History

Grenades, especially hand grenades, are devices of war that most of us are familiar with, although mostly associated with World War II, in film and television, rather than World War I, also known as the Great War, World War, or the War to End All Wars. It was with World War I that great advances…

Every year around 9/11 we see a procession of posts on social media with the message, “Never Forget.” It is not likely that any of us who lived through that horrible day could forget exactly where we were when it happened and the many tears we shed afterward for people that most of us had never even met.…

The past few years have marked a century since the war that promised to end all wars. We know that the world didn’t learn its lesson, and so the Great War became World War I. This is the story of Russell Silverthorn, Lee Silverthorn, and Josef Wäschle, my great uncles who fought on opposite sides…

Did young Tonya Harding ever imagine that a movie about her would earn multiple Oscar nominations? Perhaps—but during many periods of her life, this might have seemed like a laughable impossibility to her—and to many of us, for that matter. Well, it happened. Feature film I, Tonya earned three Oscar nominations, which are well deserved. The nominees are: Best…

The 2018 Oscar nominations for I, Tonya sent me to my ancient clipping file to excavate a March 1994 essay I wrote about the controversial figure skater. The piece appeared in a reader-participation series featured in our local newspaper, called “My Inspiration.” Would my attitude toward the subject would be different today? When I wrote the piece, Tonya…

The other morning, to occupy myself during the mind-numbing task of lunch packing, I tuned my SiriusXM app to The Catholic Channel and then, EWTN, because my usual morning program was taking a break. As a “Cradle Catholic,” I was surprised to hear on “Morning Glory” that it is not proper to decorate for Christmas until Christmas Eve, rather than right…

Twice a year, in the United States and many other parts of the world, we observe a ritual of changing the clocks on our walls, microwaves, and stoves, one hour backward or forward. Thankfully, our cell phones and computers figure out these shifts on their own. Here are seven bits about Daylight Saving Time that…

This blog post contains a book proposal on the manuscript that resulted from the Dimorier Project. BRIEF ABSTRACT  The Dimorier project began in 2004, when a handwritten journal of original poetry was discovered at a printing-house auction in Erie, Pennsylvania. The journal belonged to William E. Dimorier (1871-1951), an educator, administrator, benefactor, and poet. Born in Afton,…

When I tell people I belong to the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), sometimes they ask what the DAR is or what it does. Generally, I tell them that DAR members can trace their lineage back to a Revolutionary War patriot and that its members honor American history. But, there’s much more to the…

You might be an activist who has been speaking up about issues you feel strongly about. You want to be heard. Or, you might not think of yourself as an activist, and you might be only posting on Facebook, but you want to persuade others to think as you do, or at least, to understand your position.…