Tag: United States History
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Good News! White People Were Not Responsible For The Near Extinction Of The Buffalo
Contrary to popular belief it wasn’t just the greedy European Americans who led the bison to near extinction. As much as ecological romantics would like to have us believe that before the white man came the Indians and all of God’s creation lived in peaceful harmony, the evidence does not back up the claim. The…
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The Most Dangerous Job Isn’t Writing
“Running across freight car roofs to engage the brakes on each car as quickly as possible was a hazardous affair. In winter the planks atop the freight cars would be slippery with ice and snow. Furthermore, tracks were not always aligned horizontally resulting a rolling motion as the cars passed over uneven areas of track.…
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Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche–They Work on the Railroad
“How hard they worked is an astonishment to us in the twenty-first century. Except for some of the cooks, and bakers, there was not a fat man among them. Their hands were tough enough for any job–one never sees gloves in the photographs–which included pickax handling, shoveling, wielding sledgehammers, picking up iron rails, and using…
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Reel Jersey Girl–Trailblazing Filmaker–Alice Guy Blache
http://www.bergen.com/artsmusic/History_Reel_Jersey_Girl.html “Her ideas about narrative filmmaking predated all the great American filmmakers and most filmmakers in the world.” “She was the earliest to deploy character arc and the psychological perspective of a lead character in a film story.” “. . . pioneered the use of film close-ups years before D.W. Griffith who is usually given…
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On the Border with Crook
General Crook sporting the eco-hipster beard Contrary to recent popular education there actually are some heroic figures in the history of the United States who did their best to treat Indians decently. General George Crook comes to mind. Unlike the “journalist” Helen Hunt Jackson who tended to idealize the first people to roam in search…
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Top Ten Books about Army Life 1860’s-80’s
Men, women sex, coffee, war, horses and courts-martials…..fantastically fun reading! 10. On the Border with Crook by John G. Bourke–admittedly obscure–who cares about General Crook nowadays? But I loved Bourke’s breezy, intellectual style. The ultimate in dashing officer material and sometimes funny. This book brings the Apache wars to life and showcases the ambiguities felt…
Author Adrienne Morris 