December 2012

Home Front Girl

December 27, 2012

A couple of weekends ago–in between baking ham, slicing sweet potatoes, chopping cranberries and rolling out biscuit dough– I gave myself the treat of reading Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature and Growing Up in Wartime America. And a treat it was. Born in 1922, Joan Wehlen, later Joan Wehlen Morrison, grew up [...]

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Holiday Rerun: The Christmas Truce of 1914

December 25, 2012

My Own True Love and I are on the road for the holidays: home for Xmas with a little side trip to look at vintage airplanes. (History geeks don’t stop being history geeks just because it’s Christmas.) Instead of letting the blog go blank, I thought I’d re-run last year’s Xmas post, with an addendum: [...]

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The Barbarous Years

December 20, 2012

The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 is the third volume in historian Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the growth of British North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Bailyn discusses the settlement of British North America within the context of both the Native American cultures [...]

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Road Trip Through History: Stonehenge

December 18, 2012

We caught our first glimpse of Stonehenge from the highway–the familiar stone circle silhouetted against the sky. I felt a flutter of excitement. After all, Stonehenge is a major Bronze Age site, built at roughly the same time as the Great Pyramid at Giza. Like the pyramids, it’s built from monolithic stones, some brought from [...]

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Another Chance to Win a Copy of Mankind

December 13, 2012

Those of you who didn’t win a copy of Mankind: The Story of All of Us have a second chance. I’m blogging about Big Bang, Big Brains, Big History over at Wonders & Marvels today as part of the 12 Books of Christmas give-away. Leave a comment on the blog post over there to be [...]

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Road Trip Through History: Portsmouth

December 11, 2012

My Own True Love and I went to Portsmouth primarily to visit the Historic Dockyards. Restored historic ships, the story of the Tudor warship the Mary Rose, the history of the dockyards themselves–it sounded right up our alley. And in fact it was. The quality of the exhibits ranged from the fabulous to the dated [...]

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Twelve Days of Christmas ( or Holiday of Your Choice) at Wonders and Marvels

December 5, 2012

One of my favorite history sites on the internet, Wonders and Marvels, is celebrating the holidays by giving away twelve signed copies of books by regular contributors, including Mankind:The Story of All of Us.  It’s a great selection of history and historical fiction, if I do say so myself. A new book will go up [...]

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Road Trip Through History: The Royal Pavilion at Brighton

December 3, 2012

Visiting the Royal Pavilion at Brighton was a sentimental journey for me. As some of you may know, I did my PhD on the 20 year plan–in part because I kept wandering down odd and fascinating side roads that didn’t end up in the final dissertation.* Two of those academic dead ends were chinoiserie and [...]

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