom-mongers are like primitive tribes, firing flaming arrows at the sun at sunset in order to make it rise again the next day, which obviously ‘works’  because the sun does rise again.    Continue reading →

Fierce Green Fire is a long-awaited documentary based on the best-selling book by New York Times environmental journalist Phil Schabecoff.

The Leonids of 1833

By Bill Kovarik
Published in Appalachian Voice

Abraham Lincoln used to tell a story during the darkest days of the Civil War.  Although the story was omitted from a recent movie about Lincoln, is still worth recalling.

The story goes like this:

When Lincoln was a young man in Illinois, in 1833, he was roused from his bed late one night by his frantic landlord.  “Abe! Abe! Wake up! The day of Judgment has come,” the landlord shouted.  Lincoln  threw open the window  and saw fearful neighbors in the road and, above them, a spectacular sky lit up by the Leonid shower of meteors. At first he shared their dismay.  “But looking back of them in the heavens,” Lincoln said, “I saw all the grand old constellations with which I was so well acquainted, fixed and immoveable and true in their places. 

Thirty years later,  Lincoln would tell this story to his generals and say, “No, gentlemen, the world did not come to an end then, nor will the Union now.”

With all of the contentious media-driven politics, it often seems that nothing in our own times is fixed, immoveable or true in place. But that would be a misperception.  We only need to look behind those falling stars to see so many of our grand old constellations still fixed and true in their places. Continue reading →