“A Mormon has a right to believe what he will. His thoughts may be as free as the unconfined air, and his conscience should by no means be restrained by legal enactments. But his acts are quite a different thing.” -Raleigh News and Observer, July 20, 1881
Too long, an unrequited love of freedom
I hope we all know this story by now, seeing as this was made into the Academy Award winning film of the same name, the film that some Academy voters never even bothered to watch. I took great issue with that revelation at the time, and it still rankles. Not because of the perverted sanctity of the Academy Award, but because the logic behind not watching the movie in the first place (the subject matter is too difficult to watch) is made worse by the […]
An Unsung American Hero
This brief but riveting history was just released last month. Erica Armstrong Dunbar is a Professor of Black Studies and History at the University of Delaware and has previously published an historical work entitled A Fragile Freedom: African American Women and Emancipation in the Antebellum City. In the course of doing research some two decades ago, Dunbar came across an advertisement in an issue of the Philadelphia Gazette in 1796 for the capture of President Washington’s runaway slave Ona Judge. Her curiosity piqued, Dunbar resolved […]
The history of American spooks
3.5 stars. Learning about history via a tour of the most haunted places in America is not something I knew I wanted until I heard Liberty Hardy talking up Ghostland on a Book Riot podcast. Once I knew it existed, I had to get my hands on it. Colin Dickey travels the country learning more about the ghosts of America’s history. The ghosts take both him and the reader to some very random places and histories. From a house hunt in Los Angeles to “the […]
They Didn’t Want to Leave, They Definitely Couldn’t Stay
“I was leaving the South/To fling myself into the unknown…./I was taking a part of the South/To transplant in alien soil,/To see if it could grow differently,/If it could drink of new and cool rains,/Bend in strange winds,/Respond to the warmth of other suns/And, perhaps, to bloom.” – Richard Wright
Great expectations brought low
I don’t know who has written the book on Grover Cleveland, but I don’t think this book is it. It’s an insightful appraisal of the man, and an informative snapshot of the era, but it isn’t nearly detailed enough in the latter respect to be able to draw much of a parallel to current affairs, and the subject perhaps isn’t interesting enough to safe the former respect. I liked the book, but it’s a fairly middling biography, for a president often ignored and little taught […]
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