Human memory is an amazing thing. The great influenza that occurred during WWI is common knowledge now. But one of the things that historians and disease-hunters found surprising when looking back in retrospect, was how thoroughly people had blotted the memory out of their minds. This was no flash in the pan, like the Legionnaires …
Continue reading 365 Books: The Midnight Assassin by Skip Hollandsworth
I bought this book while I was in college and it inspired a paper that I wrote for a history class on the politics of textbooks and the representation of Native Americans in elementary school textbooks.* It was a sweeping paper, covering textbooks from colonial America through the present, and I spent many hours in …
Continue reading 365 Books: America Revised by Francis FitzGerald
Do you like footnotes? I am, if you had not already noticed, partial to them. Not just using them (although I am clearly partial to that, too). Some people, when they read non-fiction, finish the meat of the book, maybe read the afterward or those discussion questions that some books include. Perhaps they dive into …
Continue reading 365 Books: The Decline & Fall of Practically Everybody by Will Cuppy
One summer, my mother took us to Florida to visit my grandparents and my father stayed home to work. To offset the stress, he exercised. His usual M.O. was to jog until he was exhausted, drink a beer to "recalcitrate" (not a medical term although he used it that way), then swim laps in the …
Continue reading 365 Books: Twelve Days of Terror by Richard G. Fernicola, M.D.
What do you do when the facts of history conflicts with beliefs about history? How do you reset understanding to reflect what actually happened? Sometimes what we believe happened takes a spot in our heart - it could be a warm spot or a spot of anger - and you become fixed on that understanding. …
Continue reading 365 Books: A Voyage Long and Strange by Tony Horwitz
